Putney Swope, the only black man on the executive board of an advertising firm, is accidentally put in charge after the sudden death of the chairman of the board: prevented by the company by-laws from voting for themselves, in a secret ballot, most board members voted for the one person they thought could not win: Putney Swope. Renaming the business "Truth and Soul, Inc.", Swope replaces all but one of the white employees with blacks and insists they no longer accept business from companies that produce alcohol, tobacco or toy guns. The success of the business draws unwanted attention from the United States government, which considers it "a threat to the national security".
Production
In an interview on the DVD version of the film, Downey states that Arnold Johnson had great difficulty memorizing and saying his lines during the film shoot. Downey says he was not concerned because he had developed a plan to dub in his own voice to replace Johnson's. Though the movie is in black-and-white, Truth and Soul's commercials are shown in color.
Release
The film opened on July 10, 1969 at Cinema II in New York City and grossed $32,281 in its first week. The film opened in Los Angeles on January 21, 1970 and the film's poster of a girl representing the middle finger of a hand, caused controversy and was not printed by the Los Angeles Times and was not reprinted by the Los Angeles Herald Examiner after initial complaints. The advertisement also caused controversy in Chicago with the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Today refusing to publish it, and it being pulled by the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Daily News, who all later published the advertisement without the girl as the middle finger. Roger Ebert was embarrassed by the Sun-Times censorship and the film set a house record of $16,000 at the 3 Penny Cinema in Chicago when it opened in February 1970 and, in LA, it was felt that the controversy also gave a boost to the film.
Home media
The film was released on DVD on May 22, 2001 by Rhino Home Video.
Legacy
The character Buck Swope, from Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, was named as an homage to this film. Robert Downey Sr. also made a small cameo in Boogie Nights as the owner of a recording studio. The character Wing Soney, a Chinese businessman, was the inspiration for Cosmo, the Chinese character throwing firecrackers during the drug deal scene. Paul Thomas Anderson, Louis C.K., and Jim Jarmusch have cited the film as an inspiration for their approach to filmmaking. The song "Shadrach" by the Beastie Boys, from their 1989 album Paul's Boutique, mentions the film in the lyric "Music for all and not just one people, and now we're gonna bust with the Putney Swope sequel". Dialogue from the film is sampled on The Avalanches’ 2016 album Wildflower. Putney Swope was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2019.
