United Artists / Courtesy: Everett Collection
Sylvester Stallone followed his friend’s advice and rewrote the original Rocky script. A few tweaks later and he was on his way to great success.
In the new Netflix documentary Sly, Stallone discussed how he originally envisioned the project, which had a much harder approach. In the early version, Rocky was portrayed as a “villainous” character, inspired by Martin Scorsese’s crime drama Mean Streets.
But Stallone’s perspective changed when a friend read the script and said the boxer was too cruel for audiences to really care about him.
Stallone remembered her crying.
“She says, ‘I hate Rocky.’ I hate him. He is cruel. He hits people. He beats her up.’”
Stallone took it to heart and asked what he could do to soften the character.
“I said, ‘What if you stopped in front of it?’ Maybe he almost made it. He could have done it, that’s his job, but he doesn’t?’ “That would be nice,” he added. “I said, ‘What if he had a girlfriend or something?’ “Yeah, that’s nice.” So I go back and start writing: “Girlfriend.” Pretty.'”
$117 million in box office revenue later, a franchise was born.
Stallone also revealed that actor Dolph Lundgren sent him to the hospital during a fight scene in Rocky IV.
“Dolph Lundgren…he pulverized me,” Stallone says in the documentary. “Later that night my heart started to swell – which is what happens when the heart hits the chest – and then my blood pressure went up to 260 and they thought I was talking to angels. The next thing I know, I’m in the ICU surrounded by nuns and I thought, ‘Okay, those are curtains.'”
Stallone was hospitalized for nine days after the incident, praying for “one more round.”
“In the first minute of the fight it’s going to be a one-on-one fight,” Stallone told Lundgren. The Swedish actor joked in a separate interview that he was just “obeying orders,” explaining, “[Stallone] was the boss. I did what he told me.”
Doctors reportedly told Stallone that he suffered a blow to the ribs that caused his heart to pound in his chest, a condition that typically occurs in head-on collisions. “I kind of got on a bus,” Stallone joked.