If Robert Downey, Jr. has his way, when you think goat glands, you’ll think of him.
Downey, closing in on his tenth anniversary playing Tony Stark/Iron Man, will likely follow up production of the next two Avengers films with a biopic of non-doctor John Brinkley, whose use of goat glands for medicinal purposes was his ticket to infamy in the early part of the 20th Century. The untitled film, based on the “Man Of The People” episode of the Reply All podcast, focuses on Brinkley, and his rise in America with his procedure to transplant goat testicles into humans, initially to cure impotency but then for a wide variety of maladies. Using the social media of the day, radio, Brinkley spread the word of what he was doing and grew so popular that he eventually ended up managing clinics and hospitals in a number of states, and even twice ran for public office in Kansas. And all of this without ever having received a genuine medical licence. And yet despite success that turned him into a multi-millionaire — spoilers! — Brinkley died penniless due to a wide variety of lawsuits (including malpractice, wrongful death and fraud) that he became the subject of.
The film will be produced by Downey and his wife’s Team Downey production company, with Richard Linklater (The School Of Rock, Boyhood) directing. Downey will next be seen as Iron Man in this summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, and is currently involved in back-to-back shooting on Avengers: Infinity War and a fourth untitled Avengers film, which he says “promises to be a year of fun-filled lensing.” While the actor has appeared in recent years in The Judge and Chef, there are persistent rumblings of a fourth Iron Man film, hardly surprising considering that the last entry in that series, 2013’s Iron Man 3, pulled in $1.2 billion at the global box office.
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