40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic

It was early in the morning

on the streets of Philadelphia.

It was freezing cold.

And I just started to feel something welling inside.

And they go, "Sly, are you ready?"

I go, "I'm not.

"But Rocky is."

I was a complete unknown, even unknown to myself.

And I had this idea.

A lot of peo

e were feeling kind of the way I was, going nowhere fast.

And I didn't know whether I had it or not.

So I wrote this story about an underdog,

a person who wasn't very appreciated,

and I was

ven a break by United Artist and now, you had to put up or shut up,

so I couldn't believe my good fortune

and every day we'd go to the studio

and work on the script a little bit.

Of course, I had a bit of an odd personality I guess.

Maybe I was born

o play this part, I don't know, but it just seemed to fit into all the things

that I sort of believed in.

Anyway, we started working on

experimental ideas about boxing.

There had been many boxing films like,

maybe over 300 made in Hollywood

and they weren't very successful so

I couldn't believe my good luck here

when they're doing a boxing film about this character.

But the point is, it wasn't a boxing film.

It was a story about obsolescence,

about not getting an opportunity in life,

and more importantly, eventually, a serious love story.

And he happens to be a boxer.

So the relationship comes a little bit later on

but it's the key to the whole movie.

John Avildsen in the background.

He always took these, he's driving me crazy

with these eight millimeter films

but here we are, so I'm glad he did it.

But at the time I thought, what a waste of film.

Now, Mike Westmore, who was a great, great, great

makeup artist, part of the Westmore family,

he started doing all of the experiments.

Here again, I'm just overdoing everything.

Makeup tests.

And it was great, but I ended up with barely any eyebrows

left the rest of my life, so there is that.

At one time I actually wanted Rocky to look

very, very punchy and I thought,

why don't you glue my nose to the side of my face?

So they got this kind of colostomy bad glue

and it was so bad, it looked like a cartoon,

like I had run into a wall like Gumby.

So anyway as you can see, I took things to kind of extremes.

I mean, it looks like a lost clam.

We got lucky with Burgess Meredith

who was a world class actor with 50 years experience

and he took it very serious.

He was f

tastic and developed his characterthat was based on a real character

and he had all the mannerisms.

'Cause I did real good last night,

and you should've seen me.

Big deal.

You should've seen me, too.

Hey, kid.

You ever think about retiring?

No.

You think about it.

My friend Stan Shaw in the back.

Great guy.

I didn't know anything.

You know, I talked a good game like, yeah, I'm a good boxer.

I didn't know how to box anything, except maybe oranges.

But I was willing to try.

The character was not supposed to be a gifted fighter.

He was gifted in other ways.

He just could take an incredible amount of punishment,

and he was fighting for an ideal.

He had no allusions that he was a winner,

he just wanted an opportunity.

Then we came across this amazing guy, Carl Weathers,

the gr

test film boxer of all time.

This man could move.

Well, he was a world class athlete and a great actor,

but God, could he move.

This is us really beginning to figure it out.

There was a situation happening.

They had hired a choreographer

and the choreographer was used to doing old-fashioned films

like you hit me, I hit you, you hit me, I hit you.

And that's what was normally done in a closeup of two guys

just sort of, as we say, shoe-shining.

One-two, one-two, one-two, one-two.

And I thought you know, let's try to do something different.

Oh, look who just popped up.

My brother.

He was a great singer, is a great singer,

and I thought well, since I can't afford anyone else,

I'll use him.

Now here's him in the ring,

really showing his love and appreciation for the job.

Appreciate it, like start tackling me, knocking me down.

Of course I'm trying to make him feel good here

by getting a concussion.

Back to Carl, he's improving a great deal.

And I said to the stunt coordinator,

I said, "Why doesn't Carl come out

"and hit me like four jabs on the right?

He goes, "That isn't the way it is."

I said, "Well how about three jabs on the right?"

He goes, "No, just follow my thing."

I said, "Well, I wanna see something different."

He goes, "Okay.

"I quit."

So he left, and I was stuck,

and Irwin looked at me like hey, who are you to...

Well this is the guy actually right before he left.

His name was I think Stackler or something like that.

Nice guy, but he had his

old-fashioned way of doing something,

and I wanted it to look as close to real as possible,

and usually boxing films,

the actors really were not in any kind of great shape

and they didn't work any kind of choreography,

it was sort of done on the fly.

You hit me, I hit you,

and no one was ever in really excellent shape

so we started writing it up.

The director said hey, why don't you write it out?

And I thought okay, you mean like a dance?

Absolutely like a dance.

Then we hired Jimmy Nickerson

and he got in some semi-pros here

who blocked out the actual real boxing

and I would study it and go hmm,

that's believable, that's believable.

And then I started to borrow things from the world's greatest fights

and condense them into moments in our film.

So everything you've ever seen in Rocky

has actually happened before.

In the back there's famous Gene LeBell,

world famous stuntman and Judo champion.

This is all practice footage,

and he's working on Jimmy Nickerson

who insists on him actually hitting him a lot,

which I don't know what was going through Jimmy's head.

He actually did get knocked out.

There's Gene LeBell practicing.

He's overacting as his (laughs)

as a referee.

I never

w a referee get into a full squat, but why not?

This is footage that was never seen in the movie.

It was supposed to be in the movie.

Rocky is watching Apollo knock all these people out.

Mickey is going, "You don't have a chance," basically.

This is a real fighter named Sonny Shields,

father of the world class fighter named Randy Shields.

He thought Carl was just an actor,

I said he's a powerful man, and he blasted him,

and eventually knocked him down again, for real.

We never used this footage, which is unfortunate.

It was a work in progress.

So in between setups, I would constantly be re-writing

and re-writing (laughs)

and trying to make this thing work

for the budget that we had, which was nothing.

And our locations were pretty,

you know, pretty sparse.

But you know, I think that worked out for the best.

I hadn't figured out Rocky's color combination,

so this is just us practicing basically choreography

and makeup tests.

And you can see like the ropes hanging on the ground.

This was again, just for us,

too much smoke or too much makeup,

we were trying to figure out.

Like this.

Hey, anybody want a hamburger?

How you doin'?

Like, little bit of overacting

putting the cart in front of the horse here.

I think Carl again, this was mostly a makeup test.

This place was freezing by the way,

it was in the dead of winter, so.

It was not conducive to moving around a lot.

But again, we did what we could

because we were borrowing the Olympic Auditorium.

And we're seeing how close we could get with the punches.

Those are actual eight ounce gloves

that are not doctored up,

and when you get hit with them, it's...

My eye is closed, your depth perception

is way off.

So this is what these rehearsals helped with,

figuring out what works and what doesn't work.