Sylvester Stallone's Last Fight
At 60, Sylvester Stallone is resurrecting the Italian Stallion with 'Rocky Balboa.' So how much does Sly have left in the tank?
By Pat Jordan
Sylvester Stallone, at 60, is too busy to kill coyotes these days. There are too many of them. Let them roam. He has more important things to worry about. A new movie, premiering December 22, Rocky Balboa. Stallone, as Rocky, has been climbing into a boxing ring for almost 30 years, ever since the original Rocky, in 1976, won three Oscars, including Best Picture. Rocky earned over $117 million and instantly made Stallone a wealthy and famous man. His next three Rockys earned an average of $110 million, but by the time Rocky V was made, 16 years ago, Stallone's fans had lost their enthusiasm. That film earned a mere $41 million, and it was assumed, by most people, that a stake had been driven into the heart of the Rocky franchise, and, not incidentally, Stallone's career. But Stallone, who describes his latest Rocky as a man who "goes against common sense," and has more "will" than "skill," refused to let Rocky die and has resurrected his alter ego for one last fight.
"I wanted to show I had balls at 60," he says. "So they couldn't write me off." He says Rocky V failed because it was too depressing. "Too much egotism, all that underbelly of Rocky's life. No one wants to see Superman on a drinking binge." So he created, in Rocky Balboa, a character who "wins his peace of mind, who deals with the frustrations of his youth as an old man, without screaming, the only way he knows how. Through his body. Rocky has always been a guy who's about giving and receiving pain, purging old pain with new."
Rocky, like Stallone, has always been less a cerebral character than a character who "listens to his gut," says Stallone. "Just 'cause society says I'm old doesn't mean I am. I'm pursuing happiness even if it makes the people around me unhappy. Sure, I made wrong turns in my life, but I want one more shot to go out on my terms. People said my time had come and gone. No one believed in this project. The producers of the previous Rockys said they had 'no interest. Never! Never! Rocky's dead.' But that's what movies are about. Going against unbelievable skepticism. It's about raging, blind optimism."
When Stallone talks about his latest film, he does so with the same "raging" enthusiasm he always has. He talks about his camera techniques (he directs as well as stars), how the fight scenes are so much more authentic than in the previous Rocky movies, which were all cartoonish Bams! Pows! and comically distorted facial reactions. Even the characters are more realistic, he says. "Local color from Philly. This one girl I saw on the street in front of a drug rehab. I stopped the car and said, 'You wanna be in a movie?' She said, 'I don't know about no fuckin' movie.' I said, 'Perfect.' "
Stallone describes a lot of the characters in Rocky Balboa as "19- to 20-year-old, hard-bitten druggies who don't know who I am. 'I heard you was good once,' they tell Rocky. 'Buy us a drink.' In one scene they call a woman I'm with a whore, so I slam this kid up against a car. It awakened new emotions in me." He means, in Rocky. Or does he?
Stallone is not unaware that his latest Rocky might be met with cynicism and derision. Already, before the movie's release, Stallone and his alter ego have become the butt of Hollywood jokes. David Letterman imagined some Rocky Balboa dialogue along the lines of "Yo, Adrian, got my Lipitor?" The Miami Herald claimed that the film was irrefutable proof "that mankind has officially run out of ideas."
When he told his wife, Jennifer Flavin, he was planning another Rocky, she said, "Why do you want to expose yourself to humiliation?" He replied, "I know I'm not what I usta be. But I'd rather do something badly I love, than feel bad because I didn't do something I love."
Stallone hasn't had a starring role in a hit movie in ten years. During that long dry spell, he busied himself with trivial interests, all of which had to do with his body, which was always more his currency than his acting. He wrote a fitness book. He came out with a line of vitamin and dietary supplements called Instone. He hosted The Contender, a reality boxing series. He published a lifestyle magazine titled Sly for men between the ages of 35 and 55, with the help of American Media Inc., the tabloid publisher of The National Enquirer and Star. A spokesman for AMI said at the time, "Sly approached us, and we thought it was cool. He's the ultimate guy. He wasn't afraid to talk about his mistakes. He financed part of it and AMI the rest. We'll publish three to six issues at least."
Sly, the magazine, lasted three issues.
Such ventures were a sad comedown for an actor whose five Rocky and three Rambo movies, all written or cowritten by Sly, grossed almost $2 billion worldwide and made him, at $25 million a picture, the highest paid actor of his day. And then, in the '90s, people stopped coming to his movies, and Hollywood stopped asking him to make movies. He says he has nobody to blame but himself. "I became arrogant," he says.
Sly was on the first cover of his magazine, showing his good side, his muscular and vascular right arm, not his smaller, smoother left. Inside, there were a lot of buff male models hawking hair, skin, diet, testosterone, and sex enhancement products along with articles about slowing down "Father Time" and "growing old gracefully," and maintaining better erections. The subject of sex figured prominently in Sly. There was advice on how to get women in bed ("Make her feel beautiful") and how to catch a cheating wife (Buy a semen detection kit).
Stallone also included in the first issue excerpts from his Rocky Balboa script, which, he said then, even the actors hadn't seen. The script is revelatory about Stallone, as all his movies have been. It opens with Rocky and his friend and brother-in-law, Paulie, at Adrian's grave. Paulie tells Rocky, "Rememberin' stuff don't feel so good," and "Ya can't change nuthin'." Another character tells his fighter about respect, "You ain't gonna get it, 'cause once people have made up their minds about who a man is, it really ain't ever changin' much," which is why "self-respect . . . that's the only kinda respect that means a damn thing." His fighter responds, "Ya'll put a label on, an' when that label's on, it don't come off — no matter what the hell I do."'
The excerpt ends with Rocky telling a woman, "One second they like ya, next second you're a bum." (Joe Roth, the producer of Rocky Balboa, along with MGM and Sony, says he was drawn to the film because the aging Rocky was a man "desperate to not make a third act of his life go in anonymity." Talia Shire, who played Rocky's wife, Adrian, in the previous Rocky movies, and whose character appears in flashbacks in the new movie, has said, "Sylvester was always putting issues from his own life in his movies.")
Sprinkled throughout Sly were Stallone's aphorisms on how to live an ideal life. Be the predator, not the food source. Follow your passion, not money. Be a champion of your dreams. Stallone, as an actor and a person, has always been about dreams. The dreams of the inadequate, underappreciated, sensitive victim, who, against all odds, becomes a champion.
Sly and I are driving down a hill to his gym, the Compound, in a house in Beverly Hills. We come to a single-lane construction site on the road. Sly motions to the two women in the SUV facing us to move past his Mercedes. The SUV moves slowly so as not to nick Sly's car. He says, "Women don't have spatial relations. They can't parallel-park." When the SUV passes us, the women gawk at him. This is one of his problems as an actor. He can't hide from himself. He's so physically identifiable as Sylvester Stallone, even now at 60, that no matter what character he plays, the audience only sees Stallone the star, or, more accurately, Stallone as Rocky. When he went to Dodger Stadium one night, the fans saluted him with shouts of "Yo! Rocky!" Publicly, Sly has complained for years that his fans refused to accept him as any character other than Rocky or Rambo. Yet his good friend, the actor James Caan, says, "Sly became the very thing he dreaded. He wants to be an actor, but he doesn't know if he can. It's sad; he can't walk away from what made him or he'll disappoint his fans." Caan pauses, then adds, "Ya know, the greatest luxury in life is to fall on your face. Some guys won't take the chance. They stay in their comfort zone."
Today, Sly says he has made his peace with the burden of his recognition, but still, he thinks that's part of the reason why for so long he didn't have a career in movies. Sly's problem is that he still looks like the Sly of the Rocky years, with his black hair and distinctively droopy features that look less wrinkled than they do melted like wax.
"People think I dye my hair," he says, "but it's just good genes." His father, Frank, in his eighties, recently married a women 45 years his junior. She has Tourette's syndrome. When she visits Sly's three daughters — ten, eight, and four — with third wife, Flavin, a former model, she coos to the children, then shouts out obscenities. "I said, 'Jeez, Dad,'" says Sly, "'She's scarin' the kids.'"
Sly describes his father as "a frustrated singer," and his mother, Jackie, as "a bon vivant." Both parents spent more time pursuing their own dreams than worrying about their son's dreams when he was a child. His father was especially hard on him. He told Sly that his brain was "dormant." When he tried to teach Sly how to drive a nail in with a hammer with one stroke and Sly took three, he berated him. Sly snapped at him, "I'm not gonna hammer nails like you, get it?" His mother ridiculed his attempts at being an athlete. Sly says she was, and still is, a tough woman.
"She's taking trapeze lessons now," he says. He looks at me with a bemused smile. "According to her, she's only 61. I was a tough birth."
Sly is only half kidding. When he was born, the forceps nicked a facial nerve which paralyzed the left side of his face, caused an eyelid to droop, and eventually slurred his speech. As a boy, his peers tormented him. So he withdrew and "spent my time daydreaming" of superheroes. When a skinny 11-year-old Sly saw his first Steve Reeves movie, he had an epiphany and began lifting weights to sculpt his body. But no matter how muscled his body became, it was just a veneer that hid a psyche filled with "inadequacies." He says, "Once you've been born an underdog, you always identify with that character." Sly's sense of victimhood is both justified and self-pitying. He's been abused like most people, but blessed like few.
The critics have not been kind to Sly since his first success, 1976's Rocky, which earned Sly 10 percent of its net profits. Once he became rich, Sly was determined to prove he was a versatile actor in a way that would define his career. He took on projects (F.I.S.T., Paradise Alley, Rhinestone, Oscar, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) that required dramatic or comedic talents he didn't have. When they failed, he reflexively churned out another Rocky or Rambo, which was what his fans and Hollywood moneymen expected from him.
The critics savaged Sly for both attempts. He was cartoonishly anguished when he tried to play drama, and inexpressively unfunny when he tried to play comedy. Stallone was confused. He was being criticized for trying to repeat his successes and, at the same time, for trying to distance himself from them. He felt he was being underappreciated for his efforts when he should have felt grateful for being overcompensated for them. The critics, and his fans, stereotyped him as Rocky or Rambo, and wouldn't accept him as any other character.
But the truth was that Stallone's limited range found its fulfillment in Rocky and Rambo, and nowhere else, except for one other role that, in a sense, was the real highlight of his career.
To read the rest of this interview, check out Premiere's December 2006 issue.
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