Fifty years on, Rocky is still the truest manual ever written about what it costs to take the shot
There are movies you watch and movies you visit. Rocky is the second kind, for me. I go back to it every few years, never more than that, because a movie you can visit anytime is a movie you have stopped needing. I saw it the first time as a kid, on network television on a Sunday afternoon, the picture cut to ribbons for cussing and time, and it still went through me like weather. A man from a neighborhood like the ones I knew was being offered the thing that is not offered to men from neighborhoods like that, and the whole movie turned on a question so basic most films are terrified of it: will he take it? Not can he win. He cannot win. Will he take it.
I was raised around men who had opinions about that question. The block I grew up on was full of guys who had once been plausible: a Golden Gloves trophy in a shoebox, a scholarship that fell through, a voice that got good right around the time the drinking got serious. Some talked about the shot they never got. The smarter ones talked about the shot they never took. I did not have the language for the difference then. Rocky did, and it took me decades of rewatches to hear the movie say it out loud.
This month a movie about the making of that movie arrives in theaters. It is called I Play Rocky, Peter Farrelly directed it, it premiered at Toronto in September, and Anthony Ippolito plays the young Stallone with unnerving accuracy down to the droop of the mouth; Amazon MGM opens it wide on November 20. The strange thing about watching it is the recursion: a film about a fight to make a film about a fight, the myth eating its own tail. But the existence of the picture is its own review. Hollywood has been telling itself the Stallone story for fifty years the way preachers retell Jonah, as the industry's favorite sermon to itself, the one it only half believes. A broke, half-paralyzed nobody writes a screenplay in three days, refuses to sell it unless he stars in it, and the movie wins Best Picture. In a business that has spent a decade optimizing the risk out of everything, it is the last un-optimizable myth on the lot.
The climax of Rocky is not the fight. The fight is just where the truth gets announced. The climax is quieter and much harder to film: it is the moment a man with no reason to believe in himself agrees to get hit.
Begin at the face. Stallone was born in Hell's Kitchen in 1946, and a doctor's forceps severed a nerve in his cheek during the delivery, leaving the lower left side of his face partly paralyzed for life: the slurred s's, the drooping lip, the famous snarl that a hundred imitators have turned into comedy and that he could never fully turn off. The other kids called him Sly, and it was not a compliment. He was bounced through dead-end schools, remedial classes, a military academy in Maryland, a stretch of adolescence in Philadelphia, and he took the insult as a career plan, with the specific stubbornness of a kid told he is stupid by adults who are wrong. He studied drama at the University of Miami, left a few credits shy of a degree, and in 1969 went to New York to be a movie star with no visible means of becoming one.
New York chewed on him for six years. He slept, by his own account, for a period in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He cleaned lion cages, ushered at a theater, took bit parts that mostly came without screen credits, sixteen roles in six years, and most of them you would have to count. He auditioned under other names, Mike, and worse. To make rent he appeared, for $200, in a softcore picture called The Party at Kitty and Stud's, a decision that followed him for life and about which he was never sentimental: he was broke, the money was real, he took it. Nights, he wrote scripts nobody asked for. His then-girlfriend, then-wife, Sasha Czack, pregnant and working and keeping the two of them upright, told him the thing the new biopic makes its hinge: stop waiting for the phone. Write the parts you want to play. It is the oldest advice in the world and almost nobody takes it, because taking it means admitting the phone is not going to ring.
And there is the dog. In the leanest stretch, unable to afford dog food, Stallone sold his bull terrier, Butkus, for forty dollars outside a 7-Eleven, then stood there and watched the guy walk away with his dog, a detail you could not put in a screenplay because the audience would call it too much. The price he later paid to buy Butkus back is different in every retelling, from a few hundred dollars to fifteen thousand, and Stallone has never kept his own numbers straight, which is fine. Myths round off. The dog appeared in the first two Rocky films, beside him on the couch, and died in 1981, famous, which is more than most of us can promise our dogs.
The night everything turned was March 24, 1975. Stallone went to a closed-circuit broadcast of Muhammad Ali defending the heavyweight championship against Chuck Wepner, a Bayonne liquor salesman and part-time fighter known, because of what happens to his face, as the Bleeder. Nobody gave Wepner a round. He lasted nearly the full fifteen, and in the ninth he did the impossible thing: he put Muhammad Ali on the canvas. Ali got up, called it a trip, and finished Wepner with nineteen seconds left in the fight, but the image had already burned itself in. Stallone went home and started writing, and three days later there was a screenplay, ninety pages, called Rocky.
Producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler loved it. United Artists loved it. Everyone loved it, and here is the part that has kept the story alive for fifty years: nobody wanted Stallone in it. They wanted a star, a Robert Redford, a Burt Reynolds, a James Caan, and they offered money to make him walk away, then more money, the figures rising depending on whose memoir you believe: $150,000, then a reported $360,000, close to $2 million in today's money, for the script alone. At the time there were, by his account, periods when he had $106 in the bank. His wife was pregnant. He had sold his dog for groceries. He turned it all down with the line the whole myth hangs from: he would rather bury the script in the backyard and let the caterpillars play Rocky.
He had a hundred and six dollars in the bank, a pregnant wife, a dog he had sold to eat, and he turned down three hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Writers talk about believing in your work. Stallone defined the term, in the negative, with numbers.
The studio blinked, but the way studios blink: down. They paid him $35,000 for the script, scale wages for the acting, capped the budget at around a million dollars, and wrote a clause allowing them to replace him the moment the production fell behind. He signed it: he had never carried a picture, had a partially paralyzed face, and was now contractually fireable. They shot it in twenty-eight days, largely in Philadelphia, with a new gadget called the Steadicam because it was cheaper than laying dolly track, and with the star's own reclaimed dog in the cast because a trained animal was not in the budget. The picture that could not be made for a million dollars became the highest-grossing film of 1976, made more than $200 million worldwide, and took ten Academy Award nominations, winning Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing, over Taxi Driver and Network and All the President's Men. Stallone was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay, the third man in history, after Chaplin and Welles, to be nominated for writing and acting in the same film. That is the trailer of the myth. But the myth has a language, and the language is what I actually want to talk about, because that is where the thing is more than a story. It is a textbook.
Read the Rocky screenplay and the first thing you notice is that the vernacular is not decoration, it is architecture. Rocky Balboa calls himself a ham-and-egger, the period's beautiful term for a club fighter who fights for the meal, and the word does more work in two syllables than most scripts do in a monologue. The dialogue is written the way broke people talk about money, which is precisely, because they have to count. The film's whole economic philosophy arrives in a two-line exchange about a holiday. Adrian mentions that she brought him food on Thanksgiving. Rocky says it was not Thanksgiving to him. It was Thursday. Nothing in the screenplay is dressed up. Apollo Creed's handlers dismiss Rocky as a southpaw, because southpaws do everything backwards. Rocky's favorite word is absolutely, delivered like a man signing for a package. When Paulie, drunk and cruel and a masterpiece of character writing, asks what Rocky even sees in Adrian, Rocky says she fills gaps. She has gaps, he has gaps. Together, they fill each other's gaps. That is the most honest sentence about love in seventies American cinema, and it arrives in a boxing movie, from a guy with a broken nose.
The second thing you notice is the refusal. When the promoter Jergens offers Rocky the title shot, Rocky's first word is no. Sit with that. The miracle arrives, the once-in-a-lifetime chance, and the screenplay has its hero decline it, politely, on the grounds that he knows exactly what he is: I'm really a ham-and-egger, and this guy's the best. It wouldn't be such a good fight. Every other sports movie, before and since, begins with the hero hungrily grabbing the chance. This one begins with a man doing the math on himself and finding the numbers humiliating. That is the level of honesty in the writing. Stallone was exactly that broke, and either way the script has the smell of a man writing down to the last dollar he actually had.
And the third thing, the thing that makes the script unique in the whole genre: Rocky never once says he can win. His goal, stated on the ice rink to Adrian in the film's most quietly devastating speech, is to go the distance, to be standing when the final bell rings, because if he can do that, then for the first time in his life he will know he wasn't just another bum from the neighborhood. The screenplay redefines victory as duration. Not triumph: survival with witnesses. It is the only version of the underdog story where the underdog's dream is modest enough to be real, and that is precisely why, when he does better than his dream, it lands like a thunderclap. The script never lies about the odds, which is how it earns the right to defy them.
But the scene I came here to talk about, the one I watch through my fingers every few years like a guy visiting a grave, is the apartment scene. It comes the night after the offer. Rocky has walked home through the rain and sat alone with the impossible thing that has just been proposed, and there is a knock. It is Mickey, the gym owner, seventy-six years old, who has spent the whole movie ignoring him. Mickey wants to manage him now that there is something to manage. He stands there in the dim apartment holding a bare lightbulb to his own scarred face, cataloging the wreckage of a fifty-year career in the racket: twenty-one stitches over one eye, thirty-four over the other, a nose busted seventeen times. He has knowledge, he says. He wants to give it to the kid. I've got pain, Mickey says, and I've got experience. And Rocky, flat, four words that cut the old man off at the knees: Well, I've got pain, and I've got experience too.
Then it comes apart, and Stallone, who was allegedly channeling a lifetime of feeling about his own dismissive father, lets the whole ten years out of the bag. Took you long enough to get here, Rocky says. Took you ten years to come to my house. What's the matter, you don't like my house? That's right, it stinks! I didn't ask no favors from you! Don't slum around me! Talking about your prime. What about my prime, Mick? Least you had a prime! I didn't have no prime, I didn't have nothin'! Legs are goin', everything's goin'! And you wanna be ringside and see it? You wanna help me out? You wanna see me get my face kicked in? Come on in, it's a nice house! Real nice! It stinks! This whole place stinks! You wanna help me out? Well, help me out! Come on, help me out! I'm standing here!
He is punching the mattress while he says it. Burgess Meredith, playing Mickey, takes it in the face and leaves, and the scene does not resolve. There is no apology, no hug, no score swelling under a teachable moment. The next day Rocky simply shows up at the gym and starts being coached, because that is how peace actually gets made between men like that: not with speeches, but by appearing at the appointed hour with your gloves. The movie never goes back to the argument. It happened, it emptied something, and it is over.
Ten years of being invisible does not vanish when opportunity finally knocks. It has to come out of you first, out loud, in the direction of somebody who didn't see you. Then, and only then, can you get up at four in the morning and drink the eggs.
Every underdog story you have ever seen skips this scene, because this scene is not inspirational. It is the part where the blame is rationed out, and it turns out there is plenty to go around: for the gatekeepers who never looked, and for the man who kept showing up to be ignored, and for the fact of a world that gives the Dipper-types of the locker room the shot first. The Disney version cannot air a hero's grievances, because grievances are ugly, and the ugly fact is that nearly everyone who ever caught a break caught it from someone who had ignored them for years. The Rocky apartment scene is the only honest dramatization I know of what that moment actually costs. The rage has to be spent before the resolve can be built. You cannot get to the training montage while you are still keeping score.
Because now look at what the movie treats as its climax. It is not the fight, which it burns through with an almost documentary indifference, and it is not even the knockdowns. It is the sequence that follows the yes: the four-a.m. alarm, the raw eggs, the meat locker, Mickey promising the kid that he is going to eat lightnin' and he is gonna crap thunder, and finally the run through a gray Philadelphia dawn to the front steps of the Museum of Art, where Rocky, half-dead, makes it to the top on his second try and throws his fists in the air while Bill Conti's fanfare detonates around him. The score is the most famous sixty seconds of film music of the century, and it is played over a man doing roadwork. That is the point of no return, played as triumph. The fight afterward is just the receipt.
Watch it again, knowing what you know now. In the first film, he runs alone. The packs of children sprinting at his heels, that is the sequels, that is success arriving and getting choreographed. In 1976 it is one man and some early-morning Steadicam and a city that does not know he exists, and the film spends the money it saved on everything else on making that mythic: the ordinary act of a man getting himself into condition to be destroyed by the best in the world, framed like a coronation. Rocky wins the right to lose. That is the whole movie, and when he is in the ring taking the beating he signed up for, bleeding on purpose, what he calls out at the end is not the decision, which he never hears. It is Adrian. Yo, Adrian! I did it! Not I won. I did it. The distinction is the film's entire philosophy, delivered in a shout from a swollen face.
I am a writer, and I am telling you all this because I spend my years in one of the harshest traditional publishing environments anyone now alive can remember, and I have found no better manual for it than this movie. The state of the trade: agents list themselves closed to queries for months at a time; the major houses have consolidated into a fistful of conglomerates that mostly want the sure thing; advances for debuts have sagged while the manuscripts chasing them have multiplied past counting; the slush human beings must read is now salted with machine-generated prose at industrial volume; and the midlist, the old middle class of the writing life, keeps shrinking. Nobody owes me an apology. That is not a complaint; it is terrain. And Rocky, who also worked in a business that ran on other people's yeses, would recognize every inch of it.
The gym phase of that life is the years of being unexceptional in public. Your work is good enough to keep out of the trash and not, yet, good enough to get your name on a locker; there is always some Dipper getting the attention, and a Mick somewhere, an editor, an agent, a gatekeeper of any size, who has never once looked your way. And the apartment phase, the phase I find most interesting, is the part no workshop I have ever attended warns you about: the phase that comes after the shot is offered and before the man says yes. This is where most of the people who don't make it actually live, and not for a season; they live there into old age. It is the phase of the comfortable grievance, of the manuscript in the drawer and the agent who never answered in 2019, of rancor kept warm like a stove, of self-pity drinking buddies. Paulie is the patron saint of it, if saints can curse out their only friend on Thanksgiving. The movie is honest enough to show you the apartment so that you will leave it.
Stallone's playbook transcribes into the writing life with almost embarrassing neatness. One: write the part only you can play. He wrote a screenplay for a slow-talking, damaged, half-paralyzed palooka and then insisted on playing it because he was the only person who could; every real book works the same way, being the one manuscript only your ruin and your ten years could produce. Two: insist on the package. He made it tiresome, saying to every producer in Los Angeles that the script came with him in it, until the choice was to deal with him or have no script. Self-advocacy is a muscle, indecent to use, and he used it anyway, at $106 net worth, while hungry. Three: sign the replaceable clause. His deal let the studio fire him if he fell behind, the clause every writer I know lives under every day of a writing life. He took the fight knowing it could end with his face kicked in, because that beat the backyard and the caterpillars.
Nobody in that gym owed Rocky a look, and nobody in this business owes me one. That's not the injustice. The injustice would be me staying in the apartment with the lights off, waiting for an apology that has never once arrived in the history of the sport.
I watched it again last week, ahead of the biopic opening, older now than Stallone was when he made the thing. What I notice at this age is not the staircase or the score. It is the night before, in the stinking apartment, the man saying out loud, at the one person who could hear it, every ugly thing that ten unlooked-at years had put in him, and then getting up the next morning and going to the gym anyway. The climb up the museum steps is what the cameras came for, and it deserves the fanfare, but the fight was already over by then. It was decided at home, in the dark, off-screen of everybody's life, the night he agreed to take the shot. Whoever is in that dank apartment tonight, I wrote this for you. They are going to offer somebody the chance of a lifetime, and the bell is going to ring whether you are ready or not, and the only sin the movie knows is not being in it. If I can go that distance, if I am still standing when the last round ends, then for the first time in my life I will know for sure.
I wasn't just another bum from the neighborhood.
| About the Author
Robert Cavaliere is a novelist
