‘Fifteen years of total insanity’: how Robert Downey Jr made peace with his maverick father
In his father’s underground western Greaser’s Palace, a seven-yearold Robert Downey Jr plays, in his own words, “a boy who got his neck slit by God”. This, perhaps, explains a lot. Downey Jr grew up on Robert Downey Sr’s film sets in the 70s and 80s, amid what he calls “a cacophony of creativity”, at the heart of the counterculture cinema scene fuelled by “cigarettes and weed and booze”. He slept in a cot wedged against an editing desk, got taken to see X-rated films such as La Grande Bouffe at an absurdly young age, and went on a cross-country road trip as a kid where he “was in charge of the hash pipe”.
In the twilight of his father’s years, Downey Jr wanted some answers about why his father didn’t take better care of him. The resulting documentary – called Sr, with remorseless family logic – acts as part tribute, part therapy session and part last hurrah. “You,” Downey Jr tells his father, “did not give a mad fuck, did you?”
The elephant in the room of Sr is Downey’s turbulent period as a cocaineand heroin-dependent young movie star (before he miraculously cleaned up his act to become at one point the world’s highest paid actor), and the extent to which Downey Sr may or may not be responsible for his son’s addictions. In fact, it’s the elephant in the room until it isn’t. Fifty-five minutes into Sr, Downey Jr, who spends a good part of the film gently grilling his ailing father over Zoom, addresses it directly: “I think we would be remiss not to discuss its effect on me.” Downey Sr, in his 80s and beginning to succumb to Parkinson’s, readily admits that the time he spent in Los Angeles in the 1980s as a heavy-duty cocaine addict himself was “15 years of total fucking insanity”, but he isn’t too keen to get into it again. “Boy, I could sure love to miss that discussion,” he mutters.
But no matter: we cut to an interview clip that looks like it was shot in the 90s, in which Downey Sr takes it on the chin. “A lot of us thought it would be hypocritical to not have our kids participate in marijuana and stuff like that,” he says. “It was an idiot move on our parts to share that with our children. I’m just happy he’s here.” Downey Jr is in shot too, and frankly doesn’t look well. The interviewer asks: “Were you ever worried he wasn’t going to be here?” With forthright honesty Downey Sr replies: “Many times.”
Over 30 years later, the situation is very different. Downey Sr is no longer with us; he died during the making of the documentary. Downey Jr is secure in his position in the Hollywood firmament, and now seemingly anxious to draw attention to his father’s film-making achievements. Downey Sr carved his path in the underground in the 60s and 70s with chaotic absurdist abandon. He made extravagantly berserk films such as the aforementioned Greaser’s Palace, in which a pink-hatted Jesus surrogate parachutes into the old west; the plot-free comedy Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight; and probably his best known film, the Black-Power-meets-Madison-Ave satire Putney Swope, released in 1969. Another of Downey Sr’s films, Pound, in which human actors play dogs waiting to be put down, features Downey Jr’s very first screen performances, as a fiveyear-old. Arguably Downey Sr’s biggest fan is film director Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast him in small role as a recording studio guy in Boogie Nights, and of whom Downey Jr says, only a little sarcastically: “It’s no mystery that Paul Thomas Anderson is probably the son my dad wishes he had had.”
By the time Sr (the film) came to be, Downey Sr’s active film-making career was well in the past. His most recent credit was a 2005 documentary about Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. But Sr shows, if nothing else, that the man had an unquenchable yen to direct, to the extent that he took the opportunity to commandeer Sr’s equipment and crew to shoot his own version of the same film. Sr’s actual director, Chris Smith, is known for filming tricksy subjects with their own agendas, in films such as Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, about the disastrous festival, and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, in which Jim Carrey method acted as Andy Kaufman. Smith generously incorporated elements of “the Senior cut” into the finished film, and in fact says that letting Downey Sr run with it made sense for everyone. “Had he not started doing his own version, it would have been a nightmare. He would have been all over us. It kept me outside of the crosshairs, so to speak.”
Smith’s co-cinematographer and editor Kevin Ford set up an edit suite in Downey Sr’s front room – and as he became more unwell, his bedroom. His allusive, eccentric directing style is readily apparent in the way he outlines what sequences he wants filmed. In contrast to what Downey Jr calls the “legitimate” documentary he is making, Downey Sr appears to be creating an impressionistic memoir, threading together meaningful memories and chance, unrepeatable improvisations. So he takes the camera crew to the Greenwich Village address where the family lived in a converted loft (now demolished and replaced with a Nutella cafe), and has Downey Jr leap out from behind a tree and sing the same Schubert lieder he performed as a 15-yearold in a talent contest. He visits an alleyway near the Bowery where, back in the 6os, he paid a hobo $50 to lie down for a memorable dance scene in Putney Swope. A random guy doing pull-ups on scaffolding or a bunch of mopeds bombing down a boardwalk are just as