This week's episode takes a look back at the career of trailblazing independent filmmaker Robert Downey, father of Robert Downey, Jr., and his single foray into the world of Hollywood filmmaking, Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy.

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TRANSCRIPT

From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

On this episode, we follow up on a movie based on a series of articles from a humor magazine that was trying to build their brand name by slapping their name on movies with a movie that was sponsored by a humor magazine trying to build their brand name by slapping their name on movies not unlike the other humor magazine had been doing but ended up removing their name from the movie, and boy is brain already fried and we’re not even a minute into the episode.

We’re talking about Robert Downey’s 1980 comedy Up the Academy.

But, as always, before we get to Up the Academy, let’s hit the backstory.

If you know the name Robert Downey, it’s likely because you know his son. Robert Downey, Jr. You know, Iron Man. Yes, Robert Downey, Jr. is a repo baby. Maybe you’ve seen the documentary he made about his dad, Sr., that was released by Netflix last year. But it’s more than likely you’ve never heard of Robert Downey, Sr., who, ironically, was a junior himself like his son.

Robert Downey was born Robert John Elias, Jr. in New York City in 1936, the son of a model and a manager of hotels and restaurants. His parents would divorce when he was young, and his mom would remarry while Robert was still in school.

Robert Elias, Jr. would take the last name of his stepfather when he enlisted in the Army, in part because was wanted to get away from home but he was technically too young to actually join the Army. He would invent a whole new persona for himself, and he would, by his own estimate, spend the vast majority of his military career in the stockade, where he wrote his first novel, which still has never been published.

After leaving the Army, Downey would spend some time playing semi-pro baseball, not quite good enough to go pro, spending his time away from the game writing plays he hoped to take, if not to Broadway, at least off-Broadway. But he would not make his mark in the arts until 1961, when Downey started to write and direct low-budget counterculture short films, starting with Ball’s Bluff, about a Civil War soldier who wakes up in New York City’s Central Park a century later.

In 1969, he would write and direct a satirical film about the only black executive at a Madison Avenue advertising firm who is, through a strange circumstance, becomes the head of the firm when its chairman unexpectedly passes away. Featuring a cameo by Mel Brooks Putney Swope was the perfect anti-establishment film for the end of that decade, and the $120k film would gross more than $2.75m during its successful year and a half run in theatres.

1970’s Pound, based on one of Downey’s early plays, would be his first movie to be distributed by a major distributor, although it was independently produced outside the Hollywood system. Several dogs, played by humans, are at a pound, waiting to be euthanized. Oh, did I forget to mention it was a comedy? The film would be somewhat of a success at the time, but today, it’s best known as being the acting debut of the director’s five year old son, Robert Downey, Jr., although the young boy would be credited as Bob Downey.

1972’s Greaser Palace was part of an early 1970s trend of trippy “acid Westerns,” like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie. Character actor Allan Arbus plays Jesse, a man with amnesia who heals the sick, resurrects the dead and tap dances on water on the American frontier. It would be the first movie Downey would make with a million dollar budget. The critical consensus of the film at the time was not positive, although Jay Cocks, a critic for Time Magazine who would go on to be a regular screenwriter for Martin Scorsese in the 1980s, would proclaim the film to be “the most adventurous movie of the year.” The film was not a hit, and it would be decades before it would be discovered and appreciated by the next generation of cineastes.

After another disappointing film, 1975’s Moment to Moment, which would later be retitled Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight in order to not be confused with the 1978 movie of the same name starring John Travolta and Lily Tomlin that really, truly stunk, Downey would take some time off from filmmaking to deal with his divorce from his first wife and to spend more time with his son Robert and daughter Allyson.

By 1978, Robert Downey was ready to get back to work. He would get a job quickly helping Chuck Barris write a movie version of Barris’ cult television show, The Gong Show, but that wasn’t going to pay the bills with two teenagers at home. What would, though, is the one thing he hadn’t done yet in movies…

Direct a Hollywood film.

Enter Mad Magazine.

In 1978, Mad Magazine was one of the biggest humor magazines in America. I had personally discovered Mad in late 1977, when my dad, stepmom and I were on a cross country trip, staying with friends outside Detroit, the day before my tenth birthday, when I saw an issue of Mad at a local grocery store, with something Star Wars-y on its cover. I begged my dad to give me the sixty cents to buy it, and I don’t think I missed another issue for the next decade.

Mad’s biggest competition in the humor magazine game was National Lampoon, which appealed to a more adult funny bone than Mad. In 1978, National Lampoon saw a huge boost in sales when the John Landis-directed comedy Animal House, which had the name of the magazine in the title, became an unexpected smash hit at the box office. Warner Brothers, the media conglomerate who happened to own Mad Magazine, was eager to do something similar, and worked with Mad’s publisher, Bill Gaines, to find the right script that could be molded into a Mad Magazine movie, even if, like Animal House, it wouldn’t have any real connection to the magazine itself.

They would find that script in The Brave Young Men of Weinberg, a comedy script by Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, a pair of television comedy writers on shows like The Carol Burnett Show, The Sandy Duncan Show, The Bob Newhart Show and The Tony Randall Show, who had never sold a movie script before. The story would follow the misadventures of four teenage boys who, for different reasons, depend on each other for their very survival when they end up at the same military academy.

Now, of all the research I’ve done for this episode, the one very important aspect of the production I was never able to find out was exactly how Robert Downey became involved in the film. Again, he had never made a Hollywood movie before. He had only made one movie with a budget of a million dollars. His movies were satirical and critical of society in general. This was not a match made in heaven. But somehow, someone at Warner Brothers thought he’d be the right director for the film, and somehow, Downey didn’t disagree.

Unlike Animal House, Downey and Warners didn’t try to land a known commodity like John Belushi to play one of the four leads. In fact, all four of the leads, Wendell Brown, Tommy Citera, Joseph Hutchinson, and Ralph Macchio, would all be making their feature debuts. 

But there would be some familiar faces in the film.

Ron Liebman, who was a familiar face from such films has Slaughterhouse-Five, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood and Norma Rae, would play the head of the Academy. Tom Poston, who played Mindy’s downstairs neighbor on Mork and Mindy, plays what would now be considered to be a rather offensive gay caricature as the guy who handles the uniforms of the cadets, Antonio Fargas, best known as Huggy Bear on Starsky and Hutch but who had previously worked with Downey on Putney Swope and Pound, as the Coach, and Barbara Bach, who had starred as Anya Amasova in the 1977 Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

The $5m film would begin production in Salina, Kansas, on September 17th, 1979, still using the title The Brave Young Men of Weinberg. The primary shooting location would be the St. John’s Military School, which was still functioning while the film was in production, and would use most of the 144 students as extras during the shoot. The film would shoot for nine weeks without much incident, and the cast and crew would be home in time to enjoy Thanksgiving with their friends and family.

Unlike Animal House, the makers of The Brave Young Men of Weinberg did attempt to tie the movie into the magazine that would be presenting the film. At the very end of the movie, the magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, shows up on the side of the road, to wave goodbye to people and deliver his signature line, “What, Me Worry?” in a thought bubble that leads into the end credits. The person wearing the not quite realistic looking Neuman head gear, fourteen year old Scott Shapiro, was the son of the executive vice president of worldwide production at Warner Brothers.

After the first of the year, as Downey worked on his edit of the film, the studio decided to change the title from The Brave Young Men of Weinberg to Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy. Bill Gaines, the publisher of Mad Magazine, suggested a slightly different title, Mad Magazine Completely Disassociates Itself from Up the Academy, but the studio decided that was too long for theater marquees. But we’ll come back to that in a moment.

Warner Brothers set a June 6, 1980 release for the film, and Downey would finish his cut of the film by the end of March. A screening on the Warners lot in early April did not go well. Ron Liebman hated the film so much, he demanded that Warners completely remove his name from everything associated with the film. His name would not appear on the poster, the newspaper ads, the television commercials, the lobby cards, the press kit, or even in the movie itself. Bill Gaines would hate it to, such much in fact that he really did try to disassociate the magazine from the film. In a 1983 interview with The Comics Journal, Gaines would explain without much detail that there were a number of things he had objected to in the script that he was told would not be shot and not end up in the final film that were shot and did end up in the final film. But he wouldn’t be able to get the magazine’s name off the movie before it opened in theatres.

Now, one of the problems with trying to research how well films did in 1980 is that you really have only two sources for grosses, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and they didn’t always report national grosses every week, depending on outside factors. It just hadn’t the national sport it’s been since, say, 1983.

So when Up the Academy opened in theatres on June 6th, we don’t have a full idea of how many theatres it played in nationwide, or how much it grossed. The closest thing we do have for this Variety’s listing of the top movies of the week based on a limited selection of showcase theatres in the top 20 markets. So we know that the film played at 7 showcase screens in New York City that weekend, grossing $175k, and in Los Angeles on 15 showcase screens, grossing $149k. But we also know, thanks to newspaper ads in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times that the film was playing in 11 theatres in the New York Metro area, and in 30 theatres in the Los Angeles Metro area, so those listed grosses are merely a snapshot and not the whole picture.

According to Variety’s limited tracking of major market showcase theatres for the week, Up the Academy was the second highest grossing film of the week, bringing in $729k from 82 theatres. And according to their chart’s side notes, this usually accounts for about 25% of a movie’s national gross, if a film is playing in wide release around the entire country.

In its second week, Up the Academy would place ninth on that showcase theatre listing, with $377k from 87 theatres. 

But by the time Variety did bring back proper national grosses in the film’s third week of release, there would be no mention of Up the Academy in those listings, as Warners by this time had bigger fish to handle, namely Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Shining, and Bronco Billy, their Clint Eastwood movie for the year. In that showcase theatre listing, though, Up the Academy had fallen to 16th place, with $103k from 34 theatres.

In fact, there is no publicly available record of how many theatres Up the Academy played in during its theatrical run, and it wouldn’t be until the 1981 Warner Brothers 10-K annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Up the Academy had earned $10m from American movie theatres. If studios get about 55% of the box office grosses in rental fees, that would put the $5m film in a very good position to be profitable, depending on how much was spent on P&A, prints and advertising. The film wasn’t an Animal House-level hit, but it wasn’t exactly the bomb many have painted it to be. 

After Up the Academy, two of the actors, Wendell Brown and Joseph Hutchinson, would never act in another movie, although, billed as Hutch Parker, the latter would produce six X-Men related movies between 2013 and 2019, including Logan. Tommy Citera would make two more movies until he left acting in 1988. And Ralph Macchio would, of course, go on to play Daniel LaRusso, the Karate Kid, in a career-defining role that he’s still playing nearly forty years later.

Robert Downey would make another wacky comedy, called Moonbeam, in 1982. Co-written with Richard Belzer, Moonbeam would feature a fairly interesting cast including Zack Norman, Tammy Grimes, Michael J. Pollard, Liz Torres and Mr. Belzer, and tells the story of a New York cable television station that becomes world famous when they accidentally bounce their signal off the moon. But the film would not get released until October 1986, in one theatre in New York City for one week. It couldn’t even benefit from being able to promote Robert Downey, Jr., who in the ensuing years had started to build an acting career by being featured in John Sayles’ Baby It’s You, Fritz Kiersch’s Tuff Turf, John Hughes’ Weird Science, and the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School, as well as being a member of the cast of Saturday Night Live for a year.

There’s be sporadic work in television, working on shows like Matlock and The Twilight Zone, but what few movies he could get made would be pale shadows of her earlier, edgier work. Even with his son regularly taking supporting roles in his dad’s movies to help the old man out, movies like Rented Lips and Too Much Sun would be critically panned and ignored by audiences. His final movie as a writer and director, Hugo Pool, would gross just $13k when it was released in December 1997, despite having a cast that included Patrick Dempsey, Richard Lewis, Malcolm McDowell, Alyssa Milano, Cathy Moriarty and Sean Penn, along with Junior.

Downey would also continue to act in other director’s movies, including two written and directed by one of his biggest fans, Paul Thomas Anderson. Downey would play Burt, the studio manager, in Boogie Nights, and the WDKK Show director in Magnolia. Anderson adored Downey so much, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker would sit down with Downey for a four-part conversation filmed for the Criterion Company in 2013.

Robert Downey would pass away in July 2021, a curious footnote in the history of cinema, mostly because of the superstar he sired. Most of his movies are hard to find on video, and nearly impossible to find on streaming services, outside of a wonderful two disc DVD set issued by Criterion’s Eclipse specialty label and several titles streaming on The Criterion Channel. Outside of Up the Academy, which is available to rent or purchase from Amazon, Apple TV and several other streaming services, you can find Putney Swope, Greaser’s Palace and Too Much Sun on several of the more popular streaming services, but the majority of them are completely missing in action. You can also learn more about Robert Downey in Sr., a documentary streaming on Netflix produced by Robert Downey, Jr. where the son recounts the life and career of his recently passed father, alongside Paul Thomas Anderson, Alan Arkin, and mega-producer Norman Lear.

Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again soon, when Episode 107, on John Landis’s underrated 1985 comedy Into the Night, is released.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.