In the new film "Zodiac," which opened last week, Robert Downey Jr. plays gun-slinging San Francisco newspaper reporter Paul Avery. He's a man with a Hawai'i past: The real-life Avery was born in Honolulu and worked at The Honolulu Advertiser before covering the infamous Zodiac Killer case that rocked the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Avery received a threatening letter from the killer in 1970 that warned "You are doomed." Police authorized him to carry a concealed pistol for protection.

He was 66 when he died in 2000 of pulmonary emphysema.

Prosecutors never charged a suspect with the string of grisly killings attributed to Zodiac, who taunted authorities in a series of cryptic letters and ciphers he sent to Bay Area newspapers. A prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo, Calif., died in 1992.

In the film, Avery is portrayed as a dogged but flamboyant San Francisco Chronicle reporter who clashes with police and editors, then succumbs to alcohol and drug abuse while the killer remains free.

Advertiser reporter Dan Nakaso was Avery's editor at the San Francisco Examiner in the early 1990s — long after the Zodiac killings — and remembers Avery as a colorful throwback to another era.

He had a shock of white hair and always wore smoke-tinted glasses and bright, multicolored vests, accessorized with a leather satchel.

"I was a young, eager editor in a tie and an Oxford shirt who was pretty intimidated trying to supervise veteran reporters like Avery, who had covered the Vietnam War and probably had blisters older than me," Nakaso said.

At the time, Avery was married to Margo St. James, founder of the prostitutes' rights group COYOTE (for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). But St. James was living in Paris and Avery would call Nakaso at home and at work at all hours of the day and night trying to stay sober and stave off loneliness, Nakaso said.

"Even on deadline, I'd pick up the phone, and I'd hear this gruff voice say, 'This is Avery. I'm going to play you a little song I just wrote.' Then he'd plink out a tune on this tinny electronic keyboard."

Nakaso remembers Avery hacking out an uproarious laugh at the conclusion of each musical creation, and Nakaso always feared that Avery would cough up a vital organ or two.

More than once, Nakaso remembered Avery saying, "Ah, man, I just spit up blood," and Nakaso would beg him to immediately go to a hospital. Instead, he'd show up for work the next day ready to work his police beat.

Nakaso was awed by Avery's reporting skills. Avery seemed to know every cop in San Francisco and within minutes could debunk or verify any wild tip that came into the newsroom, Nakaso said.

Avery was born in 1934, the great-grandson of George Q. Cannon, the first Mormon missionary in the Islands. Avery's father, H.M. Avery, was a Navy pilot and officer. His mother was the former Frances Cannon.

Paul Avery worked at papers in Mississippi, Texas and Alaska before joining The Advertiser in 1956. He covered territorial government offices in Honolulu before becoming the paper's Big Island bureau chief at age 23.

The ambitious young reporter moved to San Francisco to join the Chronicle in 1959. He later wrote stories for both the Chronicle and The Advertiser from Vietnam and suffered a spinal fracture when a falling tree limb knocked him off an armored personnel carrier while on an operation with the 25th Infantry Division north of Tay Ninh.

He then worked for several news agencies before returning to San Francisco, where he married St. James.

Reach Johnny Brannon at jbrannon@honoluluadvertiser.com and Robbie Dingeman at rdingeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.