In 1976, hit boxing drama Rocky turned its “absolutely broke” and unknown lead actor and screenwriter, Sylvester Stallone, into an A-list sensation. It’s a story told in crowd-pleasing new film I Play Rocky.
A young Sylvester Stallone is homeless on the streets of New York in the early 1970s, with only his dog Butkus for company. In between auditioning for roles he never gets, he works gruelling hours gutting fish. He’s laughed at for his ambition to be an actor, because being delivered by forceps at birth has left him with partial face paralysis and a speech impediment, which he tries to improve by recording and listening back to his voice.
This is the starting point of I Play Rocky, directed by Green Book’s Peter Farrelly, which tells the story of how Stallone created the iconic boxing drama Rocky. It stars relative unknown Anthony Ippolito as a young Stallone, whose frustrated ambition to be an actor led him to start writing screenplays, too. In the film, we see him move to Los Angeles, where he’s so poor he has to temporarily sell Butkus – who later gets a role in the film. But he drafts the story of Rocky in three days. After many challenges on the road to getting it made, Rocky became the biggest box-office hit of 1976 and won best picture at the 1977 Oscars. It’s the ultimate Hollywood success story.
Getty Images As Rocky Balboa, Stallone created the template for a new kind of “unstoppable” cinematic hero (Credit: Getty Images)Getty Images
As Rocky Balboa, Stallone created the template for a new kind of “unstoppable” cinematic hero (Credit: Getty Images)
I Play Rocky shows why Stallone identified so strongly with Rocky Balboa, the washed-up Philadelphia boxer who takes an opportunity to fight World Heavyweight Champion Apollo Creed, even though he has virtually no chance of winning. “Stallone is the personification of an underdog himself,” says Nick de Semlyen, editor of Empire film magazine, and author of The Last Action Heroes, about Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and other male stars of that era. “He was absolutely broke and overnight he went to being the hottest thing in Hollywood and at the Oscars. It’s hard to think of another flip [in fortune] that’s as dramatic in film history.”
He saw himself as a serious actor, but he wasn’t taken seriously at all. So that’s why he decided to write his own stories as he was so frustrated with being typecast – Nick de Semlyen
Anthony Ippolito agrees that there are strong parallels between Stallone and the character he created. “Of course there are differences, because Stallone was and is a very talented writer. He reads a lot and is more of a thinker than Rocky perhaps appears in the film. But it’s semi-autobiographical in a lot of ways.”
How the script came about
In his recent memoir The Steps, Stallone himself describes the moment when the inspiration for the Rocky took hold, based on his own struggles to make it as an actor. Writing the script, he felt that others would relate to his and the character’s feelings of rejection.
“I couldn’t possibly be the only person out of billions of people to feel like they were living life in desperate frustration because the door of golden opportunity had been shut in their face over and over,” he writes.
Stallone had started acting at college, but the biggest job of his career until then had been a supporting role in The Lords of Flatbush, a film with Henry Winkler, later The Fonz of Happy Days. He had also starred in a soft porn film in 1970 to pay his bills. “He saw himself as a serious actor, but he wasn’t taken seriously at all,” says de Semlyen. “He was into poetry, he was a big Edgar Allen Poe fan, but he kept being cast as a thug. So that’s why he decided to write his own stories as he was so frustrated with being typecast. And he was willing this stuff into existence with Rocky from a place of having absolutely no power in the industry whatsoever. It’s a total miracle this film got off the ground.”
Amazon MGM Studios I Play Rocky sees relative unknown Anthony Ippolito give a remarkably accurate impression of a young Stallone (Credit: Amazon MGM Studios)Amazon MGM Studios
I Play Rocky sees relative unknown Anthony Ippolito give a remarkably accurate impression of a young Stallone (Credit: Amazon MGM Studios)
“Sylvester Stallone knew Rocky was essentially his only shot at what he wanted,” Ippolito tells the BBC. “He was coming up to 30 years old, he’d been trying to make it in the industry for quite a while, and I think he viewed Rocky as ‘this is it’ for him.”
In I Play Rocky, the studio United Artists offers Stallone increasing sums to sell the script, just as long as he lets an A-lister of the era, such as Burt Reynolds or Ryan O’Neal, take the title role. But Stallone was determined that he and he alone should play Balboa. In reality, there are conflicting accounts of how much money he was offered for the script – Stallone himself has said it was $360,000. But, as broke as he was, he wouldn’t budge.
Eventually the film was made with him as Balboa, but the budget was only around $1m, a fraction of what its independent producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff had wanted. Their deal with the studio stipulated that if the film was shot cheaply enough, they would have total control over casting. But it was a risk for everyone involved to attempt a boxing drama with a shoestring budget and an untried, unknown leading man.
The legendary shoot
Rocky was shot at breakneck speed in 28 days by director John G Avildsen. The shoot has became legendary in film history. Most scenes had to be done in one take to save money, and with no special effects budget, Stallone permanently damaged his knuckles creating the scene where Rocky punches sides of frozen meat.
“Throughout the shoot no one really believed in Stallone,” de Semlyen says. “When it was finished, the studio didn’t like it, they didn’t give it a big marketing push, it didn’t go to the Cannes Film Festival or any event like it. It was only when they started screening it to people, they were actually quite surprised that people were connecting to it.”
Rocky went on to get 10 Oscar nominations and win three, including best picture, while Stallone himself was nominated for best actor and best original screenplay. It also generated a host of sequels, some of which Stallone directed himself, and, more recently, the hugely successful spin-off Creed films starring Michael B Jordan. Stallone has also spoken about an idea to write a Rocky prequel.
With Rocky, de Semlyen says that Stallone created a new kind of stubborn underdog hero who has been a cornerstone of cinema ever since.
“Rocky doesn’t give up, he just won’t,” he says. “There’d been action movies before that, obviously, but there was something about foregrounding this one man, and the idea of one unstoppable force that was quite new. You see that repeated in so many different action films after that. The idea of resilience, of not backing down, would go on to be the fundamental tenet of these movies up to this day.”
Why the story has proved so powerful
Journalist Mike Sielski is the author of Going the Distance, a book about the making of Rocky. He tells the BBC that the story itself has “its own staying power, because the story of Stallone and Rocky is this underdog story on both levels. People want to believe the absolute utmost about what [Stallone] went through to make this film.”
Getty Images Stallone with actress Beatrice Straight at the 1977 Oscars, where Rocky won best picture (Credit: Getty Images)Getty Images
Stallone with actress Beatrice Straight at the 1977 Oscars, where Rocky won best picture (Credit: Getty Images)
He also points out that Rocky is all the more powerful for its radical ending, which goes against the Hollywood grain by having Rocky Balboa lose his fight with Creed. “That’s why it’s such a feel-good movie, because he doesn’t have to win in the end. When Apollo Creed knocks Rocky down, Rocky says, ‘Come on, I can take more’. We all want to think of ourselves as being Rocky at that moment. ‘You cannot keep us down.’ It taps into something of human nature that we want to see ourselves that way.”
BBC
Emma Jones
