Chartoff and Winkler countered by offering to make the movie for less than a million, promising to cover any overages out of pocket, and the producers sent the studio a print of Stallone’s recent independent film, The Lords of Flatbush, to seal the deal. And with a nobody in the lead role, the flick seemed doomed to box office failure. A boxing picture and all its trappings-extras, location, and arena shooting-just couldn’t be made for so little money. Impressed by the story’s heart, Winkler and Chartoff agreed to produce the film with United Artists, which gave them creative freedom for any picture budgeted under $1.5 million. In the rewrites, Rocky, who had started out as a violent thug, emerged as a gentle and deceptively wise soul who, in the actor’s words, “was good-natured, even though nature had never been good to him.” But when Stallone’s wife, Sasha, read an early draft, she pushed him to sand down his hero’s rough edges even more. The unlikely romance allowed the film to become as much a character study as a genre slugfest. To ground his story, Stallone drummed up a love interest for Rocky: Adrian, a shy pet store employee. Even his trainer, a salty old cynic named Mickey, would write him off-until a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fight against brash champion (and Ali stand-in) Apollo Creed arises. But Rocky would have the odds stacked against him. Stallone centered his story around Rocky Balboa, a club boxer plucked from obscurity and eager to go the distance. When he sat down to write a screenplay, it took him just three days to dash it off. Though Ali ultimately knocked out Wepner in the 15th round, Stallone was riveted by those moments in which it seemed like Wepner stood a chance. Pitted 40:1 against the heavily favored Muhammad Ali, Wepner landed a blow that knocked Ali down. But the story of how the film itself got made is even more improbable.Įarlier that same year, a boxer named Chuck Wepner had silenced the world. The script Stallone turned in was an underdog tale, the story of Rocky, a streetwise palooka who gets an unlikely opportunity to fight the heavyweight champion of the world. Dejected, Stallone had his hand on the doorknob when he turned and made one last pitch. When Winkler and Chartoff met Stallone, they didn’t see a movie star. offices of Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, two producers who had a standing deal with United Artists. By 1975, the 29-year-old actor was desperate for something bigger, so his agent sent him to the L.A. When Stallone landed bigger parts, it was because his drooping, stone-chiseled face made him the perfect heavy (Subway Thug No. Once, when funds were short, he took a role in an adult film to keep from living in a bus station. The bit parts he did manage to land were few and far between. By his mid-twenties, he was getting by on odd jobs like cleaning lion cages and ushering at movie theaters. Stallone studied drama at the American College of Switzerland and then at the University of Miami, but then abandoned school to pursue a career in New York City. By the time he was 18, he knew he wanted to act. He spent his free time painting and writing poetry, but his real dream was the silver screen. He struggled academically and was expelled from multiple schools. By high school, they’d moved back in with their mother in Philadelphia, but Stallone’s emotional problems followed him. His parents fought constantly, and he and his brother slipped in and out of foster care. Complications at birth left the son of a hairdresser with nerve damage that slurred his speech and curled his lips into a permanent snarl. Sylvester Stallone wasn’t born a leading man.
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