It’s a sign of how completely tastes have changed within Hollywood filmmaking that it is now inconceivable that Ben Stiller’s 2008 spoof action-comedy Tropic Thunder could be made today. The two areas that are most likely to excite controversy are the portrayal of mental disability – Stiller’s character, a fading action star, has played a figure called Simple Jack, to widespread horror – and racial politics. Robert Downey Jr plays Kirk Lazarus, an intense Australian method actor, who has undergone ‘pigmentation alteration’ surgery in order to prepare for his role as an African-American soldier. 

Although the bulk of the contemporary criticism that Tropic Thunder received came from disability rights groups, Downey Jr’s Oscar-nominated performance – essentially getting laughs from the incongruity of his being in blackface – would be unthinkable today, in the era of Black Lives Matter and its ilk. 

Downey Jr is, today, one of Hollywood’s most successful and highest-paid actors, thanks to his roles in Marvel films as Iron Man, but in 2008, he was still re-establishing his career after many years of well-documented drug problems and criminal convictions, and so he was a more candid interviewee than he is today. When discussing his influences for the character of Lazarus, he not only mentioned such Method actors as Russell Crowe and Daniel Day-Lewis, but also talked about his father, cult underground director Robert Downey Sr, and his cult satire Putney Swope. 

As Downey Jr said in 2008, “I started remembering my dad did this movie called Putney Swope. I was in New York [at that time] and the character was supposed to be a Vietnam soldier, so I was remembering some of the folks who were hanging out in the West Village back then. Without it being too specific, I just started this gravelly, cool, very world-weary voice, and I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have a ball with this’.” He duly did so, and said, “I laid the voice on [Stiller] and he laughed, and I thought, you know, he’s just laughing to make me feel OK, and then he’s going to change it all when we get there.” 

In the end, nothing was changed, and Downey Jr’s performance remained a pitch-perfect homage to his father’s most successful film, a deeply challenging, uproariously funny black comedy that was considered envelope-pushing upon its release in 1969, and has only grown in stature since then. 

A new Netflix documentary, Sr., examines Downey Sr’s often chequered life and career, with his son breaking away from his latter-day years as a squeaky-clean company man to talk candidly about his own drug addictions and his bohemian father’s influence on him, which the actor sees as both inspirational and the cause of many of his own issues. However, one thing that father and son both agree on is that Putney Swope remains an off-the-wall counter-cultural classic – one that, despite its inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2016 for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”, remains under-appreciated, perhaps because of the sheer outrageousness of its central premise. 

The poster for Putney Swope describes it as “The Truth and Soul Movie”, and it revolves around a Mad Men-esque advertising firm, with precisely one black employee, the eponymous Swope. When the chairman of the company dies, the board members, unable to appoint themselves to the highest position, vote for Swope to become chairman and expect to be able to use him as their puppet. He is having none of it, and sets about firing most of the employees, refusing to take any business from alcohol, tobacco or imitation firearm advertisers, and renames the firm “Truth and Soul, Inc”. 

While his actions shock Middle America – including the President, played as a cannabis-smoking dwarf with a pronounced German accent, who pronounces that the company is now “a threat to the national security” – Swope attracts near-adulatory attention from his disciples, who consider him one of the few truthful people in a world of lies. 

It prefigures everything from Network to the work of Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, although its cheerfully cheap aesthetic gives it the impression of being put together on a budget that would barely have paid for Pryor’s daily drug consumption. Its lead actor Allen Garfield was unable to remember his lines, so Downey Sr overdubbed the character in a deep, gravelly voice, giving it a surreal, often hysterical quality.  

Discussing the film with his disciple Paul Thomas Anderson in 2012 – who cast the director in several small roles in his own films, and of whom Downey Jr caustically said “it’s no mystery that Paul Thomas Anderson is probably the son my dad wishes he had had” – Downey Sr was uproariously candid about his creative choices. Recounting an appearance on the Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, when Carson asked him “Why did you cast a midget to play the President of the United States”, Downey replied “Because he gave the best reading of all the actors.” 

Another performer, the extraordinarily tall Stan Gottlieb – ‘actor’ is perhaps putting it too strongly – was hired when Downey saw him in a phone booth outside a cinema in New York. In the director’s telling, he said, simply, “Would you be interested in being in a film?” Gottlieb simply replied, “Yeah”. 

There was method in Downey’s process. As he said: “When you hire someone who’s not an actor, who’s just not afraid, it’s a pleasure.” And his innovations were not limited to casting people who he met on the street, or in bars. Although Putney Swope is filmed largely in black and white, it contains spoof commercials shot in colour, which have an edgy, biting wit that’s like something out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. 

At one point, a seductive woman (who Anderson jokingly called “my girlfriend” in conversation with Downey) is shown dancing around a New York street amidst piles of rubbish, before saying, apropos of nothing, “You can’t eat an air conditioner”, then resuming her dancing. His bemused crew were at least pleased by this, saying, “Finally, you gave us something that you could look at.” Typically, the woman was a waitress at a nearby restaurant, who was recruited because she could dance, and looked beautiful: the casting process for Putney Swope was an uncomplicated, instinctive one. 

Reflecting on its (relative) success, Downey Sr, who always described himself as “a prince” – “I was too young to be a king and too committed to be a queen” – said of Putney Swope: “[Initially], nobody wanted that film. People looked at it and said, ‘Uh-oh’. Then the producer had one more screening for some distributors, and then this guy was banging on the door of the cinema, and I said, ‘F--- him, he’s late, whoever he is’. Then I went to the door, and said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said ‘I’m Don Rugoff.’” Rugoff was an independent distributor and the owner of a chain of cinemas, and was instrumental in building the careers of many independent filmmakers, including Costa-Gavras and Lina Wertmüller; after he saw Putney Swope he said to Downey: “I don’t understand it, but I like it.” 

Rugoff duly agreed to show it in his cinemas, and commissioned a provocative poster, featuring a woman standing atop a clenched fist, making it look as if she represented an outstretched middle finger. The advertisement was duly banned by the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, and gave a small independent film some much-needed publicity. As Downey drolly put it, “[The poster] went up all over the city, and it had some action.” 

Although the film only had a limited release, it set box office records in many of the cinemas that it was shown in, thanks to a mixture of the controversy and the sense that Downey’s film had tapped into some sort of zeitgeist. It is too wild a satire to have any kind of heartfelt message, but a scene where Swope lectures his mostly black followers comes closest to Downey’s own credo. “I have a feeling that there’s a lot of untapped talent around here,” he declares. “So beginning right now, I want each and every one of you to conceive, write, execute and produce your own campaign…if you don’t feel that you’re the creative type, then pitch in and help someone else with what they’re doing.” 

It was this guerrilla ethos that made Putney Swope, and by extension Downey’s career, so wild and wacky, but also beloved by everyone from Anderson (who included the character “Buck Swope” in his film Boogie Nights) to the comedian Louis C.K., who has described it as both one of his favourite pictures and an influence on his own writing. 

As C.K. said of it in 2014: “I went home, starting watching [the film] and in the first couple of shots, I was like ‘Oh my God’, and the whole movie, I just kept going ‘Oh my God! Somebody made this movie. Somebody really made it.’ They didn’t just sit and go ‘This would be crazy’, they actually shot it…it was so inspiring to me because it made me think even if your ideas are crazy, as long as you believe in them…what defines the movie to me is that everything that happens, it’s nuts, but it makes perfect sense to Robert.” 

C.K. concluded: “This movie was a direct reason why I believed it was worth doing stuff that maybe didn’t seem so easy to sell or to talk someone else into.” A few years after this admission, his career suffered from allegations of sexual impropriety, but just as Downey’s son recovered his footing to become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors, so C.K. has resumed his career, winning a Grammy award earlier this year and releasing a new stand-up film, Sorry, last year. 

It might be fanciful to link the out-there satire of Putney Swope with the career decisions of those associated with it. But if there is a quality that links the film to Downey Sr and Jr, Louis C.K. and many more besides, it is a quixotic and untameable insanity that may have found its last dying echo in Tropic Thunder, and is unlikely to be seen again in contemporary cinema. And that, ultimately, has to be a great loss.