Greaser's Palace, 1972

 

Allan Arbus (Diane Arbus's husband) blaspheming Christ.

"Didn't your father used to be a successful director? Whatever happened to him? Boy, he sure died, you know, he sure went to hell."
--Chevy Chase humiliating Robert Downey, Jr, on the set of Saturday Night Live, 1985.

Robert Downey, Sr, is still alive, by the way. I didn't know he was ever a "successful director". He's now 80. He's also Jewish, but in 1972, he made what was supposed to be a surreal Christian satire, Greaser's Palace, a western set in the 1800s. There's this place called Greaser's Palace owned by hilariously-named character, Seaweedhead Greaser.

Allan Arbus (who played Dr. Sidney Freedman, the psychiatrist on TV's M*A*S*H*) plays Jesus (called Jessy) who wears a zoot suit and says he's going to Jerusalem to be a singer-dancer-actor.

It was the sort of movie Luis Buñuel would have made if Luis Buñuel had been an idiot.

Greaser keeps murdering his homosexual son named Lamy "Homo" Greaser, but Jessy keeps bringing him back to life. And Greaser is constipated all the time. And he has a daughter named Cholera. The Holy Ghost is a guy with a sheet over his head. Jessy parachutes into the movie.

It was all crap. Not one funny, clever or interesting thing.

With Robert Downey, Jr, as a seven-year-old who gets his throat slashed. A year earlier, when he was six, his father gave him marijuana for the first time.

I happened to come across an article about Deluxe. You know in movies when they say in the credits, "Color by Deluxe"?  Deluxe has thousands of negatives to thousands of movies lying around and is trying to return them to their rightful owners. They're hoping the owners will pay them to make a digital print. They're having some difficulty doing this. In some cases the owners have died, some belonged to companies that are out of business or to businesses that don't want them or to individual filmmakers who don't want to be reminded of the film that financially ruined them. And one movie they have stinking up the place is Greaser's Palace. 

Maybe Robert Downey, Jr, now an elderly Republican millionaire, will put up the money.

I found it on Roku. You can see it for free on Amazon if you have Amazon Prime. I have no memory of getting Amazon Prime or paying for it, but apparently I have it.