It’s official: Robert Downey Jr. is still the king of Comic-Con.
The actor bounded into the San Diego Convention Center's Hall H on Friday morning, his second trip to massive weekend fest. This time, he was here to promote “Sherlock Holmes” and was welcomed with an even more breathless and deafening response than “Twilight’s” own Robert Pattinson.
“I love you guys so much,” he told the raucous crowd.
Clearly enjoying the attention, Downey was in a playful mood and joked about starring as the latest interpretation of the classic British sleuth. “I kept asking myself, ‘Why haven’t they figured out how to reinvigorate Sherlock Holmes yet?’ Casting.”
After debuting a super-sized trailer for the Guy Ritchie-directed “Holmes,“ starring Downey, Jude Law and Rachel McAdams, Downey explained the timing of the super detective’s comeback more seriously.
Holmes, he said, has been misrepresented in previous film projects. “The more we all looked into the original lexicon of the four novels and dozens and dozens of short stories, the more you realize that,” Downey said.
“We pretty much went back to the source. That’s how we reinvigorated it, by changing it less than it has been.”
The work that went into playing Holmes reminded him of the prep to play Charlie Chaplin, a part that earned him an Oscar nomination. "This movie was all about the prep -- martial arts and dialect. I get grumpy when I actually have to work, but I do love the challenge."
"Robert was so committed -- and ripped in this movie," McAdams added.
Downey will be back in Hall H on Saturday to promote “Iron Man 2.”
Writer Scott Timberg always has an interesting take on the overlap between literature and film. Today, on the cover of the Los Angeles Times Sunday Calendar, he looks at Hollywood's bid to bring back the most famous creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who was born 150 years ago this month). Here's an excerpt of the excellent article, which I'm sure you'll want to read in its entirety. -- G.B.
He's probably the most adapted literary character in history -- and perhaps the only nonexistent person with an honorary degree from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Upward of 70 actors have portrayed him in more than 200 films, since the early days of silent movies.
But there's not been a major cinematic adaptation of Sherlock Holmes in decades. The classic films of the '30s and '40s, starring Basil Rathbone as Arthur Conan Doyle's immortal detective, shut down the production of Holmes films for years, and the Jeremy Brett-starring series on Britain's Granada Television, broadcast in the '80s and early '90s, has likely intimidated would-be filmmakers as well.
But heading our way are two very different films starring the Victorian detective
The first, "Sherlock Holmes," stars Robert Downey Jr. as the sleuth with Jude Law as sidekick John Watson. Though these are two respected actors, the Warner Bros. film will not be a thesp-fest but an action movie based on a graphic novel by Hollywood executive Lionel Wigram, who spent years trying to get the project taken seriously.
The film has finished shooting -- with most of the exteriors in London, Manchester and Liverpool -- and is scheduled to open Christmas Day. "I didn't want deerstalkers and pipes," Guy Ritchie, the film's director, said of the sleuth's famous hat and favorite hobby. "They're typical iconic images of Holmes, but we're starting from scratch."
The second, still untitled and in pre-production, will go for a comic tone, with "Borat" star Sacha Baron Cohen as detective and Will Ferrell as associate. (Etan Cohen, who co-wrote "Tropic Thunder," will write the screenplay, with lad-film demigod Judd Apatow as executive producer.)
Columbia executives -- who chose not to contribute to this story -- have said that their movie will be as different from the Downey film as "Austin Powers" was from James Bond. "Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh," the studio's co-president, Matt Tolmach, told Variety last year.
The films will be scrutinized, of course, by both general audiences and the millions of rabid Holmes fans the world over. "We've had to rely on our parents' or grandparents' Holmes," said Barbara Roden, a member of the Baker Street Irregulars fan group who runs Calabash, a press in British Columbia for Sherlockian research. "I'm hoping we get a 21st century Holmes, one for our generation."
Holmes himself was a morphine and cocaine addict, a formidable martial artist and a self-proclaimed bohemian who'd gladly stay up all night to puzzle out a case.
As described in Conan Doyle's 56 stories and four short novels -- written mostly between the 1880s and 1910s -- the sleuth also played by his own rules. "I generally have chemicals about, and occasionally do experiments," Holmes says to Watson while auditioning him as a potential roommate. "Would that annoy you?"
But he's been domesticated by the years and come to be seen as what Roden calls "a Victorian fuddy-duddy." As Michael Chabon points out in his essay "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes," Conan Doyle's stories have been met with condescension for more than 100 years, the suspicion that their popularity came not from quality but from "the bourgeois thirst for a tidy adventure, or nostalgia for a vanished age (Victorian, or adolescent)."
The bias against Holmes crystallized in Raymond Chandler's manifesto "The Simple Art of Murder." Though not quite naming the detective, Chandler champions the hard-boiled tradition over writers who rely on "hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish."
Some of his condescension came from Conan Doyle himself: He once described having written so many Holmes stories that he felt like he'd eaten too much foie gras. Still, for more than a century, these stories have drawn admirers...
Guy Ritchie came to Comic-Con International to promote his crackling London crime film "RocknRolla" (which, he told me, reflects the shifting cultural definitions in the U.K. these days and "the changing meaning in just the past five years of what it means to be British), but I really wanted to hear about his Sherlock Holmes project, which will star Robert Downey Jr. as Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic sleuth.
"I'm very excited about it, Robert is brilliant," Ritchie said. "I came to the character through the books when I was young and what the film will reflect is the intelligence on the page and also the action. There's quite a lot of intense action sequences in the stories; sometimes that hasn't been reflected in the movies. it's been a relatively long time since there's been a film version that people embraced. I want to make a very contemporary film as far as the tone and texture. It's exciting for me to do a period piece, that's a departure."
Ritchie said his Holmes will be a man of adventure in a gritty world, not a prim thinker in staid parlor play. "There's a darkness to the movie we want to make," said Ritchie, who will be adapting Lionel Wigram's upcoming comic book tale about Holmes as opposed to the classic canon.
And what about "The Gamekeeper," Ritchie's foray into comic books? "I still plan to make that a film but, well, I'm quite busy right now."
I interviewed the filmmaker last year about "The Gamekeeper." You can find that after the jump.
-- Geoff Boucher
Photo: Basil Rathbone left, as Sherlock Holmes, and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in 1939's "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." (Los Angeles Times archival photo)
