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AND
NOW HE'S A NEW, DYNAMIC STAR
By
Roger Ebert
December
19, 1977
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Sylvester
Stallone sits on a hotel sofa with his feet up on the
coffee table. He wears expensive blue jeans, the kind
you buy in Beverly Hills. His muscles bulge beneath a
T-shirt that says, simply and inexplicably,
"Valentine." He has a tough, sensual face, a
mane of black hair and the best hooded eyes since Robert
Mitchum. Two years ago, he observes, his acting career
was "intellectually, emotionally and financially
defunct." Now he talks about how it's going to feel
to be a star.
He's a star because of Rocky, the screenplay he
peddled to Hollywood studios while living in a one-room
apartment on next to nothing a week. He was offered big
money if he'd sell the story and let someone else star
in it - but, no, he thought he ought to be the star
himself. He held out long enough and United Artists
finally let him do it, and the movie's one of the year's
surprise hits.
Stallone is not surprised.
"The people like it who let their emotions be their
guide," he says. "Of course, if you go in
intellectually, you hate it. But if you let yourself go
with it, something happens about 40 minutes into the
movie. You say to yourself, hey, this isn't going to be
the colossal downer of all time. You find out Rocky's
not just a fighter on the way down, he's a pliable,
vulnerable person. And the movie isn't just about
fighting it's about heart and love. And then you throw
yourself into it emotionally. Maybe that's why I made it
about boxing. Everybody knows what it's like to punch,
and be punched, and everybody knows what it's like to
fall in love."
Rocky is about a mob enforcer and punk
prizefighter from Philadelphia who gets a lucky crack at
the heavyweight title and knows it may be his one shot
at amounting to something in life. The story could be
Stallone's. After years of getting nowhere as an actor
in New York, he went to Hollywood and got nowhere
there. He had roles in Capone and Death Race
2000, and a nice scene in Lords of Flatbush
where he was buying his girl a wedding ring. But things
were not exactly snowballing for him when Rocky
came through. "When we finally knew that Rocky
was going to be made and I was going to play Rocky, I
knew this wasn't only my shot, this was my life.
Everything had to be perfect. I was hard on the crew
when we were shooting - they thought I was a miserable
bastard - but I had to give the movie my best shot.
After the movie was over, if it was a flop, they could
go back to Baretta. For me, it would be a one-way ticket
back to Palookaville."
The movie has been compared with a lot of other
Hollywood boxing films, and it does have the same basic
plot: Tough street kid gets a crack at the title and
wins the girl (Talia Shire). But Stallone sees a lot of
differences.
"It's different about the boxing, about the girl
and about the fighter himself. The boxing is more
authentic. I went back and looked at Champion
and, hell, Kirk Douglas didn't even wear a mouthpiece in
the boxing scenes. And Rocky's relationship with the
girl, it's not like she's some tough neighborhood broad.
She's shy and scared and all closed off until she falls
in love. And Rocky, they say he's a big macho type. I
hate that word, 'macho.' It's overused; it sounds like a
cheap south of the border drink.
"He's masculine, but he can be reached, and
emotionally he's a 14 or 15-year-old boy in the body of
a man. Which turns some women on. They don't want the
super sophisticated intellectual businessman type. They
turn on to a man who hasn't forgotten what it's like to
crawl around on all fours playing with electric trains,
and who likes to pinch them. Rocky's like that. The fact
he has two pet turtles, that's very important."
The movie's climax is the championship fight itself, and
it goes 15 bloody rounds and contains some of the most
brutal violence ever put into a boxing film. It leaves
audiences drained. And yet, I said, there's a curious
thing: Women often say they don't like violence in
movies, and yet they like Rocky. Why does the
movie appeal to them?
"Because Rocky is courting them. They see a love
affair developing from its earliest stages. They see
Rocky with his pet turtles, they see how shy the girl
always seems to be, and they want to see this romance
come to something. Even in the clumsiest early stages
between the boy and the girl, the women in the audience
are right there because they remember what it's like to
be so colossally shy, to be cornered in some guy's
apartment.
"When Talia says she wants to leave my place
because she doesn't feel like she belongs, they
understand that. So by the end of the movie, the fight
scenes with all the blood, the women in the audience are
already going steady with Rocky. They're not turned off,
because he's fighting for them."
One scene that's particularly appealing to women,
Stallone says, is when the Talia Shire character
overcomes her shyness enough to kiss him - just barely,
but it's a kiss.
"We shot that scene all day, and she was beautiful.
So shy, so pate, so trembling. Then it turns out she had
the flu. Christ, Talia, I said, no wonder you looked so
great! So then she gets better and we all get sick, but
it's a great scene."
Stallone thinks of himself primarily as a writer who
acts, rather than the other way around.
"But I like to write popular stories. Mass audience
stories that still have something to say. One of the
reasons I wrote about a prizefighter is because a
down-and-out prizefighter is about as low down as you
can get on 'the social scale, and I didn't want Rocky
to appeal to the audience on any intellectual level. It
had to be a gut movie.
"And another thing, I don't believe in agonizing
over a story. I don't think any screenplay could take me
more than five weeks to write. So some of the scenes
stink? So, OK, we'll fix them the second time around.
It's the emotional structure that matters anyway. I'm a
very fast writer. "One reason for that is I'm a
separatist, which means I like to be separate a lot.
Socializing diminishes my powers of concentration.
There's nothing left for the page. I don't think I've
been in two bars in my life. You wanna know what my idea
of a good time is? Having an intellectual conversation
with a friend while flicking gravel at a stop
sign."
Which doesn't sound very much like the Stallone of the
legend already growing up around him. Like the Sly -
that's what his friends call him - who was raised in
foster homes and grew up in Hell's Kitchen and ran the
streets and alleys and has a Brooklyn accent you could
cut with a knife.
"You know who started all that crap? People
magazine. They interviewed me, and I was very careful to
make it clear that I may have been born in Hell's
Kitchen but we moved out when I was 5. And that I wasn't
raised in a foster home, but that both of my parents
worked and so I was taken care of by a very nice lady
who could put up with my neurotic behavior. And that I
was never a hood or all that crap. But it makes a better
story the other way. As long as I live, I'll read about
how I fought it out in Hell's Kitchen."
A pause for reflection.
"The one thing I'm not gonna do is, I'm not gonna
be Eugene O'Neill and write about my private demons. I
want to write for the public. My next movie, it's gonna
be about three brothers who live in New Jersey. And then
there's one I'm writing about Edgar Allen Poe and his
child bride, Virginia. Only I'll make it about the
genius of Poe, and not about the reality. About his
spirit. Who wants the caustic realities of real life
when fantasy is so much better? And who wants an Edgar
Allen Poe movie that tells the realities if the reality
turns out to be two hours of Lost Weekend in
drag?
"The one about the brothers in New Jersey, one is
going to be the world's biggest con man, so he thinks.
Another one is a cripple and another one is a drunk, and
their ambition is to buy a house. And I want to put in
real fantasies, like the drunk sees a dinosaur coming
out of a trash can, because I think people do have those
fantasies. Like everytime I walk over the subway grating
and think about all those tunnels down below, I know
something lives down there, some huge creature with
pearly teeth and crimson eyes, lurking in the
abyss."
It sounds, I say, as if you have a great imagination . .
.
"Oh, I dunno. It's just . . . Well, for example,
there has to be a Loch Ness monster. I think I'm a
romantic. People say Rocky is realistic, but I
don't want realism, I want romance. In a way, the
movie's like a classical symphony where it involves you,
it hooks you and then it builds to the big finish, the
monstrous lancing of the musical boil. That's my
formula. And I like it. I've seen Rocky maybe
200, maybe 300 times, and you know something? It's still
my favorite picture." |
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