ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702070002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
SOURCE: DOLORES BARCLAY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Robert Downey's playful eyes scoot around the stands at Santa Anita like windup toys.
He's scanning this rogue's gallery of bent, broken faces because people are the greatest source material for his offbeat, intimate, outlandish and satirical screenplays. A look. A glance. An overheard snatch of conversation. They're found gold.
``Oh, the things you hear,'' he says. ``My favorite is, `My marriage has a better chance than that horse.' People say things in the context of gambling that apply to other parts of their lives or my life. It's so uninhibited and basic.''
Like a Tingler.
That's the feeling you get when your horse comes in. And these days, Downey, whose horse has been limping along for a few decades, has a Tingler.
What's caused this boost of faith, inspiration and all-around good feeling is his new movie, ``Hugo Pool,'' and a fresh start for his son, actor Robert Downey Jr., who is finishing up a stay in a drug rehab program and collaborating with his father on a screenplay.
For Downey, the independent filmmaker who inspired a generation of directors with such movies as ``Putney Swope,'' ``Greaser's Palace'' and ``Pound,'' a day at the races is like watching a magic show: Nothing is ever what it seems.
He walks toward the paddock to check out the thoroughbreds in the first race, before placing what will be a winning bet, and quickly spots a pair of ringers slipping through the gate: ``Get a load of Ivana Trump with Truman Capote,'' he deadpans.
``I love it,'' he explodes, ``It's the only place in this town where you can really, really feel that you're not in show business and still be around people.''
Not that the 60-year-old Downey has ever been a pillar of the show-biz establishment. Nor has he been on the fringe. He's just been, well, different.
And it is that difference - and the lasting appeal of his work - that have helped him to survive the downward spiral of his film career.
Robert John Elias Jr. was a long way from a moviola when he dropped out of a Long Island high school at 16 and faked his birth certificate so he could escape the prickly life he had with his mother and enlist in the Army.
He wasn't cut out to be a soldier. With the time on his hands during one of his three trips to the stockade, he launched his writing career. The result, a novel he describes as somewhat akin to ``Catcher in the Rye,'' caught the eye of a top literary agent, but was never published.
Writing was fun, thought Robert, who adopted the last name Downey from his stepfather. It continued to be fun after his discharge from the Army, and certainly overshadowed the small acting jobs he wrangled while waiting tables at a Times Square restaurant in New York City. He even managed to get his quirky plays performed - off-off-off-Broadway - until turning to film with ``Babo 73'' in 1963.
This political sendup of a right- and left-wing presidential adviser who keeps switching his position, followed two years later by ``Chafed Elbows,'' an irreverent look at a welfare recipient who marries his mother, made Downey an icon of the independent film circuit. Young filmmakers began to worship his satirical sting and his ability to harness life's outrageous truths.
``I think he's one of the most original voices in the history of American film,'' actor Alan Arkin says. ``You read five pages of dialogue and you know it's him.''
But Downey's art-house movies hardly paid the bills. So he applied his craft elsewhere. He was hired to make a porn movie (the producer hated it because it was funny and not pornographic), and shot experimental commercials for an ad agency.
To say the commercials were avant-garde would be an understatement. One for Preparation H showed an Asian woman beckoning to the camera. ``No matter what your ethnic affliction, use Preparation H and you can kiss your hemorrhoids goodbye,'' she coos.
In the ad world, Downey saw firsthand how black directors in the same position as he earned less money. There just might be a movie there, he mused.
``Putney Swope,'' a 1969 satire about blacks taking over a white advertising agency on Madison Avenue, was Downey's most successful film to date. It was a riot of absurdities, complete with Miss Redneck, N.J., a mousetrap that chemically cremated rodents, and a midget president of the United States who had a minnow mounted on the wall as his prize catch.
``Pound,'' the film he made the next year, cast 18 actors as dogs waiting to be adopted. When he took the finished movie to United Artists, executives there were disappointed because it wasn't animated.
``I kind of knew then that it would be a tough journey,'' Downey says.
And it was. After ``Greaser's Palace'' (1972), a satirical Western about a healer, Downey found few takers for his brand of art. He tumbled into drugs and despair.
``I started doing drugs. Cocaine. The worst waste of time on the planet. At the time, I thought it was great. I started doing it during the editing of `Greaser's Palace,' and I didn't get rid of it until '81. Ten years of cocaine around the clock.
``Then my wife and I divorced and I got one kid and then two. My daughter thought drugs were disgusting. My son got into it, and that was horrible.
``But we were never shamed by it then. We never thought it was dangerous - we just thought it was stupid and fun.
``I used to be writing in the middle of night and my son would come down in his little pajamas and sit and I'd have a little grass or take a little coke to stay up and write, and what I wrote was gibberish, most of it. And he'd sit there, and he'd say, `If you can do it, why can't I do it?' And I'd say, `That's a good question, but why would you want to do it?' And he'd say, `Because I don't want to go to bed either.'''
``What a schmuck I was,'' he says. ``If I had it to do all over again, I probably wouldn't be doing it myself, let alone allow them to do it.''
Throughout his destructive trip, Downey kept writing and grabbed work where he could, directing second-rate movies others had written. He crept from the shadows in the early '80s when his second wife, Laura, rescued him from the thrall of drugs.
And now ``Hugo Pool,'' a screenplay she wrote with him, has rescued Downey's career.
The film is a love letter of sorts, a movie born after Laura was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS, an incurable illness that destroys nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. She died at age 36.
The movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 21, is an ensemble work featuring Malcolm McDowell, Sean Penn, Cathy Moriarty, Patrick Dempsey, Alyssa Milano and Downey's namesake son.
It is more intimate and emotional than Downey's other films, capturing a sweet romance between an ALS victim (Dempsey) and a diabetic pool cleaner (Milano). Along the way, the film has lots to say about gambling (yes, there is a Tingler), drugs, sex, parent-child relations and life itself.
```Hugo Pool' has a lot of humanity, like Bob himself,'' McDowell says. ``He's not a dictatorial director. You can do great work with him because he makes you feel totally confident and safe so that you can deliver the goods. Very few directors do that.''
But as excited as Downey is about ``Hugo Pool,'' he's even more thrilled to be working with his son on a screenplay, a guaranteed carnival of laughs involving a Cuban drug dealer and a tangle of crazy characters.
* * *
New Year's Day.
A squeaky voice calls up from the courtyard outside the West Hollywood duplex Downey shares with his partner, Barbara Ligeti, who produced ``Hugo Pool.''
``Tico, I love you. Throw down de keys.''
Downey goes to the window and laughs. It's his son, with coffee, bagels and a yellow legal pad, mimicking one of the characters in their screenplay.
Robert Jr., out from rehab for the day, bounces into the living room with a boyish, sweet smile. It's time to begin work with his father, and he couldn't be happier.
``It's great seeing my father having so much fun,'' he says. ``My dad is glowing.''
Robert Downey Jr. appears in ``Hugo Pool'' as a frantic Dutch director named Franz, who shoots an extra for overacting. ``There are those who would say he was just an extra,'' the rabbi says at the guy's funeral. ``He was more than just an extra. Every time he stepped in front of the camera, he upgraded the background!''
Father and son enjoyed being on the set together, but not as much as they love the joint creative process.
``It's great working with him. We laugh so hard,'' Robert Sr. says of his son, his mouth wrapping a gentle smile around each word. ``I'm just amazed to see how sharp and good he is. I can see how he glows when he creates like this.
``He's a great artist and a great friend and when he beats this, he's going to be a great man, and I know he's going to beat it. I'm very, very proud of this kid of mine.''
With ``Hugo Pool'' and the screenplay he's doing with his son, writing once again is fun for Robert Downey Sr.
It's almost like starting over again, like being untouched, a virgin.
``Yeah,'' quips Downey, ``a virgin who has the knowledge of what it's really like.''
LENGTH: Long : 167 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Robert Downey Sr. takes a break during a day at theby CNBhorse races at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif. Downey, an
independent filmmaker and the father of actor Robert Downey Jr., has
just finished a new movie, ``Hugo Pool.''