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They put it about that the studio paid $100,000 for the script, but that they were willing to pay even more for Stallone not to play the lead. The fact that this apparent overnight sensation had completed 30 previous screenplays, all of them rejected, was hushed up once Rocky was sold and the United Artists publicity department got to work. “He wrote it all out like a ballet,” said the film’s director, John G Avildsen. The words came quickly: 80 pages in three days, including a chunk of it devoted to the final showdown between Rocky and his opponent, Apollo Creed. “I was going to bake the dog.” Rocky was a way of converting his hard-knock life into cinema – and money. “I was beginning to look at my dog with lust,” he said. Now he was living in a dump with his pregnant wife, Sasha, and their mutt. He had earned small change making a softcore porn film, The Party at Kitty and Stud’s, which resurfaced predictably as The Italian Stallion (Rocky’s nickname) once he became successful. Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstockīut the script was also about Stallone, who felt, at the age of 28, that he too was over the hill before he’d had a chance to climb it. In one sense it was about a boxer: Rocky Balboa was a debt collector who still boxed part-time.Ī hard-knock life converted into cinema … Stallone in the original Rocky. When he wrote the first draft, he was an actor on his uppers. It was here that the kid got a feel for the docks that would provide the backdrop to Rocky. A real character.” Presumably sick of sparrows and entrails for dinner, his mother found a new husband – the Original Crispy Pizza King, no less –and moved with him and the young Stallone to Philadelphia. He was born in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, to an astrologer mother and a father whom Stallone claimed ate raw sparrows and rabbit entrails. His sagging lower lip was the result of an imperfect forceps birth that severed a facial nerve he called himself “a Mister Potato Head with all the pieces in the wrong place”. He was a sluggishly handsome nobody with sad, melted Paul McCartney eyes and a drawl in which the words ran together untroubled by consonants. His CV featured a handful of bit parts as First or Second Thug (including Woody Allen’s Bananas) and the odd speaking role (The Lords of Flatbush). When Rocky was released in the US in December 1976, no one had heard of Stallone.
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It will also bring the Rocky story full circle in the most poignant way imaginable. And if he wins the Oscar, too, that will do the trick for all time. The Golden Globe he received last month for best supporting actor isn’t a bad place to start. His performance in Creed, though, may be good enough to silence the mockery that has tended to follow him around. The late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once called him “the stupidos’ Orson Welles”.
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Stallone wrote the original movie as well as each of the six sequels except for Creed, and directed numbers two, three, four and six, but he has hardly been what you would call a critical darling. But this year he is the favourite to win best supporting actor for reprising the role of Rocky Balboa in the sequel-cum-reboot Creed, in which the boxer-turned-restaurateur trains the son of his old rival. Stallone lost out on the best actor award, which went posthumously to Peter Finch for Network. It was at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1977 that Rocky, his Cinderella story about a plucky fighter who gets a shot at the big time, took home three prizes, including best picture. S ylvester Stallone and the Oscars go way back.