One of the most legendary films of the past 50 years,Rocky ended up winning the Oscar for best picture just a few months after the premiere in New York. While winning an Academy Award is an extremely coveted prize, it isn't exactly reason enough to celebrate a film. The reason why Rocky is such an exceptional case isn't just because it is a great movie, but also because of the very interesting circumstances surrounding it.
The year was 1976
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Maybe this isn't as unknown as I would hope but Rocky almost didn't get made at all and if that had been the case we never would have been introduced to Clubber Lang (and subsequently the world may have never known about Mr. T at all), we never would have seen a bunch of Russians dedicated to cheating at the sport, none of whom were actually Russians, fighting in a Russia that wasn't Russia because Rocky 4 was filmed in Canada (on a side note: Although Rocky 4 is made fun of, I think it is actually one of the more entertaining of the entire franchise.)
In mid 1975, a then completely unknown Sylvester Stallone wrote a screenplay using a pen and paper despite knowing that these sorts of things need to be typed in order to be acceptable to studios. Stallone couldn't get it typed because he was damn near homeless at the time. He had recently sold his dog because he could no longer afford to feed it. :( It has been confirmed that when he submitted the script he had a mere $106 in his bank account and was steps away from eviction. Stallone has said that if the script hadn't been accepted, he would not have been able to pay his rent.
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The studios however, did not want to have an unknown actor play the role and wanted some bigger names in the film. They offered Stallone $350,000 for the script and he refused it. Imagine how much faith you would need to have in something to be nearly unable to afford shelter or food, you recently had to sell your best friend, and then turning down what in 1975 was the equivalent of $700,000 today.
But Stallone was steadfast, and because of this the production company paid Stallone a mere $20,000 for the rights to the story and out of spite paid their new leading "Sly" actor the industry minimum of $350 a week during filming. They also reduced the overall budget dramatically to a mere $1 million because they now had little faith in the project.
They had to "pinch pennies" in order to do a lot of the filming at all. There were several tricks that they used during the film such as having the final fight be surrounded by darkness. The idea was that this was because of the super bright lights of the big event. However, this was actually because they couldn't afford enough extras to make a decent crowd.
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There are stories about how when faced with extreme budgetary constraints, they offered extras a "free chicken dinner" for their participation in scenes.
The final fight also had no professional choreography due to budgetary constraints. However, when they were filming, it was apparently so silly and unrealistic that director John G. Avildsen scrambled to find the money and choreography was built in to save the film. Seriously, go back and watch the fights, even with choreography it looks pretty bad and not at all like real boxing. I would love to see the original footage.
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Stallone quickly became known as an actor that would "do whatever it took" to get the job done because he insisted that Carl Weathers actually hit him and this caused multiple injuries throughout filming, one of which could have killed Stallone had he not gone to the hospital.
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I don't really know if anyone today will be able to go back and watch this film for the first time and appreciate exactly how ground-breaking it was, but it really is special to take a film with no budget, almost no known actors or actresses and a script written by an amateur (although with major re-writes) and win the highest film honor in existence.
Stallone went on to become one of the biggest starts in the world and of course the Rocky films lead to First Blood and eventually really good films like Cliffhanger. (joking) Imagine how different action films of the 80's would have been if Sylvester hadn't stuck to his guns on the script back in 1975?
Second only to perhaps Schwarzenegger in terms of action-hero icon status, Stallone refused to give up despite facing lots of battles getting this movie to the big screen. His rise to A-level status began with a dream and a stubborn attitude and it all began today, 43 years ago.
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By the way, once he got his $20,000 for the script, Stallone immediately bought his dog back although the jerk he sold it to for $50 demanded $1500 for the buy back