Message Dan and Mike
Rocky turns 50 this December, and Sylvester Stallone just turned 80 — so we're marking both with our very first Stallone review. A broke, unknown actor with bit parts in mob films turned down nearly $400,000 from the studio, wrote the script in three days, and sold his own dog to make the one movie he refused to let anyone else star in.
We get into the guerrilla filmmaking behind it: a budget under a million dollars, a 28-day shoot, no permits, tarps hauled in to fake the Philadelphia skyline in New York, and a training montage stitched together from footage grabbed wherever they could get it. We talk about the producers mortgaging their homes to finish the film, the choreographers who walked off over how the fights were staged, and Stallone ultimately taking the choreography credit himself. We also cover the film's two Godfather connections through Talia Shire and Joe Spinell, the legacy of Burgess Meredith, Carl Weathers, and Burt Young, and how Rocky beat out a stacked 1976 Best Picture field that included Taxi Driver, Network, and All the President's Men.
Whether you've seen Rocky fifty times or somehow never seen it, we make the case for why it still holds up as one of the most complete films ever made. Come for the trivia, stay for the argument about whether this is truly a perfect movie.
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