
I loved her." As filming progressed, it dawned on Stallone that Rocky's relationship with Adrian would define the film. "I really felt a tremendous vitality and kinship. "We just read, and I felt the earth move," Stallone said of Shire's audition. Two other last-minute casting decisions would also shape Rocky: Shire as Adrian and Weathers as Apollo Creed. His wife, Sasha, also served as the on-set photographer. Stallone cut costs by casting his father, Frank Stallone, as a bellringer, and his brother, Frank Stallone Jr., as a street corner singer. They’re pretty flat, they’re pretty even, they really don’t function as a hand much anymore."

I don’t know what they’re good for anymore, I guess kind of like a table leg now. They're hard, they're real hard," Stallone said. "I don't know if anyone's hit a bull lately. Other training scenes were similarly excruciating, including the famous scene of Rocky punching slabs of beef in the meat locker where Paulie works. "Finally my legs basically gave out, and I'm writhing on the ground, and I want to rise up and say, 'John, I'm dying here,'" Stallone recalled. Avildsen hit the streets of Philadelphia in a van, using Garrett Brown's newly invented Steadicam to get smooth shots of Rocky running through the city.

With a meager budget of just over $1 million, Stallone and director John G. Producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff eventually got Rocky greenlit with Stallone in the lead role. I may be totally wrong, and I’m gonna be taking a lot of people down with me, but I just believe in it.’” I’m gonna be very upset. So this is one of those things where you just roll the dice, and you fly by the proverbial seat of your pants and say, ‘Alright, I gotta try it. "So I thought, 'You know what? I know in the back of my mind if I sell this script and it does very, very well, I'm gonna jump off a building if I'm not in it.' There’s no doubt about it. You really don't need much to live on,'" he said. "I thought, 'Alright, you've really managed poverty very well. They company wanted a proper movie star like Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds or James Caan to lead the film, and offered Stallone - who at the time had $106 in his bank account - over $300,000 for the script. But his then-wife, Sasha Czack, didn't like the direction, and Stallone eventually rewrote the script to resemble the version that made it to theaters.Īt a casting call, Stallone offhandedly mentioned his script to the producers, who told him to bring it by later. United Artists loved the script and wanted to finance Rocky, with one caveat: Stallone couldn't play the protagonist.
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Stallone originally planned for Rocky to throw the fight against Apollo because he no longer wanted to be part of the sleazy underworld of professional boxing. To fit the cinematic trends of the time, he initially wrote Rocky as a gritty antihero, while his coach, Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith), was a racist man with an even worse temper than what later appeared onscreen. Stallone wrote the initial script in three days, although he estimated that "maybe 10%" of his first draft made it to film. Along the way, Rocky falls in love with Adrian Pennino (Talia Shire), the sister of his best friend, Paulie (Burt Young), and fulfills his quest for self-actualization.

Wepner fight served as the catalyst for the Rocky script, about a down-on-his-luck, past-his-prime boxer who is plucked out of obscurity and given a shot at the heavyweight title against reigning champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). I said, 'Boy, if this isn’t a metaphor for life.'" And the fact that he lasted and knocked the champion down. "And for one brief moment, this supposed stumblebum turned out to be magnificent. "I saw a man they called 'The Bayonne Bleeder,’ who didn’t have a chance at all, against the greatest fighting machine, supposedly, that ever lived," Stallone recalled in The Rocky Story. At one point, Wepner also knocked Ali down, becoming one of only four fighters in history to drop the champ. His life changed on March 24, 1975, when he watched boxer Chuck Wepner - also known as the "The Bayonne Bleeder" - fight world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. Wepner was all but guaranteed to lose the match, yet he stood his ground against Ali and made it to the 15th and final round, when Ali knocked him out.

Stallone also moved in 1974 to Hollywood, where he continued seeking acting work to little avail.
