Robert Downey’s No-Budget Genius

Since its founding by director Martin Scorsese in 1990, the nonprofit preservation organization the Film Foundation has provided support and funding for restorations of key works by filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Satyajit Ray, David Lynch, Jean Renoir, and John Casavettes. The foundation’s wide-ranging efforts have also broadened to include experimental and underground cinema artists such as George and Mike Kuchar and Jonas Mekas. Beginning Friday, Anthology Film Archives will unveil the latest fruits of the Film Foundation’s efforts to preserve cinema’s more freewheeling and idiosyncratic past with a program entitled Robert Downey: A Prince.The Anthology program functions as a showcase of Mr. Downey’s (that is Mr. Downey Sr., if one is only familiar with his son’s acting career) breathlessly anarchic, hyper-verbal, and visually acute no-budget genius, via new restorations of three of his early films: “Babo 73” (1964), “Chafed Elbows” (1966), and “No More Excuses” (1968).But the series is also a promising precedent for the fiscally challenged yet indispensable local theater responsible for exhibiting these twisted and brilliant early films and shepherding them back from the brink of decay. According to Anthology’s house archivist and sometime programmer, Andrew Lampert, Anthology forged a relationship with Mr. Downey in 2005 via a weeklong run of the director’s 1970 feature “Pound,” which was shown as part of that year’s Howl Festival. On the strength of that connection, Mr. Lampert began to consider securing prints of Mr. Downey’s early short works.“I had seen ‘Chafed Elbows,’ which was pretty mind-blowing,” Mr. Lampert said.Indeed, Mr. Downey’s 57-minute 1966 film, a relentlessly absurdist portrait of Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan) and his quest to cultivate seasonal nervous breakdowns, marry his mother, and become a top-40 music sensation, arguably gives Timothy Carey’s similarly unhinged, cult-film oddity from 1962, “The World’s Greatest Sinner,” a run for its no-budget money. But even though “Chafed Elbows” was made for peanuts, it would cost a small fortune to restore the film. Auspiciously, that was when the Film Foundation stepped in.“They contacted us and said, ‘We want to put you on our regular list of fundees,'” Mr. Lampert said. While the Film Foundation has generously supported preservation and restoration work undertaken by more prominent archival intuitions such as the George Eastman House, UCLA, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Library of Congress, this overture was a first for Anthology Film Archives, Mr. Mekas’s venerable East Village storehouse of the cinematic avant-garde. “When they approached us,” Mr. Lampert said, “it was like being asked to sit at the adult table.”Though Mr. Scorsese and the Film Foundation’s board agreed that preserving Mr. Downey’s early films was a good cultural investment, according to Anthology’s archivist, Mr. Downey was originally incredulous.“When I told Downey that Scorsese was considering three films of his for preservation, he was flabbergasted. ‘Has he seen them?'” Mr. Lampert recalled the now-71-year-old director saying. “‘If he’s seen them, why would he want to put money toward them?’ He just couldn’t believe that somebody was actually willing to pay for this, much less Scorsese.”The task for Mr. Lampert then became finding the best possible sources from which to reassemble Mr. Downey’s films in the most flattering condition. “Chafed Elbows” was shot on 35 mm film, with much of it made up of still photos the director took, developed at his local Walgreens, and then rephotographed on movie film using an animation stand. Its resurrection became a matter of copying scenes, sequences, and individual frames from four different 35 mm and 16 mm prints located at the Film-Makers Cooperative and in Anthology’s own collection.The other two films were made in 16 mm. The nearly defunct practice of editing 16 mm requires generating a copy of the camera negative for cutting, alternating rolls of cut negatives for printing and multiple analog audio tracks for mixing, and transferring to the finished print. None of these potential building blocks for restoration were available, however.“Everything that was an original element? Long gone,” Mr. Lampert said. “Downey hadn’t seen them since the ’60s.”But despite Mr. Downey’s doubts, Mr. Scorsese and the Film Foundation “came through big-time,” Mr. Lampert said, restoring Mr. Downey’s “Chafed Elbows,” “Babo 73,” and “No More Excuses,” as well as a separate restoration of Ken Jacobs’s 1963 short “Blonde Cobra,” which will make its premiere at Anthology in December. “They spent a lot of dough on these four films,” Mr. Lampert said.“Babo 73” was pieced together from two extant copies, but “No More Excuses” only existed in a single version in the director’s possession. Nevertheless, all three of the Downey restorations are nothing short of stunning to look at and listen to, and are a tribute to the efforts of Anthology, Ceneric film labs, and the audio facility Trackwise, which partnered on these immaculate new prints.More than anything, however, the films represent just what a brilliant and fearless aesthetic provocateur Mr. Downey was during his formative filmmaking days.“Nothing’s sacred in these films,” Mr. Lampert said. He singled out for special praise “No More Excuses,” a fractured tour de force that unites footage of a Civil War soldier (played by the director gate-crashing Yankee Stadium) with a re-enactment of the assassination of President Garfield, documentary footage of Manhattan’s mid-’60s singles scene, and a priest and a chimpanzee romancing the same generously proportioned naked model.“‘No More Excuses’ is unlike any film I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Lampert said, and that is no understatement. Pressed for a comparison, Mr. Lampert could only cite D.W. Griffith’s elephantine three-hour plea for forgiveness “Intolerance,” from 1916. Though light-years apart in tone, budget, and running time, “‘Intolerance’ tries to mix four stories and four eras,” Mr. Lampert said, “and you have the same thing going on in ‘No More Excuses.'”But where Griffith’s thesis was obscured by visual bombast, Mr. Downey’s film sprouts its own inscrutable illogic and quickly outpaces both expectation and coherence. “Both films so bravely hit the brick wall of comprehension,” Mr. Lampert said.Robert Downey: A Prince begins Friday and runs through September 18 at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181). Mr. Downey will be in attendance on the closing night to answer questions after the 7:30 p.m. screening of ‘Chafed Elbows’ and to introduce the 9 .p.m. screening of ‘Moment to Moment.’

Robert Downey’s No-Budget Genius

Robert Downey’s No-Budget Genius

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