Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 73

Robert Downey, Sr.:
The Preston Sturges of the 1960s
Perhaps America’s most uncompromising satirist since Preston Sturges,
Robert Downey, Sr. created a series of brutally funny, no-holds barred satires in
the early 1960s and 70s which still hold up today - masterful examples o f ‘‘take no
prisoners” filmmaking that have never been equaled, or even approached, since.
Bom in New York City on June 24,1936, Downey’s mother was a Powers Model,
his father a restaurant manager. In his teens, Downey’s sole interests were baseball
and boxing, and he dropped out of high school when “I ran into geometry or
something...! just knew that it was something I wasn’t interested in...so I was
happy to get out. So I joined the Army” Downey told me in a March 3, 2001
interview (unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotes by Downey are from this
interview).
By his own admission, Downey “served a lot of time in the stockade for
being a drunk” but his periods of incarceration actually served as his first
introduction to the possibilities of being a creative artist. One of the guards in the
lock-up gave Downey a notebook and a pen, and suggested that he pass the time
by writing some essays. Instead, Downey began work on a series of one-act plays,
and after a bad conduct discharge, and one summer as a pitcher in semi-pro baseball
in Pit tsburgh, Pennsylvania, Downey headed back to New York, where one of his
early plays. What Else Is There?, received an off-off Broadway production. The
play was, according to Downey, “kinda wild, pretty ahead of its tim e.. .the actors
played missiles, in silos, ready to go off.” During the production, Downey met
early collaborator William Waering, who suggested that the two men make a movie,
using Downey’s script and Waering’s 16mm camera.
Their first film. Balls Bluff (1963), was a thirty-minute silent film, in
which a Union Civil War soldier finds himself transported to 20^ century New
York. When the lead actor failed to show up for shooting, Downey took over the
role of the soldier and the film was eventually screened at various “underground”
theatres in Manhattan. Emboldened by the success of his first project, Downey
grabbed veteran underground comic Taylor Mead, and drove to Washington, D.C.
in the fall of 1963 to shoot Babo 73 (released in 1964), his first sound feature,
about a newly elected President of the United Status (sic). Once again, William
Waering was his co-conspirator. Taylor Mead, who also appeared in such legendary
films as Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief(1960) and Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys
(1968), took to the role with his usual flamboyant abandon. Downey and Waering
photographed Mead wandering in and around the White House without press passes