Not Anymore
A Case Study of ROBIN (2021)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“The familiar performance returns. What it carries has changed.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. They examine how films work through the choices of the artists who make them.
Content notice: This study discusses the complete film, including its ending, bereavement, drug-related death, substance use, and strong language.
Explore the Lewis Brothers Filmography
Four short films. Four stages of a filmmaker’s evolution. Follow our reverse-chronological exploration of Jake Lewis’s work, tracing the creative journey from his most recent production back to the early short that helped bring him widespread attention.
Two convenience-store employees confront a creature that senses fear, turning the simple act of smiling into a desperate struggle for survival.
Behind the spectacle of a television appearance, Richard Simmons notices a man whom everyone around him seems to overlook.
Jack Nicholson and John Belushi collide on the set of a Hollywood Western, where larger-than-life personalities challenge the machinery of filmmaking.
A recreation of Robin Williams behind the scenes of Mork & Mindy explores the delicate boundary between celebrity impersonation and dramatic performance.
Robin Williams is rehearsing both sides of a conversation. He calls Orson in Mork’s voice, then supplies Orson’s answer. The exchange keeps moving because he controls every part of it: the question, the response, the rhythm, the opportunity to try something else. Someone nearby is attempting to begin a different conversation, but that one requires him to listen.
Pam Dawber’s first efforts barely interrupt the sound. She says his name and starts a question that disappears beneath his next variation. By the time her insistence finally reaches him, the film has established more than Jamie Costa’s ability to reproduce a recognizable voice. It has established a behavior with a consequence. Robin’s comic momentum is keeping another person out.
That relationship will change. Humor will become something Pam offers him, something he can return, and eventually something he tries to resume alone. The film does not simply remove a comic surface to expose a sad person underneath. It follows the changing uses of a performance, then returns Robin to familiar material that can no longer mean only what it meant before.
The Room Changes Direction
The first live-action images are work materials: script pages, makeup tools, production paperwork attached to a mirror. Pam’s face appears before Robin’s. When Costa is finally shown clearly, his face is a reflection, with the physical presence of his head and shoulder retained in the foreground and a makeup artist working behind him. The likeness arrives inside an activity rather than as an isolated invitation to compare faces.
The arrangement gives cinematographer Marc Shap and director Jake Lewis several layers within a small space. The foreground body establishes where Robin sits; the reflection lets us examine the face he is using; the surrounding work keeps the image attached to a production day. Danielle Thompson’s production design supplies a room that can be understood through its function, while Samantha Chapman’s hair and character makeup help establish the figure occupying it. Chapman also plays the makeup artist, placing that ongoing preparation inside the scene.
The film effectively works with three walls. It never turns to show the door and never takes us outside to look back in. Nothing in the visible geography establishes whether this was an actual dressing room, a trailer, or an environment fabricated elsewhere. What matters is how completely the presentation makes its limited space usable. The mirror adds depth without requiring another location, and the production beyond the room can remain unseen.
Costa fills this arrangement with activity. He changes vocal placement, plays both characters, and drives his explanation of dreams upward into a breathless rush. Then he discards that attempt and tries Cinderella. The rehearsal is not one polished routine; it is a series of possibilities being tested. That distinction will become important when he returns to the same material later.
Meanwhile, Sarah Murphree gives Pam an incompatible task. She has to stop him. The cuts back to her register attempts that his momentum does not accommodate, until an emphatic use of his name breaks through. Costa appears genuinely thrown. Nothing in that reaction requires us to imagine that he already suspects the news or is using comedy to avoid it. At this point, he is simply absorbed in something else.
Once privacy has been requested and the makeup artist leaves, Pam sits and folds forward. Robin carefully turns his chair toward her. The turn, forward movement, and settling into the exchange remain together while the camera reframes. A physical adjustment carries the scene from rehearsal to conversation. His face is no longer principally offered through the mirror; he has another person to look at.
The Joke Stops Working
Turning toward Pam does not mean Robin immediately understands what she needs. He begins with familiarity: “Dawbs.” Then comes the possibility that this is about an earlier fart, delivered with mock seriousness and followed by a playful, whispered apology. He has recognized that something needs addressing, but he is still looking for an explanation that belongs to their ordinary working relationship.
Murphree does not provide the response that would complete the joke. Her lowered face and difficulty beginning create a silence his familiar approach cannot resolve. Costa’s smile melts before he asks what is wrong. He discovers that he has misread the encounter before discovering its cause.
This is the first substantial change in how we watch his face. The recognition supplied by voice and appearance remains, but it is no longer the immediate question. We are watching a person revise his understanding of another person. The performance makes that revision legible without announcing it through a large gesture.
Pam delivers the news directly: “John Belushi died last night.” Murphree’s firmness has the quality of someone deciding that further preparation will only prolong the difficulty. She does not make the sentence an exhibition of her own distress. Her task is to get the information across, then remain present for what it does.
Costa does not immediately give her a completed grief response. His eyes work across her face. There is an evaluating quality to the look, as though he is still searching for the condition under which this statement might be something other than true. His “What?” asks her to account for what she has just said. She answers with the discovery of the body.
Only then does his breathing begin to deepen toward the edge of a possible sob. The break feels close enough that it could arrive at any moment, but the scene continues through the effort of not quite breaking. Breath becomes part of the action rather than merely an accompaniment to dialogue.
The Same Denial Changes
“I told you, I was with him.”
Robin presents this as evidence. The fact that he recently experienced John as alive seems, emotionally, to contradict the information he is receiving. Costa’s insistence is not yet a ceremonial refusal to accept the inevitable. He is trying to make his account of the previous night defeat Pam’s account of the morning.
Her response is carefully constructed. She acknowledges what he is saying without accepting the conclusion he needs it to support. She knows he was with John. She is not asking him to surrender that fact. But it cannot make the other fact disappear.
“John’s not dead. I was with him last night.”
“I know you were.”
Murphree does not become impatient with the repetition. Her patience gives Costa something specific to encounter: a person who understands his objection and is still not withdrawing the news. There is nowhere useful for the argument to go.
Lewis’s editing allows that impasse to develop. The exchange retains reciprocal coverage, but the duration is not distributed evenly. Robin receives a sustained shot through his denial, a brief return to Pam intervenes, and another extended hold lets his processing continue. Some of her words reach us while the image remains with him. The film is interested in what a sentence does to its listener, not only in the face of the person delivering it.
When Pam apologizes, the later “No” is different from the earlier one. It no longer seems capable of disputing the information. He has understood, and the word survives as a protest against something he now knows. “Not John” narrows the response further. The problem is no longer whether someone has died. It is that this particular person is gone.
Costa gives those differences physical continuity. His attention falls away from Pam. A hand moves toward his mouth and then toward his head. Speech continues to emerge through a body that appears close to losing control of it. The sustained passages give the smaller adjustments between expressive peaks as much attention as the peaks themselves.
That continuity is central to the identification. Costa remains convincing when the performance is least occupied with the behaviors that initially announced Williams. Stillness does not become a vacancy where the impression used to be. It contains listening, resistance, recognition, and the effort to continue.
Pam Needs an Answer Too
Robin’s question about how John died changes the pressure again. It begins as a search for information, then becomes more self-conscious as he specifies what he wants to know. Pam’s “You know, Robin” does not sound like an accusation. It makes explicit that they are discussing something both already understand.
His difficulty maintaining eye contact can now be read as shame as well as sorrow. The context supplies that possibility: the question, her answer, his earlier insistence that he had been with John. The film does not need a separate account of his own behavior to make Pam’s next concern intelligible.
“Hey, look at me.”
She brings him back into the relationship before telling him that she cannot let the same thing happen to him. He assures her it will not. Then she repeats, “I can’t,” and the balance shifts. Her firmness no longer entirely contains her fear. She has been helping him face the loss of a friend while confronting the possibility that she could lose the friend in front of her.
Costa looks toward her and softly answers, “Yeah.” It is a small response, but it acknowledges more than a warning. He appears to hear what this would do to her. For a moment, the person receiving support also has someone to reassure.
Pam then threatens to find him and kill him first should he meet the same fate. The contradiction lets affection take a form that belongs to their exchange. She can remain serious without keeping the tone solemn. Murphree sustains that mixture, and Lewis gives the warning a held shot rather than reducing her contribution to a quick setup for Costa’s next bit.
Robin’s small nod before the joke is important. He receives the support before building on its playfulness. “You sounded like James Bond just then,” he tells her, then gives her the Connery version: “‘Name’s Dawbs. Pam Dawbs.” The impression is directed toward her. He has made something out of what she offered him.
His emotion remains visible beneath it, including the incomplete ease of his eye contact. The scene has not switched from tragedy back to comedy. It has found a way for comedy to participate in care. At the beginning, the voices obstructed a conversation. Here, another voice helps the conversation continue.
He Chooses to Go Back
A light knock and a voice beyond the frame return their attention to the working day. The production does not need an establishing shot of a corridor, a stage, or a waiting crew. Sound and the two performers’ corresponding looks give the unseen space a function. Someone is ready for them.
Robin clears his throat and rises. Pam tells him he does not have to go out there. That permission prevents the scene from becoming a simple story about an institution compelling someone to work through grief. Work is waiting, but an alternative has been spoken aloud.
“I think I do, Pam.”
Costa gives the reply determination without making it sound like recovery. The qualification remains in the words. He believes returning is something he needs to do, but the film does not require us to decide whether that need is professionalism, refuge, habit, or some combination of them.
Andrew Gerlicher’s score begins to emerge around this decision. Its low, melancholy presence comes after the central disclosure and much of the exchange have already been carried by the actors. The music does not introduce the grief for us. It accompanies the attempt to move with it.
Robin thanks Pam and asks her to tell Howard that he will be a minute. The attempt at casualness is not quite enough to conceal what remains in the voice. Then she leaves through the foreground, and the shot continues. There is no cut to announce that company has become solitude. Her departure alters the existing composition, and Costa has to carry what happens in the space she no longer occupies.
His hands gather low in front of him. His gaze stays down. Eventually he releases the clasp and moves his hands into his pockets. These are small changes, but the uninterrupted observation gives them scale. We can follow the body becoming able to undertake its next ordinary action without treating that action as proof that the feeling has passed.
The sound keeps the recovery physical. Clothing movement, the handling of the chair, and the quiet activity of preparing to sit belong to the same room as the conversation. With production sound credited to Mario Torres and post-production sound design and mix to Freshmade TV, the finished track preserves a material environment even as the score begins to carry more of the transition.
The Answer Changes
Robin resets the chair and sits. The camera follows him into the reflected composition. His eyes close before he attempts to begin, and when they open, the first call to Orson still carries the emotion of the conversation he has just left.
The mirror does not need to symbolize two selves to make this effective. It gives us a practical comparison. Here is the same man at the same work station, attempting an activity we have already watched. The surrounding geography has not expanded; the information within it has.
Costa’s lip quivers. He purses his lips, makes a small frustrated movement, and tries again. The renewed call is deeper and more emphatic. A hand comes over his mouth, lightly tapping his lips and changing the sound as he supplies Orson’s question. The familiar vocal exchange is being reconstructed through a body that does not yet perform it with the earlier ease.
Lewis keeps these efforts together. The move into the chair, the first attempt, the bodily interruptions, the renewed address, and the altered response occupy one sustained shot. The changing expressions remain connected to the actions that produce them. We can compare successive attempts because they remain part of a continuous effort.
Crucially, the writing does not merely repeat an identical routine in a sadder voice. Earlier, Orson’s question led to a report about dreams. Now the answer changes: “No, sir. Not anymore.”
The opening has prepared for variation by showing Robin test different versions of the material. A new answer can therefore arise within the activity of rehearsal. But this answer also belongs to the encounter with Pam. After the warning, the assurance, and the silence, “Not anymore” has acquired a possible meaning beyond sleeping on the job.
The first delivery remains attached to Mork, although its resolution reaches beyond the character’s immediate circumstances. The second repetition becomes deeper and less affected. Costa seems to move closer to an unperformed speaking voice without making a conspicuous demonstration of leaving the character.
A response to Orson becomes available as a statement to himself.
The film does not have to certify a permanent transformation for that moment to function. Determination is a present action, not a guarantee about the future. What we can see is a man finding words that allow him to attempt the next thing. The routine gives him somewhere to put an intention he has not delivered as a separate speech.
This is where likeness and dramatic acting become particularly difficult to separate. The established voice gives the words their familiarity; the performance makes their unfamiliar weight legible. Recognition has not been discarded. It has become part of the scene’s means of showing change.
The Costume Is Still on the Wall
Robin allows a small, sad smile as he gets up. He moves the chair, sniffs, then brings the energy back: “All right. Nanu-nanu. Let’s go.” Gerlicher’s score answers with a bright flourish and a more playful pulse. The accompaniment changes with the renewed physical animation rather than continuing to insist on a single melancholy register.
For a moment, the restart appears to have worked. The next call to Orson is full-throated. Then the extended name loses its force before the line has finished. Another thought reaches him, and Costa lets the sound change around it. He has forgotten his costume.
The realization punctures any possibility of an immaculate exit. He swears, races back for the red garment, and apologizes to Howard as he hurries out of frame. The score becomes playfully propulsive, and the shot carries the scramble into the fade without breaking the scene into a separate comic appendix.
The garment is an efficient piece of storytelling because it exposes a difference between two kinds of readiness. Robin has recovered enough of the voice and physical energy to attempt going back. He has not become perfectly collected. The practical omission survives the apparent emotional restart.
That makes the ending more humane than a polished demonstration of professional endurance. It does not ask us to admire an invulnerable performer who can set grief aside on command. He remains distracted, apologetic, funny, and fallible. The return of comic behavior does not certify the disappearance of what we have just seen.
Nor does the final laugh have to belong to a different film from the earlier pain. The same construction has carried both: a person attempting to work, responding to another person, trying to gather himself, and discovering that he has missed something. The costume was part of the room’s practical purpose all along. At the end, it reveals the limits of his recovery.
What the Test Can Prove
Costa had already made his Williams impression publicly recognizable before this project. His 2015 tribute, Never Had a Friend Like Him, brought together impressions of familiar Williams characters. The later short had a different task available to it: sustaining an encounter rather than demonstrating a collection of recognizable moments.
In the statement accompanying his upload, Costa describes ROBIN as having been created in 2020 as a proof of concept for a larger biopic. He says he selected this episode for its emotional arc and wanted to tell a story rather than make only an imitation piece. The writing is credited jointly to Costa, Sam Lewis, and Jake Lewis. The biopic intention clarifies what was being offered for consideration: a portrayal that could sustain a story, not only evoke an image.
Part of the exchange has a documented historical foundation. In Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Dawber recalled making the warning about finding and killing Williams first as they walked toward their trailers, with Williams reassuring her. That recollection, reported by PEOPLE, supports the affectionate warning without authenticating every surrounding line, gesture, or detail of the short’s dressing-room staging.
The distinction remains important precisely because Costa is convincing. The ability to make us believe in this response does not turn the performance into a record of Williams’s private thoughts. The film constructs a particular person in a particular circumstance; it cannot establish that circumstance as the explanation of an entire life. Its grief belongs to the loss being discussed, not to a retrospective theory that every comic gesture must conceal some permanent, truer sadness.
The short became a viral clip in 2021, but its circulation also had a personal consequence outside the work. Zelda Williams asked people to stop repeatedly sending it to her while acknowledging Costa’s talent. Costa subsequently removed it; his contemporary explanation described an intended private review, a leak, and his decision to provide an identifiable public source. In his later upload statement, he reports further communication and says the family and estate had no objection to the short being shared again, while specifying that no expansion would be pursued at that time. That remains his account of their understanding, not a separately issued family endorsement or authorization for a feature.
What Was Already Here
In an interview with FilmInk, Jake and Sam Lewis described an interest in a Hollywood-folklore anthology and distinguished the public legends around famous performers from the people audiences do not know. That interest provides a useful context for their celebrity-centered work, although it does not turn every project into part of one continuous production plan.
This study completes a reverse-chronology journey through four of Lewis’s shorts. Remain Calm asked an audience to see fear that a creature must not recognize. The Court Jester found its emotional center in the attention one person gave another, allowing the exchange to exceed the precision of a celebrity recreation. Our examination of The Cowboy & the Samurai found persuasive character behavior without complete acceptance of Costa as Nicholson. Those were distinct problems, not preliminary versions of this one.
Here, the identification comes readily, but the film gives it something to do. Costa’s likeness establishes a familiarity that can be interrupted, complicated, and returned to. Murphree makes that development relational. Lewis’s staging and editing determine when we encounter Robin through his reflection, when we face him across an exchange, and how long we remain after the other person has gone.
The connection to the later work is therefore not simply an interest in celebrity impressions, nor a claim that increased production scale represents artistic improvement. It is an interest in performances that have to carry more than one state at once. The audience can hear the restored comic voice and still perceive the feeling it has not removed.
The room makes that coexistence visible without a reverse view of the entrance, another location, or a larger spectacle. Robin turns from the mirror to a person and then returns with something the reflection did not contain before. A familiar question still belongs to the rehearsal. The answer now belongs to more than the rehearsal.
Orson asks about sleeping on the job. The man in the mirror has another reason to say, “Not anymore.”
A Note on Sourcing: This study is based on repeated viewing of the complete short, supported by dialogue and picture-edit analysis. Production credits and Costa’s account of the project’s origins and renewed availability follow his upload statement. Historical context draws on Dawber’s documentary recollection as reported by PEOPLE, Costa’s contemporary statement preserved by ABC, and the Lewis brothers’ FilmInk interview. The reconstructed encounter is analyzed as filmmaking, not treated as a verbatim historical record; interpretations of behavior remain readings of the performances.