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A young Sylvester Stallone lives on the streets of New York in the early 1970s, homeless and with only his dog, Butkus, for company.
Between one audition and another for roles that he never gets, he works exhausting days removing the entrails from the fish. They laugh at him for his ambition to be an actor, since being born with forceps has left him with partial facial paralysis and a speech problem, which he tries to improve by recording himself and listening to his own voice.
This is the starting point of "I Play Rocky," directed by Peter Farrelly (the director of Green Book), which tells the story of how Stallone created the iconic boxing drama Rocky.
The new film stars the relatively unknown Anthony Ippolito, who plays the young Stallone, whose frustrated ambition to be an actor led him to start writing screenplays.
In the film, we see him move to Los Angeles, where he is so poor that he has to temporarily sell his dog Butkus, who later also has a role in the film.
But he manages to write the Rocky script in three days.
After many challenges along the way to bringing it to the screen, Rocky became the biggest box office hit of 1976 and won the award for best picture at the 1977 Oscars. It is the quintessential Hollywood success story.
"I Am Rocky" shows why Stallone identified so much with Rocky Balboa, the down-and-out Philadelphia boxer who jumps at the chance to fight world heavyweight champion Apollo Creed even though he has virtually no chance of winning.
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"Stallone is the epitome of the underdog," says Nick de Semlyen, editor of the film magazine Empire and author of The Last Action Heroes, a book about Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and other male stars of that era.
"He was completely broke and, overnight, he became a Hollywood and Oscar sensation. It's hard to think of another such dramatic turn [of fortune] in the history of cinema," he notes.
Anthony Ippolito agrees that there are strong parallels between Stallone and the character he created. "Of course there are differences, because Stallone was and is a very talented writer. He reads a lot and is more reflective than perhaps Rocky seems in the movie. But it is semi-autobiographical in many ways."
How the script came about
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In his recent memoir, titled The Steps, Stallone himself describes the moment in which the inspiration for Rocky arose, based on his own difficulties in succeeding as an actor.
When writing the script, he felt that other people would identify with his and the character's feelings of rejection.
"I couldn't be the only person, among billions, who felt like he was living a life of desperate frustration because the door of great opportunity had been slammed in his face again and again," he writes.
He had begun acting in college, but the biggest work of his career up to that point had been a supporting role in The Lords of Flatbush, a film with Henry Winkler, who would later play Fonzie in Happy Days.
Stallone had also starred in a softcore porn film in 1970 to pay his bills. "He saw himself as a serious actor, but he wasn't taken seriously at all," says de Semlyen.
"He liked poetry, he was a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, but he was always cast in thug roles. That's why he decided to write his own stories, because he was very frustrated with being typecast. And he made all of this come true with Rocky coming from a position where he had absolutely no power in the industry. It's a real miracle that this movie ever saw the light of day."
"Sylvester Stallone knew that Rocky was, in essence, his only chance to achieve what he wanted," Ippolito explains to the BBC. "He was approaching 30 years old, he had been trying to make his way in the industry for quite some time and I think he saw Rocky as 'the big break' for him."
In "I Am Rocky," the United Artists studio offers Stallone increasing sums to sell the script, as long as he allows a top star of the time, such as Burt Reynolds or Ryan O'Neal, to play the lead role.
But Stallone was determined that he, and only him, play Balboa. In reality, there are conflicting versions about how much money he was offered for the script; Stallone himself has said it was US$360,000. However, no matter how ruined he was, he did not give in.
The film was eventually made with him as Balboa, but the budget was only about $1 million, a fraction of what his independent producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, had wanted.
Their agreement with the studio stipulated that if the film was shot on a low enough budget, they would have complete control over the cast. But it was a risk for everyone involved to try to film a boxing drama with a very small budget and an inexperienced and unknown protagonist.
image copyrightAmazon MGM Studios
The legendary shoot
Rocky was filmed at a breakneck pace in 28 days by director John G. Avildsen. The filming has become legendary in film history.
Most of the scenes had to be filmed in one take, to save money and because there was no budget for special effects. Stallone permanently injured his knuckles while filming the scene in which Rocky hits frozen meat with his fists.
"Throughout filming, no one really believed in Stallone," he says of Semlyen. "When it was finished, the studio didn't like it; they didn't give it a big marketing push, it didn't go to the Cannes Film Festival or anything like that. It was only when they started showing it to the public that they were quite surprised to see that people identified with it."
Rocky went on to earn 10 Oscar nominations and won three, including Best Picture, while Stallone himself was nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. It also spawned a slew of sequels, some of which Stallone himself directed, and, most recently, the hit Creed film series, starring Michael B. Jordan. Stallone has also talked about the idea of writing a Rocky prequel.
With Rocky, de Semlyen says, Stallone created a new type of stubborn, underdog hero who has been a cornerstone of cinema ever since.
"Rocky doesn't give up, he just never does," he says. "Obviously, there had been action movies before, but there was something about bringing this particular man to the forefront, and the idea of an unstoppable force, that was quite novel. That was echoed in so many different action movies from then on. The idea of resilience, of not backing down, would become the fundamental principle of these movies to this day."
Why history has been so powerful
The story itself has "its own staying power, because the story of Stallone and Rocky is the story of an underdog on both levels. People want to believe to the extreme what [Stallone] went through to make this movie," journalist Mike Sielski, author of Going the Distance, a book about the making of Rocky, tells the BBC.
He also notes that Rocky is even more shocking for its radical ending, which goes against the Hollywood grain by having Rocky Balboa lose his fight against Creed.
"That's why it's such a feel-good movie, because he doesn't have to win in the end. When Apollo Creed takes down Rocky, Rocky says, 'Come on, I can take it longer!' We all want to imagine ourselves being Rocky in that moment, 'He can't beat me.' It touches on something about human nature: we want to see ourselves that way."
In fact, Sielski believes Rocky was such a phenomenon in America because his heroic underdog spirit resonated with a society that, in 1976, was "eager to find a reason to feel good again."
"There had been the Watergate scandal, there had been Vietnam," he continues. "The movies of that era revolved around antiheroes, especially when you think about the movies that were nominated [for the Oscars] in 1977 along with Rocky: Taxi Driver, which has no hero in the movie, or Network, which was a satirical take on the anger that America felt."
"Sometimes," Sielski concludes, "you get these situations in culture where you don't realize that people are hungry for something and no one is offering it to them. And then when an entity or a person or an institution does it, there's an explosion. That's what happened with Rocky."
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