Released earlier this month on DVD by MGM Home
Entertainment, the "Rocky Anthology" is a great way to revisit one of
the most successful film franchises in history. All right, so maybe after the
first three films, moviegoers' affections for the saga of the Philadelphia
underdog played by Sylvester Stallone may have started to wane a bit, but
there's no denying the electrifying excitement of the first three films (the
fifth disc in the five-disc box set is the A&E biography on Stallone). The
Sun-Times spoke to Sylvester's brother Frank Stallone Jr., who had a small role
in the first film as a street-corner singer, and Burt Young, who starred as the
cranky meat-packer brother-in-law, Paulie, about the "Rocky"
phenomenon.
Q. Burt, how did you get the role as Talia
Shire's rather unlikable brother, Paulie?
BY: I didn't even have to audition. I met
Sylvester in the commissary at one of the studios and he said he'd written this
movie and he wanted me in it. This kid didn't have a dime, so I was giving him a
hard time about my salary.
Q. What attracted you to the script?
BY: It was just 98 pages of prose. He wrote so
beautifully. Probably 95 percent of the finished film was in the original pages.
That's unheard of in movies. I was so glad to be a part of it because I knew
this was going to be a fine, fine movie.
Q. How long did it take to make the first
film?
BY: We had 28 days to shoot, and we just flew
through the scenes. What enabled us to move at that clip was the fella who
invented the SteadyCam. That was the first major film production to use it. It
allowed us to do all those running scenes, traveling sequences. Most of what you
saw in the finished product on the first film especially was done in one or two
takes because Sly had the heart of a lion, and the director [Irwin Winkler] was
a born cinematographer.
Q. Why did the "Rocky" phenomenon
take off like it did?
BY: Because it really wasn't a movie about
boxing. It was a love story. It was a story about standing up for what you
believe in and who you take with you on that journey.
FS: With the first film, we didn't know what to
expect. It was so low-budget and it just took off. I became so big it was just
ridiculous. It was off the hook. And I was just the musician singing a cappella
on the corner in the first one. But we all felt something special about it.
Q. Was your brother much like the character he
was portraying?
FS: Sure, he really was broke when he wrote the
first film. I think it would have been much harder for a guy who was rich to do
that film because he wouldn't have been able to connect to the character the way
my brother did.
Q. Who was your favorite opponent for Rocky?
FS: I'm sentimental, so I'll go with [Apollo]
Creed [Carl Weathers] in the first film. But I thought Mr. T [as Clubber Lang in
"Rocky III"] and the Russian (Ivan Drago, played by Dolph Lundgren, in
"Rocky IV"] were great, too. Sly made it a point to have these great
adversaries.
Q. How was it to work with Burgess Meredith?
BY: That was one of the great pleasures of making
the movies and one of the great pleasures of my life. Burgess was a poet, a
lively son of a gun who had a spark in his eye for as long as I knew him, and we
remained friends till the day he died.
Q. How much of the fighting did Sylvester
actually do?
FS: We would hang out at a gym in California and
do some of the boxing stuff. I was an amateur boxer so it wasn't too difficult
for me. Sylvester really got into learning the moves, the basics.
BY: He weighed like 170 pounds but he was
wrestling with this 400-pound guy out there. I'd be over in a corner laughing
like crazy. Sylvester choreographed every one of the fight scenes. It was
amazing. He'd go home for the day and come back in the morning with the fight
scene completely scripted, punch by punch. It was physical poetry on paper.
