This image was lost some time after publication, but you can still view it here.

The Sunday LAT goes long-form with Robert Downey, Jr, who's willing to talk (and talk and talk) about his checkered (read: black tar heroin-abusing) past to promote his nth comeback in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a profile bearing a 70/30 drugs-to-plugs ratio. Given Downey's gift for rambling on in colorful, confessional metaphors about What It's Like to be a recovering addict/movie star, almost the entire article is a potential pullquote, but how could we resist one that starts with a teenage Downey, James Spader, and the Chateau?

"When I came out here at 17, 18, staying at the Chateau with Jimmy Spader," he says, "there was this understanding that everyone went completely off their rockers for the weekend, then pulled together for the work on Monday. And there was something not very genuine about that, and I had no intention of adhering to that whatsoever. It's so funny to me," he adds, "so passé, the hard-partying movie stars and starlets — it's like demonstrating at a nuclear power plant that's already been shut down and turned to natural gas."

We think this Downey/Spader/Chateau set-up could become "The Aristocrats" of the bathroom stall scene. See, it's easy: "So there I was at the Chateau with a 17-year-old Downey and Jimmy Spader. Right in the middle of cooking up my spoon, a bellboy walks in. Spades and Bobby hold him down, he's screaming for his mommy, promising not to tell anyone what he's seen, but we're all in our third straight day without sleep, so I inject him right in the ass. Poor kid died in Downey's arms, and Spader spent the rest of the week parading around in nothing but the unlucky bastard's bellhop jacket, but the Chateau, they were cool about it. They told his family he drowned in the pool and mailed the body back to Peoria. Hey, that's drugs." We think this is really going to catch on.