Putney Swope

At an advertising agency board meeting the chairman collapses on the table and dies. The board moves straight to electing a new chairman and votes in secret. Since nobody can vote for himself, each votes for the man he assumes nobody else will: Putney Swope, the board's only Black member and its music director. When the count is read, Swope is chairman. He remakes the agency, renames it Truth and Soul, shows almost all the white staff the door, and announces it will take no accounts for alcohol, war toys or cigarettes. The agency grows. Then the principles become negotiable one by one. Robert Downey Sr. writes and directs. Arnold Johnson plays Putney. There is a separate story in the sound: because Johnson had trouble holding the lines, Downey dubbed all of the character's speech himself, and the voice heard in the film is the director's. It was shot in black and white; the commercials the agency produces are in colour and shown separately inside the narrative. The matter it works at is how the order absorbs those who criticise it, and the film puts no side in the right. It was made independently and played for a long time in midnight screening culture. Its limit is form; the plot is loose and some sections stand like sketches. Who it is for: viewers who like American independent cinema of the sixties and hard satire. Who it is not for: the structure is scattered, the humour crude, and by present measure some sections uncomfortable.