He makes a battle suit that not only helps him escape, it's a life-support system for a coronary injury.

On the set, Downey, looking muscular and especially sly with a new goatee, made no bones about everyone involved hoping a franchise -- and, by extension, a mainstay studio -- is being born.

"There's a lot to the story and the character, and the approach now is no longer, 'Oh, here's a comic book, this should be mindless,' " he said. "This is fun, but we're also taking it seriously."

"That's quite a painting," someone says in "Woman in Gold" on first glimpsing Gustav Klimt's celebrated "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," and anyone seeing the artwork in person during its brief visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or atdiversity" the prompt inspired in the submissions, she tells Guy Raz, contest curator and host of NPR's TED Radio Hour.

"Reading the entries felt a little like a treasure hunt — I couldn't wait to see what object they were going to bury inside the story for their characters to find," she says. "In most cases, the 'found' objects did not have a huge dollar value — any value they had was reflective of the character's secret desires, or the product of some human relationship."

There were two finalists this round, apart from the winner: Picked Clean by Manuel Gonzales and Chipsby Kristina Riggle.

Ben Jahn, the winner of Round 11, received a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts grant in fiction to begin the novel he's currently working on.
Courtesy of