Sly Stallone From Outsider to Action Hero

There was a time when the name of Sylvester Stallone inspired respect as an outstanding cinematic talent. His big break in Tinseltown was writing. For his first leading role, Stallone received two Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay, as well as many high accolades. Roger Ebert wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times that Sylvester Stallone reminded him of Marlon Brando and compared this performance to Mr. Mumbles’ performance in The Waterfront (1954). Indeed, Lee J. Cobb from this film even told Stallone that if he could write like Sly, he would never become an actor.

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see how this oft-underrated writer became the epitome of 1980s masculinity. Stallone is a big star whose brand has long since replaced his work, and whose characters define and limit him. The most obvious and appropriate of these is, of course, the very role that brought him great success and applause … Rocky. Stallone – his story literally begins with his birth. Born in 1946, the young Stallone suffered complications while leaving the womb. During his birth, midwives were forced to use two pairs of forceps and accidentally cut a nerve. The medical failure paralyzed the lower left side of Stallone’s face, giving him his trademark growl and one-of-a-kind slurred accent. Many action fans know that Stallone

studied acting and writing at the American College in Switzerland, or that he dropped out of said school, and they may feel that he ended up living in a major American city. At the age of 20, Stallone gave up acting to devote himself entirely to writing. He became a member of the classic New York bohemia, weighed down by the miseries of existence. The man who was supposed to be Rambo painted the windows black, and decided to recreate the tone of Edgar Allan Poe in his works. Like Balboa, he imagined himself to be a sensitive soul. At the same time, he was evicted from his apartment and slept at the Port Authority bus station for almost three weeks before landing his first movie role. As Stud in the 1970 softcore film Kitty and Stud’s Party. The $200 he received for the role allowed him to eat again and eventually find his way to Hollywood.

Returning to acting gave Sly new opportunities, but they also limited him. He was always depicted as a muscle or a thug in the background. In his brief appearance in Woody Allen’s classic Bananas (1971), he plays a New York mobster who robs the neurotic protagonist. Despite getting married during these years, Stallone still painted his Los Angeles apartment black and continued to sink into preconceived notions about his hulking behavior. His obsessions gave him the chance to rewrite Lords of Flatbush (1974), a film in which Stallone co-starred with Henry Winkler. Then Stallone met Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff in 1975. He gave them both his script about a man fighting in a 1940s professional wrestling ring with two brothers. However, Winkler said that

he admired Stallone’s dialogue and asked if he had anything else up his sleeve. It so happened that the story of the underdog boxer was mulled over in the actor/writer for several months. In March of that year, Stallone saw a shocking heavyweight bout featuring Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali. In the ninth round of the fight, Wepner knocked down the champion. Of course, Ali got up and won by TKO in the 15th round, but the fighter who had a 30-to-1 odds against him went the distance. Ignoring that Ali had already passed his peak during the fight, or any racial implications of it “inspiring” white viewers, it was still seen as a moment of athletic excellence; especially for a struggling actor who was never considered a contender. A few days later, Stallone submitted an 80-page handwritten draft of Rocky, a script he had developed for himself.

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Winkler and Chartoff liked the lyrics and offered to buy it from Sly for $20,000. For a writer with less than $200 in the bank account, it was like hitting the jackpot. But yes, Stallone refused. They gradually raised their offer again and again until Robert Redford expressed interest in playing the Italian stallion and he raised the offer to $200,000. But Stallone still refused. No matter how much money was thrown at him, Stallone knew that he had literally written the part for himself and the opportunity would never come again. The producers’ offer reached $360,000, but Stallone was always turned down and wanted to go further. They eventually gave Sly the lead role, for $340 a week plus $20,000 for the script. Rocky (1976) is a seminal film for Stallone and the medium in general.

Stallone has said many times that Rocky Balboa is indeed his career. However, there is something really innocent and pure about the character. Stallone created him out of hunger and longing as a failed talent, but he is an ordinary person, which we all see ourselves as. The little guy who deserves more than life shit on him. Rocky redefined cinematic underdog history for all time. Virtually all sports films made after 1976 follow the formula of this film. Forgotten Rock gets a title shot with heavyweight champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) by sheer luck. Apollo needs an Italian male Cinderella (as in the Christopher Columbus myth) to replace him with boxing meat for his 1976 bicentennial fight in Philadelphia. And Rock, a product of 20th-century American immigrant history (Stallone’s own father was from Gioia del Colle, Apulia, Italy), arbitrarily fit the bill.

The final scene of Rocky is still one of the most satisfying moments in cinematic history. Unlike other conventional sports films, including numerous Rocky sequels, the underdog doesn’t win. His fight with Apollo may have ended in a draw, and the judges awarded the champion the win. However, Rocky has proven his worth to himself and the world as more than just a bum. After all, Rocky isn’t even a sports movie. This is a story of self-realization and love. Rocky takes on true superiority when he hugs Adrian in the very last shots of the movie. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director among competitors.

Like Balboa, Stallone was at the pinnacle of a career that instantly elevated him to the list of the best in his industry. Stallone’s first major work after Rocky was his long-awaited passion project Paradise Alley (1978). He wrote the screenplay for a dark character drama set in the New York area. He went behind the lens for his first directorial work. Obviously, he played Victor, a bankrupt businessman from a family of businessmen who broke into professional wrestling at the cost of their souls.

Stallone’s second semi-autobiographical drama about another opponent was a critical and box office failure, leaving Sly ready to return to the boxing ring for Rocky 2. Rocky II fulfilled the promise of the original ending when the Philadelphia southpaw defeated Apollo in a rematch. It also commented on Rocky’s newfound fame and reflected Stallone’s own discomfort with fame. This was clearly not the case in Rocky III (1982). Six years after Rocky went all the way to the Oscars, Stallone has become famous in sports films. He starred in John Huston’s breakneck film Victory (1982), in which he played a football POW with Michael Caine and Pelé against the Nazis in wartime Paris. By the end of the movie

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Rocky, trained by Apollo, is able to beat Mr. T in the ring and overcome the softness of fame (although in real life, Stallone reduced his body fat to an unhealthy 2.8 percent for the role). The need for a hit and another character role far exceeded his creative vision in the 1970s. Sly was no longer a writer with something to prove, but a hired creative weapon looking for a new image away from the arena. He wrote and co-starred with Dolly Parton in Rock Crystal (1984), a country musical about Dolly that turns his character into that genre. Stallone also directed and wrote the Saturday Night Fever sequel, Lost (1983). Stallone couldn’t find a new way to express himself artistically until a new icon appeared. This next role defined his career more than it could ever have done.

During the Vietnam War, David Morrell became a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. Between 1970 and 1972, he saw an influx of students returning from Vietnam suffering from what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After interviewing many of them, Morrell wrote the novel First Blood in 1972. It was a brooding and cynical story about a Vietnam veteran named John Rambo who had a nervous breakdown and gunned down a small American town. The film rights were immediately sold and just as quickly shelved when the Vietnam War finally came to an end.

“First Blood” was back on the table and after a few sketches fell under Sylvester Stallone. His first impulse was to soften the violence. In earlier outlines written over the previous seven years, Rambo’s rampage was a bloody affair during which he killed 18 civilians, much like the target practice on Parris Island. The only person he kills in the entire movie is partially responsible because he was not wearing a seat belt when he shot the anti-hero from a helicopter. The film First Blood (1982) portrays the Vietnam veteran as a more sympathetic victim of the American government than the source material.

In the original ending of the film, as in the book, the colonel executes the monster he created by putting a bullet in Rambo’s head. During filming, Stallone realized that telling veterans that death might be the only possible end to their suffering was cruel and inappropriate. He rewrote it so that Rambo is arrested and taken away to seek salvation. Douglas was furious at such an ending and argued that Rambo’s death was the only artistically valid conclusion. Stallone did change the ending though, and Douglas immediately left the set to be replaced by Richard Crenna. Years later, Douglas met with Sylvester Stallone and said, “My ending is even better.” He also admitted that it would have cost Sly a billion dollars. Douglas is probably right that the tragic tone of First Blood would have been better suited to a darker ending.

But this change also meant a shift in Stallone’s career. Because, like Rocky, we saw John Rambo many more times, and (like Rocky) he became a superhero show during the Reagan days. If Rocky Balboa drew with his zeitgeist from post-Vietnam, post-Watergate American audiences who wanted to rally around the little guy (after all, they elected a farmer president that same year), then Rambo and the muscular action heroes he spawned , became a product of the jingoism of the Reagan era. The President of the United States compared his handling of the 1985 tax cuts with Congressional Democrats to the way Rambo took care of business in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985). In this movie, Rambo is landed in Vietnam again and gives the Americans the ending they know they deserve!

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The President even invited Stallone and his new fiancee to the White House after the film’s release. After the 1985 TWA hostage situation, in which Lebanese terrorists hijacked a plane with more than 150 passengers and flight crew (most of them Americans), President Reagan remarked, “Boy, I saw Rambo last night. I know what to do next time it happens!” More than Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris or any other action movie of that decade, Stallone created a cinematic superman whose muscle alone was enough to mow down entire armies of the Third World. Even Rocky Balboa took part in the filming of Rocky IV (1985). In his fourth adventure, Rocky travels to Soviet Russia to defeat the 7-foot tall man played by Dolph Lundgren and avenge the death of Captain America, uh, Apollo Creed.

The most absurdly brilliant of these Team America love letters remains Rambo III (1988). In the latest Reagan-era Rambo movie, the protagonist Sly is forced to leave his zen retreat in Thailand by Trautman and travels to Afghanistan to team up with the Mujahideen and kill the Russians! Mujahideen factions later became the modern-day Taliban that the Americans are now fighting in our own Afghan war. The last frame of “Rambo III” dedicates the film to “the brave Mujahideen of Afghanistan”… yes. There’s no denying that Sylvester Stallone carved a surprisingly lucrative niche for himself and a generation of men who would become action movie icons.

Toward the end of the 1980s, Reagan’s optimism was crushed by the 1988 recession. Hollywood fads also evolved with new action stars such as the very unripped but witty Bruce Willis in Die Hard (1988), while Michael Keaton used a rubber suit for his muscles in Batman (1989). In 1990, with the Cold War hanging in the balance that Gorbachev intended to cut, Rocky V crashed and burned out at the box office. In the 1990s, Sly achieved creative and financial success. He did Die Hard on the Mountain with the vertigo that was in Cliffhanger (1993).

Stallone starred in a lousy cop comedy with Kurt Russell in Tango and the Money (1989) and an erotic thriller with Sharon Stone in The Specialist (1994). He played one of the worst superheroes of all time in Judge Dredd (1995) and even emulated the Schwarzenegger family comedy formula in the legendary Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992). The days of Rambo seemed to be over, and all that was left was the bloat that Stallone’s own Rocky III lyrics warned about and satirized about. If his alter ego always remained stoic, Stallone looked like he was drowning, and no one in Hollywood wanted to swim too close to the end of the 90s. This period left Stallone hungrier than he’s likely been since producing Rocky. He ended the decade surprising audiences with the kind of talent Ebert once trumpeted 20 years ago. For Police Land (1997), Stallone received a salary of just $60,000 and added 41 pounds of carbohydrates to his body.

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In James Mangold’s film, he played a hearing-impaired small-town New Jersey sheriff (not unlike Stallone’s paralysis in real life) who watches over tough NYPD detectives played by acting legends Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta. As in real life, other members of Stallone’s profession look down on him as a lightweight and pretender. Thus, when Keitel’s dirty drug schemes cross the river, Sly has something to prove to them and to his soul. Although even Stallone would not say that he is on the same level as them.

In the 1970s, no one wanted to star in a Rocky movie starring the unfashionable Sylvester Stallone. It took him six years to produce Rocky Balboa (2006). Supposedly the latest Rocky movie could still be a hater in need of a beating at his nursing home in the future. superbly revisited its 1976 roots, stripping away the excesses and frills of the 1980s. And again, like Stallone, Balboa had something to say about aging in the spotlight, but with much more grace than his real-life counterpart.

Rocky Balboa became a real hit for the actor with the public, in nostalgia for the 1980s. After seeing profits of over $150 million worldwide, Stallone decided it was time to bring John Rambo back for “one last time”. And indeed Rambo (2008) wasn’t as well received by critics as Rocky VI, but Rambo’s fourth adventure still won over a huge audience that wanted to see Stallone kill every member of the Burmese military regime in Myanmar. Rambo confirmed the hefty action heroes we now live in. Stallone wrote, directed, and starred in The Expendables (2010), the Avengers of aging 1980s action stars.