LI man makes Robert Downey Jr.'s muscle cars eco-friendly

Northport- and East Northport-raised Chris Mazzilli, whose ventures include Manhattan’s Gotham Comedy Club and Plainview’s Dream Car Restorations, has teamed with Robert Downey Jr. to display and give away in a sweepstakes six classic vehicles, modified to be eco-friendly, in a benefit for the actor’s environmental and technology organization, the FootPrint Coalition.

Set to appear at the New York International Auto Show, March 29 to April 7 at the Jacob Javits Center, are Downey’s 1969 Mercedes-Benz 280 SE, converted to biodiesel; 1965 Chevrolet Corvette Convertible, 1972 Volkswagen Bus and 1972 Chevrolet K-10 pickup truck, each converted to electric; and 1966 Buick Riviera and 1985 Chevrolet El Camino, each outfitted with a modern internal combustion engine that, according to Mazzilli, “gets twice the mileage” of the one it replaced.

The initiative grew out of Mazzilli having first known the actor decades ago through a friendship with Downey’s father, the Rockville Centre-raised filmmaker and actor Robert Downey Sr., who died in 2021.

“I’d gotten hired to produce a film for [Downey Sr.] years ago that never got made, and we just hit it off,” Mazzilli, 59, recalls, speaking by phone from his Manhattan home. “He was a great and funny guy. And at the time I owned a restaurant here in the city,” the since-shuttered Italian eatery Arezzo, at 22nd Street and Sixth Avenue. “So we used to go to lunch probably once a month … and he used to come to the comedy club a lot, and over the years I got to meet Junior.”

He and the “Oppenheimer” Oscar winner never talked cars back then. But many years later, Mazzilli and Dave Weber's Dream Cars Restorations customized a 1973 Ford Bronco SUV for producer Jay Peterson. Mazzilli and Peterson had done the Yahoo! Autos web series “Riding Shotgun with Michelle Rodriguez." Peterson "was driving that out in the Hamptons, and a friend of his, [FootPrint Coalition co-founder and CEO] Jon Schulhof, saw it and said, ‘I love this thing! Who built this?’ ”

Downey, it turned out, was looking to make some of his cars eco-friendly, and so Schulhof and Peterson got Mazzilli and Downey together by phone. The actor, he says, “was like, ‘Mazzilli, I can't believe it — this is crazy! I didn't even know that you did this.’ So that's how it all came together.”

Downey had an idea to modify some of his cars and to sell them as a FootPrint fundraiser. Mazzilli suggested instead something he had done when restoring artist Peter Max’s collection of 36 Corvettes: a sweepstakes, which in that case had benefited a veterans organization. He additionally suggested that “to bring attention to it, we should pitch it as a TV series,” a la Mazzilli’s 2019 History Channel miniseries about that restoration project, “The Lost Corvettes.”

Downey agreed, and the result was the 2023 Max series “Downey’s Dream Cars,” chronicling the renovations and conversions, half done by Mazzilli’s firm and half under its oversight by two other firms since, Mazzilli explains, “Work like we did on these cars would take a year, two years, sometimes three years to do just one. We had to do six in 18 months.” 

To participate in the sweepstakes and to learn more about the FootPrint Coalition, visit RDJdreamcars.com.