The pitchman as scene-stealer: an interview with Robert Staats

The absolute joy of scene-stealing performers is that they redirect our attention even when we’re enjoying the film in question. It’s easy to be a scene-stealer in a bad movie (in that case there isn’t very much to be stolen), but in a great movie the character person has achieved something wonderful when we still remember their small turn after the movie is over.

Robert Staats served just that purpose in a number of cult films that are great to begin with; he also walked away with some great moments in films that are not quite up to snuff. And the most intriguing thing about this is that Staats has never considered himself to be an actor, didn’t want to be an actor, and firmly maintains to this day that his parts in movies came about because he was fine with “doing a favor for a friend.” What goes unsaid here is the filmmakers in question — Harry Hurwitz, Jonathan Kaplan, Robert Downey Sr., and others — knew that Staats could give a memorable performance and they wanted him to brighten up their movie with his cinematic alter-ego: a carny pitchman who is both your best friend and a guy whose hand is reaching in your pocket.

I had the rare pleasure of interviewing Mr. Staats a few weeks ago and am very happy to share some of his history, his wonderful anecdotes, and his not-too-positive view of major-studio Hollywood (countered by his friendly devotion to Hurwitz and the filmmakers who knew how to use him as a “secret weapon” to keep their films moving along perfectly). He’s a no-nonsense sort of guy who, at 89, is happy that he has fans who enjoyed his movie work, but he’s far prouder of his military service and his work as a seaman over the years. 

“I have no interest in any aspect of show business,” he says now. “I was not interested in soliciting any acting work. I had no agent, although I got a lot of offers from agencies. I wanted no part of it. I would answer the phone and someone would introduce themselves, ‘Could you do this or that?’ ” That was the extent of his work in show business, although he clearly got a number of those phone calls from 1969 through the early Eighties. 

Winning over a rube in
Fairy Tales (1978).

He “backed into” work as a comic actor because of his experience as a “front-talker” at state fairs and other events. This began after his first stint in the Army (1952-55). Staats still speaks the language of the “carny,” discussing how important it is not to “blow the tip” (lose your audience). “You gotta work them and work them,” Staats says of the “tip.” “I was pretty good at layin’ it down.” 

One of his initial forays into show-biz was investing in a traveling show that would honor James Dean, who had recently died. The show contained a facsimile of Dean’s “death car” and was to feature a lifelike wax figure of the movie idol. When the figure arrived, however, it was a dummy of Elvis Presley — the man who made the figure thought that Presley was Dean and had no idea what the real Dean looked like. 

Despite that screw-up, the attraction did fairly well and Staats ended up selling it (and the giant semi-trailer the car was kept in). He was then asked by a producer of tent shows if he could step in as a front-talker. “I did very well — stayed there and made quite a bit of money.” He did spiels at large events. “Some of these state fairs had 100,000 people on the midway in one day. These were huge things, the Calgary Stampede, the Texas State Fair.” He would entice the public to see attractions like “the Alligator Boy.” He admits that being a front talker is certainly an art, but not a nice one — “painting is a nice art. I was screwing people out of their money.” 

“By the way, every game in the carnival is rigged. Every one. I know how they’re all rigged. I know so many ways...” 

In the off-season, he started pitching merchandise, but he felt that he “didn’t have a very good resume” at the age of 30, so he and his wife both re-enlisted in the service so he could get a commission. When his second stint (1959-62) in the Army was over, he made a crucial connection that propelled him into the advertising business and ultimately into a film career he never asked for, but that he excelled at.

A photographer named Ray Porter that Staats knew from the Army was then working for Seventeen magazine. He had gone to art school with an animator named Len Glasser. Porter introduced Glasser to Staats without knowing he was introducing future business partners who would change the face of advertising with their unconventional approach to industrial films and TV commercials. 

Animation from "Safety Shoes."

Glasser recruited Staats for his advertising firm, Stars and Stripes Forever. Staats, an independently minded guy no matter what the situation, agreed to work for him on commission, became a partner in the firm, and ultimately stayed with the company from 1962 to 1971. The first important thing the two made together is a short film that is considered a classic in advertising circles. “Safety Shoes” (1965) was made for the Lehigh Safety Shoe Company and plays like a spoof of TV commercials. It is only in the last three minutes (of 18) when you find that you’ve been pranked in an unusual way — the comedy film you’ve been watching is indeed an industrial film for a very real product. 

Staats “backed into” the film for an interesting reason — it simply wasn’t long enough. The sponsor wanted a 20-minute short and the film was running under. Glasser had hired doubletalk expert Al Kelly to provide a very funny and incomprehensible intro, and had created a cartoon about safety shoes (which features, among others, the [uncredited] voice of future Hurwitz star and Staats cohort Chuck McCann). 

He needed to fill out the spoof section of the film, and so Robert Staats became a film actor, playing his alter ego, later named “E. Eddie Edwards.” Staats says he chose that name for a specific reason: “It just struck me. There are a lot of shitty guys who always try to make themselves look good with a nice name. So E. Eddie is this shitty pitchman, this dishonest carny who wants to be something else. He was like a number of guys that I knew that were that way.” 

Staats wrote his own lines and both sold the product and made fun of hard-sell con men whom every consumer has come in contact with. The character blossomed later, especially in the films of Harry Hurwitz, but here he comes on strong and is a memorable creation. In other words, Staats stole his very first film. 

“Safety Shoes" was up online on Vimeo, posted by a noted advertising filmmaker. And it's now gone! All we have left is this screengrab of Bob as E. Eddie.

and this credit for Staats:

and this production credit for the Big RS:

Glasser’s company ended up having ancillary offices in Chicago and Toronto, and doing films for big clients like the Ford Motor company, General Mills, and Hostess. Staats appeared as a TV-friendly version of his E. Eddie character in a string of TV commercials for New England Telephone. (Staats notes his pitchman character was family-friendly in these spots — “I would clean it up.”)

The first great independent filmmaker that Staats worked as an actor for (albeit briefly) was Robert Downey Sr. (My recent tribute to Downey Sr. can be found here.) Again, happenstance and blind luck took a hand — “Downey and I lived in the same building in Forest Hills. My son and Robert Downey Jr., and my wife and Downey’s wife, would meet all the time. [Downey Sr] wanted to be in the film business and I was in the film business. I told him about this crazy filmmaker in the same office building as Stars and Stripes, a millionaire who was pumping a lot of money to build up a commercial film business called Filmex.”

The man who ran Filmex was an heir to a very profitable business, American Home Products. His family was wealthy and he was “wiping them out financially” since nothing was coming of the film projects he invested in (which included commercials). He hired Robert Downey Sr, who wound up sitting around and writing his own films, including a spoof of advertising that was to become Putney Swope (1969). 

Downey’s ideas came to nothing at Filmex, but his experience working at the firm did inform part of Putney Swope, and so the man who connected him with the film biz, none other than Staats, was hired to play a small part in the film. (An executive, called “Mr. War Toys” in the credits, who is told he has bad breath by Arnold Johnson as Putney; the scene can be found here.) Staats remembers the shoot well, as it took place in an office building at night.

Staats in Putney Swope.

The film became a major hit for Downey Sr and propelled him out of the “underground,” but it did nothing for Staats. Around the same time, however, he made friends with filmmaker Jonathan Kaplan, who introduced him to the man that used Staats to best advantage as E. Eddie, Harry Hurwitz.

But before we get around to Staats’ awesome scene-stealing in Hurwitz’s best known (and best in general) film, let’s turn to a different medium. Staats’ work in Len Glassman’s advertising films attracted the attention TV producer George Schlatter, who was cresting in 1968-69 on the incredible success of “Laugh-In.” After a nice luncheon at the Russian Tea Room, Schlatter hired Staats to appear in and write for his new series, “Turn-on.”

"Turn-on"
Photo by S. Kaufman.

Over the years “Turn-on” has become famous as “the show that was cancelled while it was airing.” This is indeed true — the first episode of the series aired on Feb. 5, 1969, and was cancelled by the network after it played on the East Coast and was making its way to the West Coast. A station manager in Cleveland pulled the show as it was airing and went to a live presentation of organ music (!).

 

Staats is very frank about the experience of working on “Turn-on.” He was hired for 14 shows and claims that many of his segments for that season were shot. (One other complete episode, in addition to the infamous first show, is in the library of The Paley Center.) He says he performed as three characters: his pitchman alter-ego E. Eddie, a “Modren Bride” [spelling correct] who gave advice to the lovelorn, and “the Magic Housewife” who dispensed cooking tips. He wrote his own material and maintains that at no time was it said by anyone associated with the series (including reps from the network, ABC, or the sponsor, Colgate Palmolive, who were on the set) that the show was objectionable. 

"Turn-on"
Photo by S. Kaufman.

He admits to having had fun creating those characters and acting them out, but he is very honest about the experience, noting that he wasn’t quite aligned with Schlatter’s Liberal politics. He also notes that the producer (who still had a massive hit running at the time, with “Laugh-In” killing in the ratings) “came to me, crying poor mouth, ‘oh, woe is me,’ I’m takin’ some bath on this. Do you mind if I don’t pay you the rest of the contract?' I had a contract for quite a few thousand dollars, you know! I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, George, I’m paid in full.’ So I just waived it off. That’s Hollywood….” 

 

He admits his sketches were “slightly smutty” for 1969, but he was encouraged in that by Schlatter. He also looks back on it as a lessons of sorts, since he came out of the experience feeling that “Hollywood is a dishonest sewer” that he was happy to be away from. (And, aside from one very well-budgeted film he appeared in as a favor to director Jonathan Kaplan, Staats never worked in mainstream show biz again.)

Staats also notes that, after the first “Turn-on” episode aired, he was more than surprised to see the “Art Fern” character on Carson’s “Tonight Show.” The character had many aspects of the E. Eddie Edwards character and Carson worked with Carol Wayne, who had played Staats' sidekick on Schlatter’s show.

"Turn-on"
Photo by S. Kaufman.

When I asked Staats about writing his own dialogue in most of his film appearances, he replied with a saying he’s fond of — that he “was in it, but not of it.” He used the phrase in our interview more than once to describe both himself and the filmmakers he liked the most (Hurwitz, Kaplan). That carny phrase means that these people could work within the system but never were corrupted by it; they retained their personality in their work, made films according to certain rules set by producers, but never succumbed to the general greed and backstabbing that runs the movie industry. 

We move on to the point where Staats first worked with the filmmaker he is most identified with, the late and very great Harry Hurwitz. Staats has nothing but praise for Hurwitz, declaring that Harry “was a wonderful guy — there was no artifice about him.” As Staats remembers it, he was introduced to Hurwitz by Kaplan (who studied at NYU in the 1960s, with Scorsese as his tutor). Other directors might’ve used Staats to good advantage in bit parts, but Hurwitz constructed entire scenes around the E. Eddie Edwards character and cast Staats in his only starring role (in The Comeback Trail). 

McCann and Hurwitz.

One of the reasons that Hurwitz’s great film The Projectionist (1970) is so memorable is that he threw the kitchen sink into it. It has a central plot — in which projectionist Chuck McCann fantasizes about being a superhero — but it also veers off the rails wonderfully with scenes that find Chuck interacting with old movie clips (in a way that was later done in many features, including Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid), moments of the projectionist’s daily life (which show the Deuce off to good advantage), and random elements, like a late-night commercial the projectionist watches on his TV, featuring none other than E. Eddie Edwards. 

Hurwitz realized that to get the best out of Staats he should give him an outline and let him create his own dialogue. But, Staats emphasizes, this was within “parameters” — “I made it a pitch, but I made it his pitch. Some of the key lines were Harry’s. You can’t write a pitch. I can write a pitch because I was a talker. There’s a singsong rhythm to it — if you don’t do that, it doesn’t come across. All that stuff I did [in movies], I had to be the writer completely or rewrite it, so that it fit E. Eddie’s pitch.” 

Demonstrating proper behavior in
The Projectionist.

“As a front talker, I was used to talking for prolonged amounts of time. The mob in front of you at the carnival, which could be a couple of hundred people, they’re called ‘the tip.’ You gotta work them and work them, until you get where you know you can turn it — until you get there you have to keep going. So I was pretty good at layin’ it down real fast, and getting it in one take or two at the most. Carnival talkers are good at that. You don’t have a script, you’re winging it.” 

The result in Projectionist is a sequence that is very well-remembered, not only for its un-p.c. jokes and spot-on spoof of late-night scam-product commercials but because it stands as a little mini-film within the larger film. In her review of the film, Judith Christ singled out Staats for praise. This short segment showcases the full-tilt version of E. Eddie, and while The Projectionist is a modern comedy classic (and nostalgia-fan’s wet dream), the film is indeed stolen by Staats for the mere three minutes that he’s onscreen:

 

Staats next appeared in Jonathan Kaplan’s Night Call Nurses (1972) at Kaplan’s request. Staats had no agent and, again, appeared in films simply because the filmmakers (Downey Sr, Hurwitz, Kaplan, Alan Abel) would call him up. Here again Staats ad-libs for a few minutes as E. Eddie, lending some verbal humor to a “soft” T&A drama-comedy (and stealing the film in the process). His bit in the film begins at 18:54; the film is here.

In Night Call Nurses.

I wrote about Harry Hurwitz’s The Comeback Trail back in 2017 — you can find that piece here. In that blog entry, I outlined how the film was remade and changed by Hurwitz. There was one complete initial version of the film, but he felt it needed more work, so he continued to work on it for several years, adding additional scenes shot in New York and L.A.

This means that there are two different versions floating around the “underside” of the Internet (there has never been a DVD or even a VHS release of the picture). The first one contains more of the main plotline, while the second ends up exploring the fictional film company that is at the center of the plot. 

I actually “found” Mr. Staats because of that piece. I had asked the public for any info regarding his status — who was he? Where had he come from? Was he still with us? This lead to the interview I’m writing about here. In the meantime, a remake of the Hurwitz film has been finished and awaits a major release — it stars Robert De Niro in the Chuck McCann role (I’m not making this up; check out the trailer), Tommy Lee Jones in the Buster Crabbe role, Morgan Freeman in newly created gangster role, and Zach Braff of TV’s “Scrubs” in the role played by Staats (this time as “E. Eddie Eastman”). 

McCann and Staats in
The Comeback Trail.

The Hurwitz film was shot from 1971 to 1979 (!) and got its first theatrical showings at the Thalia in Manhattan in 1982. Staats clarified that, again, he did the role at Hurwitz’s request and there was indeed an initial shoot in New Mexico for a few weeks in 1971 and then the shoots for the additional material took place in NYC and L.A. over the next eight years. 

He also noted about the film’s plot — about two low-rent producers trying to kill the senior-citizen star of their latest film (Crabbe) in order to get his life insurance — that “anybody who saw The Producers would recognize it in Harry’s outline.” He noted that McCann and he ad-libbed their own dialogue throughout the shoots. “Harry gave us a few minutes of direction,” he emphasizes, with “no time estimation” given for the scenes but with the caution “don’t run away with it. You could say we were script writers,” he clarifies. “We wrote dialogue — we were dialogue writers.”

He denies the story that was in my original blog entry (courtesy of an associate producer on the film) concerning Buster Crabbe getting drunk and beating someone up on the set. Staats does confirm that Buster was fond of “beverages.” (“I’m fond of beverages myself,” adds Staats.) But he didn’t beat anyone up on the set. 

Crabbe in
The Comeback Trail.

Staats remembers instead what they did do together. As for the ripe language, remember that Bob Staats considers himself first and foremost as a seaman. “We would have drinks — not excessively. Believe it or not, down the road from where we were shooting in New Mexico, there was a tent show. It was a striptease artist, a sex show, in a tent on the highway. The star, a stripper — you could imagine what the strippers would look like in this fuckin’ joint – had one leg. She had an artificial leg. So Buster and I went down here a couple of times. Of all the people I hung out with on that set, it was Buster I hung out with the most. 

“A couple of years later Buster was giving a talk to a bunch of film students at a college. He called me and asked me to come and help him out with the talk. He liked me and I liked him.” As for Crabbe beating people up, Staats declares it never happened on the Hurwitz film. He says, “I knew him well — not quite well – enough to judge his character. I mean one of the things carnies do is figure out people… so we can take their money. ” 

I was surprised to see that Hurwitz’s film is back “in public view.” This is the original edit of the material, with more of the plot than the later version:

 

A 1976 film that Staats appeared in has disappeared over the years. Alan Abel’s The Faking of the President is present only on the Net as a listing of a handful of cast members, including Staats as G. Gordon Liddy and the infamous “Richard M. Dixon” as Nixon. The info we can go on is Staats’ vague memory of the picture: His character name was “G. Gordon. He was a pitchman; he sold a line of weaponry.” 

The next filmic adventure for Staats was a bit part in Jonathan Kapan’s first mainstream production, Mr. Billion (1977), made as an American vehicle for Italian star Terence Hill. Staats appears in the film as railway train conductor who is (of course) running a side hustle in cheap watches.

In Mr. Billion.

Staats remembers the shoot well, because he wound up hanging out with the film’s American “name,” Jackie Gleason. The Great One liked his “beverages,” and since Staats was by no means an abstainer when it came to said beverages, he joined him for a few. Among other things they talked about their youth — Gleason was raised in Bushwick, while Staats grew up in the adjoining Queens nabe of Ridgewood.

Staats’ memory of the film extends to the fact that it was the only film he was in that had a big premiere — the film played as the Easter show at the Radio City Music Hall. “Jesus, that stunk!” Staats reflects on his friend Kaplan’s first big-budgeted film. (Kaplan did better with later items like Heart Like a Wheel and The Accused.) His scene in Mr. Billion can be found here at 18:45. 

In Fairy Tales.

Harry Hurwitz gave Staats a lovely supporting part in the softcore feature Fairy Tales (1978), which he made under the nom du erotica “Harry Tampa.” There’s no question that Staats is the best thing in the film (and this in a feature that gave Linnea Quigley her debut role). He steals the show as “Tommy Tucker,” who is given the job of persuading rubes to go into the (not so) Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe’s house of ill repute. 

He got the part in the usual way — Hurwitz called him up and offered it to him. Staats was once again “doing whatever Harry wanted me to” and he made the role his own by ad-libbing carny pitches to rubes who wander by the shoe. His tagline from his previous E. Eddie appearances comes in early on. (“Isn’t that wonderful? Say yes, it makes me feel good. I couldn’t help but notice... ”) 

He returns throughout the film to instigate the vignettes, with wonderfully worded enticements. (“20 dollars for sex, 30 if you want to touch the sides.”) At the end, he closes things out with an exhortation to see the film again, with your family: “It’s a family picture, friends. Mom and the kids can come for the music and dancing, and Dad will enjoy the meat.” 

In Fairy Tales.

“I winged that whole thing,” says Staats. “Harry didn’t have any input in that…. I would tell the different guy to ask me this or say that, to give me a feed line…. That was all my smut. Harry wasn’t smutty at all.” 

One can only be grateful to the YouTube poster who boiled down Staats’ scenes in the film to one glorious 10-minute edit. The man himself notes that he doesn’t keep copies of his acting work around, but he was amused when a relative stumbled onto Fairy Tales and was surprised that he had been in a “porn” movie. (It's actually a softcore picture.) Staats’ take on the movie? “I thought it was funny — I love that kinda crap!” 

 

Hurwitz’s second softcore film as “Harry Tampa” was Auditions (1978). The premise for this one is tissue-thin: We watch people audition for the sequel to Fairy Tales. The participants are mostly porn stars who perform for the camera solo or in groups. There is comic relief every so often — Staats wanders through, of course, and gets two really good scenes (and a bit toward the end). This time his E. Eddie Edwards character is a sleazy agent (for “ASU — the Agency for the Strange and Unusual”), but that’s sort of like being a pitchman anyway, isn’t it? 

In Auditions.

This incarnation of E. Eddie is not as high-energy as before, but he’s still a master bullshit artist. Staats scenes in the film can be found at 14:30, 20:20, 102:00, and 114:00. The film is viewable here with the proviso that this is, most certainly, an NSFW video. 

The last sequence that Staats appeared in for Hurwitz that was released appears in That’s Adequate (1989). The first 45 minutes or so of this pic is an absolute joy, as Tony Randall hosts a journey through the productions of “Adequate Pictures,” the same firm that was responsible for the ridiculous films in Comeback Trail. The cast of this part of the movie is a rogues’ gallery of great NYC talent: James Coco, Stiller and Meara, Professor Irwin Corey, Lenny Schultz, Brother Theodore, and Joe Franklin. 

The second part of the film was shot in L.A. and it’s very different in tone. (And much less funny.) The latter-day productions of Adequate Pictures includes a “where did this come from?” charity-single music video sketch that is clearly a riff on “We Are the World.” In this part of the film the cast includes a young Bruce Willis, Robert Downey Jr, Richard Lewis, and many other L.A. standup comics. 

Staats’ turn as E. Eddie finds him as the MC of a movie premiere where he sings the praises of the studio’s output, including “Singin’ in the Synagogue.” His bit is at 10:29.

 

One of Staats oddest credits was a very mainstream cartoon assignment — doing a voice for the syndicated show “Drawing Power” in 1980, which was half-live and half-animation, and was a spinoff of the popular “Schoolhouse Rock” series. “George Newall and Tom Yohe worked for executives at an ad agency called McCaffrey & McCall (which I wrote two live trade shows for, and I appeared in the shows). They were potential clients I called on. So I got to know George very well, and they had this very successful show they owned called ‘Schoolhouse Rock.’ Periodically they would call me up to do voiceovers.”

I must, again, bless the fans on YouTube who upload everything they love. A VHS video of “Drawing Power” has been uploaded and looks to be shot off a TV set. Staats does the voice of “Professor Rutabaga” who is, you guessed it, a carny pitchman! The character appears at 10:49 and 39:01, as the Professor lectures us on the joys of vegetables and our imagination. He even says “Say yes — it makes me feel good...”

 

The last time we were lucky enough to see Staats steal a picture was in Kenny Hotz and Spencer Rice’s mockumentary Pitch (1997). As Staats tells it, “Two young guys up in Toronto wanted me to do the film. I didn’t know them. I agreed to do it, if they had refreshing beverages on the set… and some sandwiches.” (Mr. Staats never specified which beverages he was looking for, but one can sure it wasn’t a seltzer or a Coke.)

Staats appears at 11:06, 28:30, and 51:34:

For those who are Hurwitz completists (tell me, where is his own Nixon film, Richard?), Staats brought up another collaboration he had with Harry and Chuck McCann, which evidently was never edited together (or sits in a vault somewhere). “Chuck was in the film; he had the lead. He plays a homeless guy who gets a credit card and uses it to buy food or something. He’s a very simple guy. He then gets a second credit card — you know, how they mail them out to people? So when he gets the bill for the first one, he pays it off with the second one, and back and forth. It was shot on Long Island; Harry was a hired hand directing it.” 

Another Hurwitz fragment with Staats sounds like it would’ve possibly been woven into another Hurwitz “omnibus” pic like That’s Adequate: “Harry asked me to do a pitch in an amusement park in Long Beach, California. And it had to do, I think, with politics. I don’t know what became of it. It was dark — it was like an evil pitchman luring you into a tunnel ride. This was near the end of Harry’s life.” 

Making a point in Auditions.

One of the most touching moments in my talk with Mr. Staats was the moment where he talked about how he thinks of himself. “The American merchant navy is known as ‘the hooligan navy’ — hard-drinking guys, terrific guys. I identify with them forever. To this day, many people know me only as a merchant seaman. I’ve had neighbors in this building for years — they only know me as a merchant seaman. I tell people I’m a seaman. I don’t talk about anything else. At heart I’m a seaman. Those were the happiest days of my life. 

“Merchant seamen are roughnecks, hard-drinking guys. But they’re also very intellectual, believe it or not. They’re readers. I knew two millionaires who went to sea — they had a million dollars and they’re shipping out as seamen, not just once, that was their life. It has its appeal… 

“It isn’t romantic — they love the life! The sea wants to kill you, every fucking day. And it does, frequently. Seamen have a very high rate of dying or getting injured. That goes with the territory. Ships blow up, collide, shoal up, burn out at a rapid rate. It’s the nature of the thing. Nature is a powerhouse.” 

At different points in our interview, Staats pointed out that he was only an actor because “people called me up.” He did note, more than once, that he had the best working relationship with Hurwitz: “Harry was very gentle, but also very strong. He knew what he wanted, and he got it out of us.” 

Hurwitz and Staats, working on
The Comeback Trail.
(Photo by S. Kaufman.)

Toward the end of or interview I asked Mr. Staats if Hurwitz paid his airfare to come out to L.A. and do small scenes for him. He replied that sometimes that was the case, but there was a time or two that Bob paid for his own air fare and charged it to whatever agency he was working for at the time. 

“I really liked Harry,” he reflects. “All of the directors I met through Harry, they were genuinely nice people — they weren’t the Hollywood types. They were like Harry, that’s why they liked Harry. They were followers of Harry because they were like him. *I* was a follower of Harry, in a sense. He was with it, but not of it.”

The “two eras” of Deceased Artiste Robert Downey Sr. (a prince)

The death of Robert Downey Sr. has brought to mind that unasked question that pertains to so many filmmakers of the Sixties and early Seventies. Namely, what the hell happened to their work after the “maverick” period came to a close when Jaws and Star Wars pointed the way to future Hollywood mega-releases aimed at younger viewers?

In the case of Downey’s work, it was essential “underground” filmmaking that began to be sadly unwatchable even before the advent of the “tent-pole” movie. There are a few clear reasons why his early films are so eminently rewatchable, and every fiction feature after Greaser’s Palace is an incredible misfire. (There was a final, really good documentary by Downey that showed us what we’d been missing in the three decades that preceded it; see below.)

The elements that made Downey’s low-/no-budget films from 1961 to 1973 so imaginative and entertaining are the obvious ones. He worked on threadbare features with scripts filled with absurdist comic situations, with the narration and dialogue being dubbed in afterward. By the time of his best-known film, Putney Swope (1969), he was using direct sound and had actual production value in the images.

Downey acting in his first short
"Balls Bluff" (1961; later incorporated into 
No More Excuses)

The Downey features of this period play with genre and moviegoers’ expectations. He blurred the lines between different movie genres from scene to scene and wasn't averse to throwing in something completely out of left field, as if he was creating a live-action version of a Mad magazine movie parody. (Then, of course, he directed the first Mad movie, but that’s a story for another piece, about his unwatchable later comedies.)

The keynote for the great Downey films was always the cast. He used comic actors from the NYC pool of seasoned vets and had them play bizarre “types.” He regularly used the bald comedian Lawrence Wolf, the raccoon-eyed character actor Don Calfa, the boyish but seedy George Morgan, and he assigned many female roles (all of them, in certain films) to his wife Elsie, who was fearless in terms of playing both sex objects and toothless hags.

Lawrence Wolf (left) in
Putney Swope.

So the half-dozen features made in this period — not including a truly grim and brilliant telefilm and a lost sexploitation film — are all worth your time. But, oh, the films that came after Greaser’s Palace were dismal in new and depressing ways. It’s not difficult to diagnose the key factors that made them so awful:

1. The time period. The energy that infused filmmaking in the Sixties and early Seventies was truly radical and as pioneering as what had taken place in the silent era. Taboos were broken and movies were made that appealed to intelligent, engaged viewers. The blockbusters of the mid-Seventies led the majors to realize they could return to creating “package” pictures.

Downey directs Pound (1970).

At that point filmmakers needed the brazen ballsiness of Robert Altman or the natural gifts of that era’s Martin Scorsese to continue to make personal, adult films funded by the studios. Downey was a “comedy-maker,” so he was lost in the “package” world of Hollywood (where comedies were conceived of as either pictures with high-concept plots or as vehicles for SNL alumni).

2. Drugs. The obits for Downey stressed, naturally enough, his son, whose performances have run the gamut from snarky teen characters (or hammy out-of-control ones), to snarky young adults (or hammy out-of-control ones), to a surprisingly good Chaplin, to snarky middle-aged adults. Part of the oft-told tale of the younger, drug-addled Downey Jr. was that his father introduced him to drug culture as a child.

Drugs seem to have played a role as well in Downey Sr. losing his footing as a filmmaker and going from being an innovator and an iconoclast to a really pedestrian comedy-maker. As for his son, Downey Sr. did one other thing that was detrimental to his son’s growth as a performer — he let him ham it up in his films.

Robert Downeys, Sr. and Jr.

Downey Jr. has run amok in so many films, but the “ad-lib anything — your funny faces and weird comic tics are great!” indulgence went the farthest in his father’s films (and led to high-key-in-every-scene performances, like his intolerable turn in Two Girls and a Guy and in Downey Jr.’s own doc, The Last Party).

Now Downey Jr. is a Hollywood institution who recently played a snarky superhero, a kooky Dr. Dolittle, and countless other wacky roles. He has been off of drugs for a few decades now, but his dad’s indulgence lives on every time he delivers a line in a hipster cadence or veers into a tic that does nothing to define a character (only to establish them as “another figure played by Downey Jr.”).

3. Moving to L.A. Downey Sr. clearly moved to L.A. to enter the mainstream of show business. This meant: the aforementioned bad Mad magazine movie, a script for The Gong Show Movie, and a few package comedies that had terrific performers (Dick Shawn and Martin Mull in Rented Lips; Eric Idle and Andrea Martin in Too Much Sun) but were just plain awful.

The energy and absurdity that bristled through Downey’s NYC films was gone, and so were  the supporting casts of great character people. Like Neil Simon and many others, Downey flourished in NYC and became a mere [favorite current phrase] “producer of content” in L.A. The “micro-budgets” he had in NYC gave him complete control over what he was making, whereas the Hollywood producers who funded his work dictated what the films would ultimately be like. Thus, the difference in tone, look, and casting.

And the films couldn’t be made better with talented performers. Martin Mull and Dick Shawn star in the straight-to-video title Rented Lips (1987). The film is just dreadful with a lame script by Mull — who wrote a great “sit-down” comedy act, wrote several albums of great comedy songs, and later wrote great scripts for his History of White People cable shows, but apparently couldn’t write a great comedy movie script.

The cast is a gathering of superb comic talent, including Shelley Berman, Kenneth Mars, Eileen Brennan, Jack Riley, Pat McCormick, Jennifer Tilly, and Edy Williams (plus a lethally hammy Downey Jr.). And the film is still a waste of everyone’s time (and someone’s money). If you'd still care to see it, it can be found here on Rarefilmm.com.

It’s interesting to hear Downey reflect on how bad the later films were, at the end of this interview about Putney Swope. He, of course, knew how bad they were. The only obvious corollary question is: Why didn’t he go back to making truly independent work? Downey’s last film, a mellow little documentary (see below), proved he could have, at any time, gone back to indie filmmaking. But once one has sucked at what Bertolucci called “the Big Nipple” of Hollywood, one can hardly stop sucking…. 

*****

Now to the films that should be seen and are all thankfully in distribution — as noted above, only one film, Sweet Smell of Sex is currently “lost.” A Criterion/Eclipse box called Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr. contains four of his entertaining early works, plus one misfire that should’ve either been issued as a short or kept as a Downey family home movie. (As of this writing I’ve been informed that the contents of that box set and Greaser’s Palace are on the Criterion Channel, which I neither pay for, nor get for free.)

Babo 73.

Babo 73 (1964, in the Eclipse box) is a political spoof starring Greenwich Village icon Taylor Mead. It’s fun and extremely goofy, with Downey finding his footing in zero-budget filmmaking.

Chafed Elbows (1965, in the Eclipse box) was the breakthrough. The film, which was reportedly made for $25,000, is a clever and very silly comedy that goes from film to posed photographs, like Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine photo-funnies meeting Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962). 

George Morgan, looking suitably
innocent, in Chafed Elbows.

The film follows a loser (Downey regular George Morgan) who loves his mother too much — so much so that he thinks he’s made her pregnant — and acquires various jobs as he wanders along. Downey talked about Elbows on the CBC in this 1967 interview:

 

On a casting level, Downey hit on the masterstroke of having his wife Elsie play all the female roles.

Elsie Downey as the mother in
Chafed Elbows.

He also utilized one of his regulars, Lawrence Wolf, onscreen and as the dozens of characters — the film was post-synched and constantly communicates its threadbare nature, with surprises thrown in (like color sequences shot in great NYC locations).

 

No More Excuses (1968) is an odd creation — a “feature” of 46 minutes that is basically five short projects slammed together. In the mix is Downey’s first short “Balls Bluff,” about a Civil War soldier (played by Downey himself) waking up in contemporary NYC.

The other four threads are: a recreation of the assassination of President Garfield (played by Lawrence Wolf); a speech about clothing animals by notorious prankster Alan Abel; a mini-documentary about the singles bar scene on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (proving Downey threw nothing out!); and a thriller/”romance” narrative about a rapist (Don Calfa), which has a comic punchline.

No More Excuses.

Excuses has some great moments and some not-so-great ones, but at 46 minutes, who can quibble? The restoration on the film was done at the Anthology Film Archives, but the funding for the restoration was provided by The Film Foundation (Scorsese’s film restoration org) clearly went for lots of music clearances. Downey included on the soundtrack then-current songs by the Hollies, Cream, the Who, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Monkees (as well as the theme from A Man and a Woman for the rapist plotline). In other words, Excuses is a thoroughly Sixties creation.

Downey directs Putney Swope.

Putney Swope (1969, in the Eclipse box) is Downey’s most famous film, and rightly so. It’s a radically weird creation that spoofs the advertising industry, the business world, the U.S. government, TV commercials, the “sexual revolution,” and, of course, race relations.

It was in Swope that Downey found the perfect balance for his “Borscht Belt meets Absurdist Theater” approach — the ad satires alone have kept the film relevant (because even today’s “woke” advertising is as ridiculous as the hard-sells of yesteryear). And the cast is filled with great comic performers, from Downey ensemble members Wolf and Stan Gottlieb to Allen Garfield and, in a showcase, role, Funhouse interview subject Antonio Fargas.

Putney Swope.

The film’s oddest touch is that Downey himself dubbed the (black) lead actor Arnold Johnson, because Johnson supposedly couldn’t remember his lines (although he later worked in other movies and TV series). It’s a ballsy and bizarre move (that most surely wouldn’t be tolerated today).

Swope is, of course, a white man’s view of several black characters — the interesting thing throughout, though, is that Downey makes it clear that Swope is trying not to sell out, and all the white characters are entirely profit-driven hypocrites. (Or just cartoons, like the memorably cheery little-man U.S. President and his Nazi-esque sidekick, played by Lawrence Wolf.)

The next film, Pound (1970), is the strangest, most original Downey film and this reviewer’s favorite. Structured like a Theater of the Absurd play, it did first see life as an off-Broadway theatrical production written by Downey; because of the success of Swope, the film was distributed by United Artists and had an X-rating for its theatrical run.

The action revolves around a group of dogs in a pound, awaiting the gas that will kill them. Each breed of dog is played by an actor, and the whole cast hailed from the great pool of character people in NYC. Included among them are (again) Elsie Downey, Lawrence Wolf, and Don Calfa, as well as Antonio Fargas, Charles Dierkop, and Funhouse favorite Marshall Efron.

There are outdoor scenes and a second plotline concerning “the Honky Killer,” but the focus of the film are the scenes set in the pound. There is a definite theatrical feel to these scenes, but that is shattered (at 47:05) by a major musical number written by Charley Cuva, in which all the people-as-dogs dance to a funky, obscene, and very catchy song. (Sample lyric: “"Bow-wow/you're an ugly cocksucker/standin' in the men's room/waiting for a pucker.”)

Some helpful soul has posted the soundtrack “album,” which he admits is a bootleg, but it’s the only opportunity to hear the very catchy score by Charley Cuva without having to rewatch the film and just hear snippets. The poster notes that the lyrics for the songs were written by Downey himself — thus, more evidence of just how creative he really was in his “golden” period. It’s available on YT here. 

The whole film can be seen here. It has never been officially released in any medium in the U.S., so the best-looking copy anyone has found is one that aired on the Israeli MGM channel (!):

 

The last great Downey theatrical film is Greaser’s Palace (1972), which is available on DVD and had the biggest budget of anything Downey made during the “golden” period of his work; it is also unquestionably his best-looking film. It is as wonderfully weird as Pound, but this time the weirdness takes place mostly outdoors, as we encounter a Western town that is run by a villain.

Western movies since the beginning of cinema would lead the audience to expect a gunfighter to come and “clean house” in the town, but instead — a man in a zoot suit (Allan Arbus) parachutes into the town and brings a dead man back to life. He claims, “I’m on my way to Jerusalem to be an actor-singer. It is written that the agent Morris awaits me...” He then walks on water and seals the deal — he’s the messiah.

Greaser's Palace.

The film is a wonderfully freaky creation that is carried off beautifully by its ensemble cast, including old standbys and new names like Luana Anders (as the villain’s daughter, a showgirl named Cholera), Toni Basil (as a bare-breasted Indian maiden), and Hervé Villechaize (as a flirtatious, bisexual cowboy). It’s a very quiet movie, featuring nonsense of a higher order. One wishes Downey could have kept the momentum going, but, sadly, Greaser’s Palace was his last truly imaginative fiction film. The whole film can be seen here:

 

Curiously enough, Downey made a superb TV movie the year after Greaser’s. It’s a very serious piece that could’ve pointed the way to another type of career, but there was never another drama in his filmography after Sticks and Bones (1973).

After being “lost” to the public for several decades (for unspecified reasons), finally a copy of Sticks has materialized. It was last seen on television in the Eighties when it was rerun on a cable arts channel.

Sticks and Bones.

It’s hard to reconcile the fact that this radical play by David Rabe — which both openly condemned America’s presence in Vietnam and satirized the “don’t wanna hear about it” attitude of many middle Americans — aired on a major network (CBS) in prime time. [NOTE: It’s mentioned in the notes to the Criterion/Eclipse box that, after a delay of several months, the show finally aired only “late at night” on certain CBS affiliates; NYC-area editions of TV Guide for the week in question (August 11-17, 1973) show that it aired in its intended prime time slot of 9:00 p.m. on a Friday night, opposite “Room 222.”] The play was certainly fodder for PBS but not a network that was still airing variety shows and wacky sitcoms.

However, this was after the emergence of “All in the Family,” and American television was free (for a short time, at least) to present truly challenging fare. The telefilm was most certainly that, with its plot about an “average American family” (named Ozzie, Harriet, Ricky, and David in the play as performed theatrically) who are confronted with the horrors of Vietnam when the eldest son comes home from the war, blind and shell-shocked. (The best-known cast members are Anne Jackson as the mother and Cliff De Young as the Viet-vet brother.)

Some CBS affiliates refused to air the film — which was shot on video, to make it look more like a sitcom — and one can see why. Not only is Rabe’s play (here adapted by the playwright) an incredibly in-your-face piece, but Downey added to the claustrophobia and the flagrantly theatrical aspect of the play by shooting it with a fish-eye lens that makes the action seem more immediate and assaultive.

Al Hirschfeld's illustration 
of the stars of the telefilm
Sticks and Bones.

Downey clearly drew on his experience shooting Pound, but he also went back to No More Excuses by utilizing popular songs in Sticks. We hear a surprisingly rockin’ Randy Newman song (“Gone Dead Train” from the Performance soundtrack), “Monkey Man” by The Rolling Stones, and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” (used beautifully to underscore scenes with the blind son trying to re-integrate into his family). As he had in Greaser’s, Downey also utilized electronic music, which serves as another distancing technique.

It’s a bit too long and is structured around a very obvious metaphor (the son may be blind, but his family’s apathy toward the war is the true “blind spot”). The telefilm still packs a punch, though, because it unflinchingly presents the all-American family’s resolute racism toward the Vietnamese. (Racial epithets abound but are utterly essential to conveying this very real aspect of the American character.) Its finale is unforgettably grim, reinforced by a final bucolic image with a very ugly detail.

The film can be found on the Rarefilmm site, here. 

Watching Sticks, one laments that it was Downey’s only foray into drama. Watching his next film, Moment to Moment (1975), one is further saddened — but in this case because the film is a complete mess.

Alternately titled Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight, the film can be found in a shorter version in the Eclipse box. It was assembled by Downey as a sort of Valentine/farewell to his wife Elsie (whom he was already separated from). The credits feature the folks who gave him money to complete the project; names on the LONG list include Hal Ashby, Norman Lear, Bud Yorkin, Shep Gordon, Joseph Papp, Haskell Wexler, and Jack Nicholson.

It’s comprised of many shards, which contain many different characters in many different situations. The shards were reportedly shot over two years, but Elsie (who plays every female role, again) looks like she ages or regresses a decade from scene to scene. Cast members — including regulars Wolf and Stan Gottlieb, and a briefly seen Seymour Cassel — show up and then disappear. Some reappear later in the picture; many do not. (And random shots of Downey Jr and his sister Allyson reinforce the idea that the film is basically a protracted home movie, whether it’s an hour or 85 minutes.)

The film does show Elsie’s range as a performer but, since there’s not ever a semblance of continuity, Moment begins the hard-to-watch phase of Downey’s career. The musical score by Jack Nitzsche, David Sanborn, and Arica is the one salvageable aspect of the film, and one wishes it was used for a better picture.

The version found on the Rarefilmm site is the longer cut of the film with the title Moment to Moment. At the 1:04:00 mark, there is a scene where Elsie and Gottlieb snort cocaine. The enthusiasm and eagerness with which Elsie performs this scene is like a visual confirmation that drugs were killing off the brilliance of certain members of the Downey clan (although Robert Jr. noted in his memorial note about his mother that alcohol was her particular demon).

It’s a jarring scene to watch because — like everything else in Moment — it serves no purpose at all, but plays like a harbinger of all of the Downey Sr. misfire films that followed. 

Moment to Moment can be seen on Rarefilmm.com, here.

*****

There is a happy ending to all this, besides the fact that we now can easily access pristine copies of Downey’s best work. That happy conclusion is the well-made and quietly touching documentary Rittenhouse Square (2005), about a Philadelphia park. Someone uploaded the complete film to YouTube after Downey’s death and we can all be grateful, as it demonstrates that Downey never lost his filmmaking prowess — he just should’ve abandoned comedy after Greaser’s.

At 82 minutes, Rittenhouse could have withstood a little pruning, but gone are the days when one could make an hour-long feature and get it booked into arthouses. And while there are a few scenes that could easily have been cut (as with a charity benefit held for Philly’s upper crust to fund the park), some of the best sequences would have been left out of a straighter PBS-style doc — moments where we see local musicians performing in the park (the Curtis Institute of Music adjoins the park), and Downey simply shows us the musicians, their audience of stragglers, and those sitting nearby on the benches.

So while we do get some Rittenhouse history and other socially acceptable sequences (including a day to devoted to children’s amusements), the documentary is most effective when it explores the two themes with which Downey infused it (besides the obvious one — the joy of music in open spaces).

The first is a gloriously un-p.c. tribute to girl-watching. In this case those indulging in this practice are men over 65, so it isn’t as un-“woke” as it may sound. On-camera (as “the questioner”) Downey informally speaks to men in his age bracket, and they honestly note that one of the principal joys of sitting for a time in Rittenhouse is to watch beautiful young women go by. We even hear that one old gent used to harangue his son to get out of the way of his wheelchair when a particularly pretty young woman strolled by.

The other theme — which was inevitable, given that Downey made the film when he was round about 69 — is aging (and its unavoidable sidekick, death). Downey’s discussions with old men and women form a lovely counterpoint to the scenes of the young talented musicians performing in the park. The musicians have clearly got everything in front of them, while the seniors reflect on what is behind them — with some of them being uncommonly honest (one painter regretting a long-ago divorce; a woman noting how deeply she loved her boyfriend but what a misogynist he was).

In this regard Downey gives us two “protagonists” — an elegant older gent who dressed up to stroll through the park (and died during the production of the doc) and a young girl whom we never hear speak, but we watch her go to and from her music classes and see her playing her violin at various points.

Rittenhouse Square forms a great “bookend” to Downey’s career, as one of his first films was “A Touch of Greatness” (1964), a totally serious doc about a beloved teacher who used unconventional methods to interest kids in literature and thought. Clips from that film can be seen in this more recent salute to the teacher. (This clip is apparently about a third of the recent doc.)

 

So, ultimately, if one watches Downey’s two docs, his best over-the-top creations (Pound, Greaser’s Palace) and, most especially, Sticks and Bones, one laments the “road never taken” by the filmmaker. There never was another drama or a really innovative comedy, but at least Downey’s last feature reaffirmed his talent. Even though Rittenhouse Square was barely seen in the mid-2000s — it mostly played festivals and arthouses — it’s heartening that he went out on a high note.

   

Thanks to Jon Whitehead of Rarefilmm.com and Robert Nedelkoff for referring me to the rarest films discussed in this piece.