The Rep Report (September 12--19)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

Film Forum, in association with the BFI, commences a two-week tribute to David Lean on Friday. Yeah, Lawrence of Arabia and the other late epics are made for the big screen, but for some of us, the really choice news here is that many of Lean's finely crafted, early entertainments are brought together, many in handsome new prints. The program kicks off perfectly with the Dickens-adaptation double feature: Great Expectations, a rousing entertainment that famously inaugurated Lean's lifelong partnership with Alec Guinness (seen here in the role of Herbert Pocket), and Oliver Twist, in which Guinness actually caused the movie some problem with Jewish groups for his alarmingly faithful embodiment of Dickens's Fagin. There's also the chance to see Charles Laughton tear it up with a splendidly undomesticated performance in the domestic comedy Hobson's Choice, Noel Coward perfect the stiff upper lip in the wartime propaganda film In Which We Serve, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard take out a patent on the masochistic romantic agony of shared self-denial in Brief Encounter. A word to the wise: if it's epic you're after, take a pass on the latest drive to "re-evaluate" Lean's misbegotten 1970 waste of time Ryan's Daughter and, instead, check out his last film, the sumptuous, brilliantly acted 1984 version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

LOS ANGELES: The 12th Annual Latino International Film Festival, one of the pre-eminent opportunities for Latino filmmakers to show their work to audiences in the U.S., runs September 12 through the 19th. The 132-film program ranges from the popular and timely Colombian drama Paraiso Travel to music documentary profiles of Celia Cruz and Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

The Summer of Downey

Phil Nugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A fresh wave of media attention, including a profile in Time magazine by Rebecca Winters Keegan and a New York Times piece by David Carr, make it clear that this summer is penciled in to be the one that takes Robert Downey, Jr. to the next level. It is hard to think of a reason to root against him. Downey, who was born in 1965, first appeared on-screen in movies directed by his father, who didn't used to have be called Robert Downey, Sr. to avoid confusion: the 1970 Pound, in which the actors pretended to be caged dogs and young Bob was supposed to be a puppy, and the 1972 Greaser's Palace, in which he was a shot dead in a Western setting, and for which he was prepared form his challenging role with a speech about how he was being pressed into service because dad wasn't really into the child-labor laws. In 1985, he was invited to join the cast of Saturday Night Live at the insistence of the then-hot Anthony Michael Hall, who Lorne Michaels wanted badly for the show, and who Downey subsequently smoked. In the fall of 1987, he starred in James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, which confirmed that he could carry a lightweight comedy on the strength of his talent and charm, and played the fast-sinking buddy of the hero in Less Than Zero, which confirmed that he could take on a thinly written role in an unwatchable mess of a movie and use it to burn an indelible mark in a corner of the screen. The scale of Downey's talent was no secret by the time he starred in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, but the Oscar nomination he got for that performance made it "official." Attenborough has been quoted as referring to Downey as "a little Brat Pack gadfly" with no formal training but a willingness to "work his arse off," a neat way of giving himself credit for his star's performance. With regard to his lack of "formal training," Downey, talking to Rebecca Winters Keegan, recalls "hanging around and smoking weed in the stairways with my friends who had just gotten back from class. They'd tell me the exercises. It seemed like inevitably they wound up screaming and crying—screaming at each other and crying at what was screamed. I would just call that Thanksgiving."

Back in 2001, NPR's All Things Considered set aside two whole minutes of precious airtime to allow something called Stephen Lynch--it wrote for the Orange County Register, and I'm sure it's mama is proud of it--to take note of Downey's then-latest brushes with the law and the rehab centers and insist that Downey's reputation as a tragically misguided bullet of talent was inflated by the supposed glamour of his messy personal life. As an actor, Lynch declared, "He wasn't"--note the use of the past tense--"that good." What had this keen observer been smoking? One of the surprises of the recent interviews with Downey is the unexpected but not illogical connection he now draws between his triumph in Chaplin and the tabloid slide downhill. He tells Winters Keegan that he knew that he had "just knocked one out of the park", a feeling that carried an expectation that everything about his life was about to change. When everything didn't, it led to "this huge anticlimactic thing that basically took on different shades of awe, wonder, acceptance, bitterness or disassociation for the next—-what year is it?—-17 years. There was this kind of lull, and I never really found any momentum to focus my creative energy after that, so pretty expectable things happened." Cut to a few years down the line, and Downey was capable of accepting a recurring role on Ally McBeal for his next comeback, and further capable of getting himself written out of the series when his comeback was followed by more tabloid headlines, this time involving an arrest "in a hotel room with cocaine and a Wonder Woman costume". What's striking about Downey's rough patch is that, even with his troubles, he was a dependable hire in terms of getting the role done; there are very few duff performances in his resume--one of them is in U.S. Marshals, a sequel to The Fugitive that he credited with pushing him once more over the edge, because, he once said in an interview with Mike Figgis, he wasn't in the best psychic condition to spend a few weeks running around playing "Johnny Handgun"--and he was assured of some kind of comeback every time he gave a performance that was widely seen. No one less stupid than Stephen Lynch--a select group that includes Mel Gibson and a dog I used to have that was killed trying to shake hands with an eighteen-wheeler--could fail to detect how much talent was there. The problem, in an industry where there are insurance forms to fill out, was getting someone to hire him at all.

Downey has said that he wanted to star in Iron Man in part so that he'd be in the kind of movie he could take his son to, but then, he said the same thing about U.S. Marshals. He's also said that he was tired of making movies that nobody sees, and it's bracing to hear someone intimate that he might regret having been in A Scanner Darkly or Zodiac, or at least that he'd be happier if they'd done better business. Elsewhere, Downey has cited Johnny Depp's success in a series of films based on a Disney theme park ride--"If Depp is on a Slurpee, I want to be on a Slurpee"--in a tone that seems to suggest that they amounted to giving him a kind of permission to headline a franchise for Marvel Comics. The fact is, both Pirates of the Caribbean and Iron Man point up what it is that, in a world where the media is as obsessed with box-office numbers as the studios, just what a Johnny Depp or a Robert Downey, Jr. might someday find himself being forced to prove. Nobody who's been paying attention can be in doubt about Downey's being a major actor; what he has to show, if he wants to have the power in terms of freedom and the options he must crave, is that he's a movie star. Which doesn't just mean the ability to command the screen or even the additional ability to put asses in seats but the control to show up and do the press junket and repeat the necessary drivel to reporters over and over without throwing a vase at somebody's head. And, yes, to look right on a Slurpee.

The Screengrab : greaser's palace

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

The Summer of Downey