Written in a few days after a real fight
In March 1975 Sylvester Stallone, then a struggling actor with very little money, watched the world heavyweight CHAMPION Muhammad Ali fight Chuck Wepner, a little-known boxer given almost no chance. Wepner lasted into the fifteenth and final round and even knocked Ali down once. Stallone is said to have written the first draft of ROCKY in about three days afterwards.
The story of a small-time Philadelphia boxer, Rocky BALBOA, who gets a chance to fight the champion APOLLO CREED and only wants to go the distance, came straight from that night.
He would only sell it if he could star
Studios liked the script and offered Stallone a lot of money for it — but they wanted a famous actor in the lead. Stallone refused to sell unless he played Rocky himself, even though he had very little in the bank. Eventually the producers agreed, on a tiny budget of under a million dollars.
The film came out in 1976, became the highest-earning film of the year, and won the Oscar for Best Picture. It led to a long series of sequels and later the Creed films, about Apollo's son.
The steps and the training montage
Rocky's early-morning run ends with him racing up the long flight of STEPS outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art and punching the air at the top. The scene was one of the first to use the Steadicam, a new camera support that let an operator run alongside an actor and keep the picture smooth. Visitors now run up what everyone calls the Rocky Steps, and a bronze statue of Rocky stands nearby.
The TRAINING MONTAGE, with its drinking raw eggs, punching hanging sides of beef in a meat store and the theme Gonna Fly Now, became the model for training sequences in films ever since. The song went to number one in the American charts.
The people in Rocky's corner
ADRIAN, the shy girl from the pet shop who becomes Rocky's wife, her brother PAULIE, and MICKEY, the gruff old trainer who runs the gym, form the heart of the first film. CLUBBER Lang, played by Mr T, is the fierce opponent in the third film, and Ivan DRAGO, the powerful Soviet boxer in the fourth film, turns the fourth film into a story about the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Our boxing page covers the real sport behind the films. Money was so tight that Stallone's own dog, Butkus, plays Rocky's dog, and some street scenes were filmed quickly without closing the roads: when a stallholder at Philadelphia's Italian Market throws Rocky an orange during his run, he did not know he was in a film.
Rocky's nickname is the ITALIAN STALLION, and he is a CONTENDER from PHILLY who wins the crowd with his heart rather than his skill. Every fight has a PUNCH, a KNOCKOUT or a near one, the GLOVES, the RING and the long rounds of BOXING.
In the first film, the famous ending is not a win at all: Rocky loses on points, and it does not matter.