ROCKY IS A work of fiction, but it’s fair to say Sylvester Stallone threw his heart and suffering onto the page. The then-29-year-old actor-turned-screenwriter was a Hollywood nobody when the boxing movie to end all boxing movies was filmed in early 1976 (with a release later that year). The now-80-year-old had done minor work in largely forgotten films (oh, and don’t forget the porno!) when he wrote himself his dream leading role and convinced studio United Artists to both make the film and take a chance on the hardscrabble, sometimes literally hard-to-understand Sly as the star.
This story is recounted in I Play Rocky, the acclaimed biopic about the making and myth behind both Rocky and Stallone, played by Anthony Ippolito. Sly is, alas, “all but indivisible” from his creation, as The Guardian wrote in a review of his new memoir The Steps, “each an extension of the other.” Sly has his own version of his ascension, though it’s laced with frustration toward family and a certain producer on Rocky who he feels fleeced him (more on that below). But what’s real in I Play Rocky, what’s Hollywood-ified, and what’s Stallone’s own hard-won truth?
Here we dig into the facts behind Rocky’s development, production, and eventual gangbusters box office reception. But we also get into Stallone’s life and career, where the two merge with Rocky “The Italian Stallion” Balboa, and how well I Play Rocky streamlines it all into popcorn fun. Sylvester Stallone was born on July 6, 1946, in Hell’s Kitchen, then a rough neighborhood of Manhattan, according to History.
As Sly tells it in a (fascinating) 1976 profile in The New York Times, he was raised by a “bickering Italian couple” who put him in foster care while they worked. (His hairdresser father, Francesco “Frank” Stallone Sr., who had a tiny part in Rocky as the timekeeper in the climax fight, is embodied by a curmudgeonly Matt Dillon in I Play Rocky. Stallone’s mother, Jacqueline “Jackie” Stallone, is not depicted, but had a wild career as an astrologer, trapeze artist, chorus girl, women’s-only gym owner, and boxing promoter.) Stallone became a juvenile delinquent who “attended 12 schools by the time he was 15, and was kicked out of most of them.” More promisingly, the native New Yorker went to high school in Philadelphia, aka Rocky town, and threw himself into sports, being a star fullback and discus thrower. In an unexpected move, he then attended university at American College in Leysin, Switzerland, where he picked up a part-time job chasing men away from female dorms, except he found it was more lucrative to “look the other way” for two francs an hour (money that scored him flights back home).
Studying drama came next at the University of Miami for two years before he moved back to New York with the loftiest thespian ambitions. Instead, he found work as an usher at a movie theater and cleaning cages at a zoo. I Play Rocky starts with a very broke Stallone as a theater usher, though there’s no zoo action, and the story cuts the very funny fact that he was fired from said theater when he tried scalping a M*A*S*H ticket to the theater’s owner, Walter Reade. (Also absent from I Play Rocky: Among Sly’s ambitions was a fully autobiographical film that he planned to call From Roaches to Riches.) Sly took what scraps he could in his New York days, appearing in the low-budget greaser comedy The Lords of Flatbush (contrary to I Play Rocky, he was a co-lead actor, and even wrote additional dialogue).
He had an uncredited bit part in Robert Altman’s 1970 touchstone M*A*S*H (yes, the same film for which he tried to scalp a ticket) and acted in Capone (1975) as well as the Roger Corman-produced cult B-movie Death Race 2000 (1975), playing Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. In desperate need of money, the real-life Italian Stallion took a part in the 1970 softcore porn film The Party at Kitty and Stud's, in which he lets it all hang out—without hardcore sex. He thought the movie was garbage, but he was paid $200 for two days of work.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
