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The troublesome offspring of a hotel manager and a Powers model who lived in Greenwich Village, Downey had already been bounced from a handful of schools before he sneaked into the service at the illegal age of 16. After receiving a dishonorable discharge from the Army, he returned to the Village, where he scrounged jobs as a waiter at Howard Johnson's and a poster tacker at the Bleecker St. Cinema.
Downey also married a model named Elsie (who appears with their two children in Greaser's Palace). He appropriated his wife's fees for TV commercials in order to finance his first movie, Babo '73. "I had to dub all the voices myself on that one," Downey recalls. One day he even shot without film because he was too embarrassed to tell the actors that money had run out.
Funds never have rolled in for Downey. His fourth and best-known film, the ad-game satire Putney Swope, had a modestly profitable return at the box office, but Downey remained less than the hottest ticket in Hollywood. His next film, Pound, was shown in approximately four cities, double-billed with some unsavory horror pictures.
Then Downey met Manhattan-based Cyma Rubin, the wife of the former owner of Faberge and the fledgling impresario who produced Broadway's No, No, Nanette. She staked him close to $1,000,000 and let him have his head on Greaser's Palace. When the film opened in Manhattan, it was generally lambasted. A couple of critics even suggested that Downey had been borne away by his budget, that his movies were better when their director was a waiter.
"I'm ready to go back to waiting," vows Downey, 36. "I hope I don't have to, but if I do, I'm ready." Meantime, he says: "I want to change movies. The people in the industry don't want to. They don't even like movies." There are probably enough people who do, however, to keep Downey safe from pushing clam rolls over the counter at Howard Johnson's.