Sylvester Stallone

#1Sylvester Stallone had about $106 in the bank. His wife, Sasha, was pregnant, and acting wasn't paying the bills.

#2Then one of his screenplays started attracting serious money. Roughly $100,000 at first. Then $180,000. Other offers went above $250,000 and close to $300,000.

#3For a struggling actor in the mid-1970s, that could change everything.

#4There was one problem.

#5They wanted "Rocky." They didn't want Stallone playing Rocky.

#6The studio could cast Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds, or another recognizable actor. Stallone could take the check and leave.

#7He needed the money. By his own account, the higher the offers went, the harder they were to refuse.

#8Still, he kept refusing the version of the deal that removed him from the movie.

#9Why?

#10That only starts to make sense when you look at what Hollywood had been offering him up to then.

#11A nerve injury during Stallone's birth left part of his face partially paralyzed and helped give him the speech and facial asymmetry that later became unmistakably his.

#12Before fame, those same traits didn't exactly make him an obvious leading man.

#13He studied acting anyway. He was even told he might want to rethink acting as a career.

#14He kept going.

#15In New York, he auditioned again and again. He got occasional screen work, but the roles tended to live in the same corner.

#16A mugger. A thug. A street tough.

#17Years later, Stallone joked that he could have spent his career as something like the second hood standing beside a doorway.

#18So he started writing.

#19If nobody was going to give him the kind of role he wanted, maybe he'd have to make one.

#20He wrote screenplay after screenplay. Later, he estimated that he'd written around 30 before breaking through and joked that maybe 29 of them were terrible.

#21Still, he finished them.

#22"Rocky" wasn't his first attempt to write himself a way in.

#23Before "Rocky," Stallone had worked on a story called "Paradise Alley."

#24At a point when he needed money, he gave up rights to it. The exact terms got muddled in later recollections, but one thing mattered: it was no longer a project he could freely take wherever he wanted.

#25Then he met Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff.

#26He wasn't there as a promising new writer. He was looking for acting work.

#27The meeting was about to go nowhere when Stallone mentioned that he wrote too.

#28That got their attention.

#29The problem was that "Paradise Alley," the material he could talk about, was already tied up.

#30In Stallone's later telling, he walked away with an ugly realization: a door had finally opened, and he had nothing to carry through it.

#31Around the same time, another image had been sitting in his head.

#32A boxer who wasn't supposed to last.

#33On March 24, 1975, Muhammad Ali fought Chuck Wepner.

#34Ali was heavyweight champion of the world. Wepner wasn't remotely the same kind of star. The matchup looked so lopsided that a quick ending seemed likely.

#35But Wepner stayed.

#36One round. Then another. Then another.

#37Ali finally stopped him in the 15th.

#38Wepner lost.

#39That's what stuck with Stallone.

#40Not an impossible victory.

#41A man everybody expected to lose quickly was still there much later than expected.

#42The famous version of the "Rocky" origin story usually moves fast from there: Stallone watches the fight, rushes home, writes the movie in three days.

#43The real timeline was messier.

#44He thought about the idea for months. Once he finally began writing, though, the first draft came fast—roughly three to three and a half days. Sasha typed the handwritten pages.

#45Even then, Rocky wasn't finished.

#46In Stallone's later recollection, Sasha didn't like the early version because Rocky was too harsh. The character gradually softened.

#47So Rocky wasn't Chuck Wepner with a new name. He wasn't Stallone copied into boxing trunks either.

#48But he carried a question Stallone knew very well.

#49What happens when somebody nobody expects much from finally gets one real shot?

#50Winkler and Chartoff liked "Rocky." The movie business liked the screenplay too.

#51Stallone himself was the problem.

#52He had almost no track record as a leading man. From a studio's point of view, the clean answer was obvious: buy the script, pay the writer, cast a star.

#53The offers kept climbing.

#54Stallone still had about $106 in the bank. His wife was pregnant.

#55He asked what happened to him if somebody else played Rocky.

#56The practical answer was simple.

#57Take the money. Leave the movie.

#58This is where the story gets more interesting than the usual starving-artist legend.

#59Stallone was already explaining his logic around the time "Rocky" came out.

#60To him, the movie was about a man getting one golden shot in a life that hadn't offered many.

#61If he wrote that story and then sold away his own chance the moment it arrived, he felt the story itself would become false.

#62He didn't know he was a great actor.

#63He didn't know "Rocky" would work.

#64He just didn't want somebody else climbing into the ring for him this time.

#65But refusing a deal isn't the same thing as financing a movie.

#66Now the producers had to decide how far they were willing to follow him.

#67United Artists had plenty of reasons to be nervous.

#68A boxing movie. An unknown star. Questions about whether women would come. Questions about violence. Questions about whether it would sell overseas.

#69Winkler and Chartoff, though, had a contractual route that could let them push through a picture under a certain budget.

#70The studio's numbers came in too high.

#71So the producers changed the numbers.

#72They'd make "Rocky" for roughly $1 million.

#73And they'd stand behind getting it finished.

#74Stallone had already risked the biggest payday of his life to keep the role.

#75Now the producers were taking on risk to make that choice real.

#76The movie finally moved.

#77There wasn't much money left for comfort.

#78The shoot ran about 28 days.

#79And some of those limitations ended up shaping the movie.

#80Rocky and Adrian were supposed to spend time at a skating rink.

#81A normal rink would be busy. Busy means extras. Extras cost money.

#82Director John G. Avildsen found another answer.

#83The rink was closed.

#84Rocky and Adrian would get let in anyway.

#85Suddenly the scene had almost nobody in it. Adrian moved around the ice while Rocky walked beside her, talking too much, trying to connect.

#86A money problem had emptied the room.

#87The empty room made the scene intimate.

#88Casting brought its own surprises.

#89Carl Weathers came in for Apollo Creed and didn't know who Stallone was. After reading with him, Weathers complained, essentially, that he'd do better with a real actor opposite him.

#90The man standing there had written the movie, turned down six-figure offers, and fought to keep the lead.

#91And the guy auditioning for his movie didn't even recognize him as an actor.

#92Then Weathers found out.

#93He didn't suddenly get timid. That confidence actually helped.

#94Apollo Creed was supposed to walk into a room already convinced he owned it.

#95Weathers could do that.

#96He got the part.

#97Burgess Meredith added something to Mickey too. During an audition, he threw out a question that wasn't in the script: had Rocky ever thought about retiring?

#98Avildsen heard Mickey in it.

#99This was still Stallone's movie.

#100But every time another person entered, it became less like something one man had made alone.

#101Late in the film, Rocky tells Adrian what he actually wants from the Apollo fight.

#102He doesn't promise to beat him.

#103He knows he probably won't.

#104He wants one thing.

#105To go the distance.

#106Nobody goes the distance with Apollo Creed. If Rocky can still be standing when the final bell rings, then he'll know something about himself.

#107He'll know he wasn't just another nobody from the neighborhood.

#108That brings Wepner back into the story.

#109Wepner didn't beat Muhammad Ali. Rocky doesn't beat Apollo Creed.

#110And Stallone wasn't asking Hollywood to guarantee that he'd become its greatest actor.

#111He wanted one honest chance to find out how far he could go.

#112Then, near the end of filming, he became convinced he'd blown it.

#113The final sequence—Adrian pushing through the crowd to reach Rocky—was reshot.

#114The production was still short on money. They couldn't recreate a huge arena in full. They didn't have enough people to make every angle feel packed.

#115Even Adrian's hat became a problem. It needed to come off at the right moment, and when it wouldn't cooperate, dental floss was used to pull it away.

#116Rocky searches through the noise.

#117"Adrian!"

#118She calls back.

#119They finally reach each other.

#120They say they love each other.

#121Cut.

#122Stallone thought he'd been terrible.

#123In his later recollection, he went home convinced he'd hurt the movie.

#124Then he saw the scene assembled.

#125Bill Conti's music was there. Avildsen's direction and editing were there. Talia Shire was there.

#126The pieces that had looked cheap and awkward on set worked once they were put together.

#127Stallone had fought harder than anyone to make sure he stayed at the center of "Rocky."

#128But one of the film's most important moments only came alive because other people completed what he couldn't see by himself.

#129Now there was one last group left to convince.

#130The audience.

#131"Rocky" opened in November 1976.

#132Winkler and Chartoff were outside a theater reading a bad review in The New York Times.

#133They were crushed.

#134After everything it had taken to make the movie, this could still end exactly the way the studio had feared.

#135Then Peter Falk told them, essentially, to stop standing outside and go look inside.

#136The audience was on its feet.

#137Cheering.

#138The numbers came afterward.

#139A movie made for around $1 million went on to earn more than $200 million worldwide. It received nine Academy Award nominations.

#140Stallone was nominated for Best Actor.

#141He was nominated for writing the screenplay too.

#142Not long before, buyers had been ready to pay him a fortune as long as he disappeared from the lead.

#143Now he was an Oscar nominee for playing it.

#144"Rocky" won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing.

#145Stallone didn't win Best Actor. He didn't win for the screenplay either.

#146Rocky doesn't win the decision against Apollo either.

#147But when the fight ends, Rocky barely seems interested in the judges.

#148Everybody else is announcing the winner.

#149He's looking for one person.

#150Adrian.

#151Not literally.

#152Rocky wasn't Chuck Wepner. He wasn't Stallone's autobiography in boxing gloves.

#153Wepner's fight contributed the shape of an underdog who could lose and still prove something. Apollo carried the feel of a superstar champion like Muhammad Ali. Philadelphia brought its boxing culture and working-class streets.

#154Then other people kept adding to the film.

#155Sasha reacted to the early Rocky. Winkler and Chartoff made the production possible. Avildsen reshaped scenes around the budget. Weathers, Meredith, and Shire brought things that weren't sitting on Stallone's pages.

#156"Rocky" was made out of several lives and several choices.

#157But Rocky's fear was very close to Stallone's.

#158Spend years being overlooked. Finally get a real opportunity. Then hear, once again:

#159We want the thing you made. We just don't want you.

#160That's why the money wasn't enough.

#161Stallone wasn't asking for a guarantee that he'd win.

#162He wanted his turn in the ring to actually be his.

#163Rocky lasted far beyond the first film.

#164Visitors still run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and throw their arms into the air. The Rocky statue became part of the city's identity.

#165Then, as the original film reached its 50th-anniversary era, Hollywood made another movie.

#166"I Play Rocky."

#167It isn't another chapter in Rocky Balboa's boxing career.

#168It's about the young Sylvester Stallone writing "Rocky," being offered money for it, and refusing to let another actor take the lead.

#169This time, Anthony Ippolito plays the young Stallone.

#170Fifty years earlier, Hollywood had effectively told Stallone:

#171We want what you wrote.

#172We don't need you.

#173He didn't disappear.

#174Half a century later, another actor stands in front of a camera and recreates the moment Stallone refused to disappear from "Rocky."

#175Chuck Wepner lost to Muhammad Ali, but that defeat helped give Stallone one of the key sparks behind Rocky Balboa. Decades later, Chuck Wepner sued Stallone, arguing that his name and story had been used without the compensation he believed he'd been promised. The case ended in a private settlement. So what happened between the real underdog and the man who turned that kind of fight into "Rocky"?