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Robert Downey Sr.
Robert John Downey ( Elias Jr.; June 24, 1936 – July 7, 2021) was an American filmmaker and actor. He was known for writing and directing the underground film ''Putney Swope'', a satire on the New York Madison Avenue advertising world. According to film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon, Downey's films during the 1960s were "strictly take-no-prisoners affairs, with minimal budgets and outrageous satire, effectively pushing forward the countercultural agenda of the day." Early life Downey was born Robert John Elias Jr. in the Manhattan borough of New York City, on June 24, 1936. He was the son of Elizabeth ( McLauchlen), a model, and Robert John Elias, who worked in management of motels and restaurants. His paternal grandparents were Lithuanian Jews, while his mother was of half Hungarian Jewish and half Irish ancestry. He grew up in Rockville Centre, New York. He changed his surname to Downey (after his stepfather, James Downey) when he wanted to enlist in the United States Army wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wheeler Winston Dixon
Wheeler Winston Dixon (born March 12, 1950) is an American filmmaker and scholar. He is an expert on film history, theory and criticism.Bill Goodykoontz, December 23, 2012, USA TodayDefining Tarantino Accessed Aug. 25, 2013, Quote = "...long, involved chunks of onanistic, meaningless dialogue..." His scholarship has particular emphasis on François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, American experimental cinema and horror films. He has written extensively on numerous aspects of film, including his books ''A Short History of Film'' (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster) and ''A History of Horror''. From 1999 through the end of 2014, he was co-editor, along with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the ''Quarterly Review of Film and Video.'' He is regarded as a top reviewer of films.Susan Wloszczyna, April 2, 2010, USA TODAYHow to watch your dragons: 10 fire-breathing beasts on DVD Accessed Aug. 25, 2013, Quote = “Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924)...Highly recommended by Wheeler Winston Dixon, e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Downey Jr
Robert John Downey Jr. (born April 4, 1965) is an American actor and producer. His career has been characterized by critical and popular success in his youth, followed by a period of substance abuse and legal troubles, before a resurgence of commercial success later in his career. In 2008, Downey was named by ''Time'' magazine among the 100 most influential people in the world, and from 2013 to 2015, he was listed by ''Forbes'' as Hollywood's highest-paid actor. At the age of five, he made his acting debut in his father Robert Downey Sr.'s film '' Pound'' in 1970. He subsequently worked with the Brat Pack in the teen films '' Weird Science'' (1985) and '' Less than Zero'' (1987). In 1992, Downey portrayed the title character in the biopic '' Chaplin'', for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won a BAFTA Award. Following a stint at the Corcoran Substance Abuse Treatment Facility on drug charges, he joined the TV series '' Ally McBeal'', for which ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Counterculture
A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Houghton Mifflin. . (1993) p. 419. "Members of a cultural protest that began in the U.S. In the 1960s and Europe before fading in the 1970s... fundamentally a cultural rather than a Protest, political protest." A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach Critical mass (sociodynamics), critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Prominent examples of countercultures in the Western world include the Levellers (1645–1650), Bohemianism (1850–1910), the more fragmentary counterculture of the Beat Generation (1944–1964), followed by the globalized counterculture of the 1960s (1964–1974). Definition and characteris ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Up The Academy
''Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy,'' often shortened to ''Up the Academy,'' is a 1980 American comedy film directed by Robert Downey Sr. and starring Wendell Brown, Tommy Citera, Ron Leibman, Harry Teinowitz, Hutch Parker, Ralph Macchio, Tom Poston, King Coleman, and Barbara Bach. The plot concerns the outrageous antics of a group of misfits at a military school. Plot Four troublemaking young men are assigned to Wienberg Military Academy as punishment for their antics: the heir to an organized crime family, Chooch; a faith healer’s son, Ike; the son of an Arab sheik, Hash; and Oliver, whose governor father is up for re-election. In charge over these new recruits is sadistic Major Vaughn Liceman. Three of the four new recruits establish themselves as troublemakers from the start, but Chooch wants to go straight and focuses on his studies. When Oliver’s girlfriend from back home, Candy, ends up enrolled at a nearby girls military school, the recruits plot to sneak out. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pound (film)
''Pound'' is a 1970 American comedy film written and directed by Robert Downey Sr. It was based on ''The Comeuppance'', an Off-Off Broadway play written by Downey in 1961. It is about several dogs, along with a Siamese cat and a penguin, at a pound, as they await being euthanised; the animals are played by human actors. The film is best known for marking the acting debut of Downey's son and namesake, Robert Jr., as Puppy. Cast *Lawrence Wolf as Mexican Hairless *Stan Gottlieb as Boxer * Charles Dierkop as Airdale *Elsie Downey as Mutt Bitch *Carolyn Groves as Pedigreed *Lucille Rogers as Old Pekingese *Ching Yeh as Siamese Cat *George Morgan as Irish Setter * Don Calfa as Italian Terrier * Antonio Fargas as Greyhound * Chuck Green as Mutt *Buddy Butler as Singing Water Spaniel *Harry Rigby as Fowl * Marshall Efron as Dachshund *Eric Krupnik as Montana Sheepdog *Eric Crawley as Baltimore Pointer *Carolyn Cardwell as Keeper *Joe Madden as Colonel *James Green as Honky Killer * L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chafed Elbows
''Chafed Elbows'' is a 1966 still image film directed by Robert Downey Sr. A manic comic parody underground film made for $12,000, ''Chafed Elbows'' was a commercial success. The film was premiered at The Gate Theater in New York City and ran for over one month alongside '' Scorpio Rising''. Downey photographed most of the movie with a still 35mm camera and had the film processed at Walgreens drugstore. These pictures were animated alongside a few live-action scenes and almost all the dialogue was dubbed to rather hilarious effect. One scene was shot in Anthology Film Archives’s upstairs theater back in the days when the building was still a defunct downtown courthouse. All 13 of the female roles were played by Elsie Downey, Robert Downey's wife, and the lead male role by George Morgan. Plot Hapless Walter Dinsmore undergoes his annual November breakdown at the 1964 New York World's Fair, has a love affair with his mother, recollects his hysterectomy operation, impersonates a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IMDb
IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and fan and critical reviews. IMDb began as a fan-operated movie database on the Usenet group "rec.arts.movies" in 1990, and moved to the Web in 1993. It is now owned and operated by IMDb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon. the database contained some million titles (including television episodes) and million person records. Additionally, the site had 83 million registered users. The site's message boards were disabled in February 2017. Features The title and talent ''pages'' of IMDb are accessible to all users, but only registered and logged-in users can submit new material and suggest edits to existing entries. Most of the site's data has been provided by these volunteers. Registered users with a prov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greaser's Palace
''Greaser's Palace'' is a 1972 American Western film written and directed by Robert Downey Sr. It stars Allan Arbus as Jesse, a man with amnesia who heals the sick, resurrects the dead and tap dances on water on the American frontier. A parable based on the life of Jesus in the New Testament, the film has been described as an acid Western. Plot Jesse (Allan Arbus) paraglides into a town on the American frontier run by a saloon owner named Seaweedhead Greaser ( Albert Henderson), a tyrant who collects the town's taxes while keeping his mother and favorite mariachi band in cages, and suffering from chronic constipation. Jesse has amnesia and remembers nothing except that he is anticipated by talent agent Morris, telling people that he's on his way to Jerusalem, where he will become a singer, dancer and actor. Greaser murders his son, Lamy Homo Greaser (Michael Sullivan), for being a homosexual, and Jesse resurrects the dead man. Subsequently, Jesse heals the sick and tap dan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or ''surreality.'' It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and '' non sequitur''. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism" Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e. artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Central Park
Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West Side, Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the List of New York City parks, fifth-largest park in the city, covering . It is the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated 42 million visitors annually , and is the most filmed location in the world. After proposals for a large park in Manhattan during the 1840s, it was approved in 1853 to cover . In 1857, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a Architectural design competition, design competition for the park with their "Greensward Plan". Construction began the same year; existing structures, including a majority-Black settlement named Seneca Village, were seized through eminent domain and razed. The park's first areas were opened to the public in late 1858. Additional land at the northern end of Central Park was purchased in 1859, and the park was completed in 1876. After a period of de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Films
A short film is any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits". In the United States, short films were generally termed short subjects from the 1920s into the 1970s when confined to two 35 mm reels or less, and featurettes for a film of three or four reels. "Short" was an abbreviation for either term. The increasingly rare industry term "short subject" carries more of an assumption that the film is shown as part of a presentation along with a feature film. Short films are often screened at local, national, or international film festivals and made by independent filmmakers with either a low budget or no budget at all. They are usually funded by film grants, nonprofit organizations, sponsor, or personal funds. Short films are generally used for industry experience a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Underground Films
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing. Notable examples include: John Waters' ''Pink Flamingos'', David Lynch's ''Eraserhead'', Andy Warhol's ''Blue Movie'', Rosa von Praunheim's ''Tally Brown, New York'', Frank Henenlotter's ''Basket Case'', Nikos Nikolaidis' ''Singapore Sling'', Rinse Dreams' ''Café Flesh'', and Jörg Buttgereit's ''Nekromantik''. Definition and history The first printed use of the term "underground film" occurs in a 1957 essay by American film critic Manny Farber, "Underground Films." Farber uses it to refer to the work of directors who "played an anti-art role in Hollywood." He contrasts "such soldier-cowboy-gangster directors as Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, William Wellman," and others with the "less talented De Sicas and Zinnemanns hocontinue to fascinate the critics." However, as in "Underground Press", the term developed as a metaphorical reference to a clandestine and subversive culture ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
