It’s probably also why he didn’t have a big-name composer scoring it.īill Conti, like Stallone, is Italian American. So the underdog story of Rocky also became the underdog story of Stallone himself his own backstory was key to the movie. But Stallone had demanded to play lead in his own movie, and he had to fight for it nobody thought he could act.
He knew he’s written a great script, and studios knew it, too. Its star and writer, Sylvester Stallone, was a bit-part actor, someone who nobody took seriously. Rocky wasn’t supposed to be a huge movie. He runs up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum Of Art, pausing for a moment of triumph and possibility, striking the iconic pose in the place where that fictional character’s statue now stands. He does one-handed pushups, his sweat dripping on the mat of the practice ring. He jaws with locals, tosses balls around. Rocky runs down the streets of his South Philadelphia hometown. But thanks to his hardbitten, motivational trainer, that starts to change. He’s only in there because he has a good nickname, because he comes from the right city, because he’s white, and because he can’t possibly win. Often, they still use the same music as the Rocky movies.) In Rocky, Rocky Balboa has randomly been booked in a fight with the champion of the world. (We still get training montages, but now they’ve become a self-conscious, parodic trope. Avildsen more or less invented the training montage, a convention that would become a staple of American movies for about the next 20 years.
But in the training montage, he becomes something else. He’s a spiritual descendent of someone like Ernest Borgnine in Marty. He’s a mess, and his life is not together at all. He yammers nervously, perpetually, in a slurry mutter of a voice. Rocky is a go-nowhere boxer and a small-time criminal.
It’s a grey, ugly, slow-moving character study about a punchy, dimwitted lug. Up until the training montage, Rocky belongs within the ranks of the ’70s dramas that clearly inspired it. There’s a moment in the 1976 movie Rocky where the film we’re watching stops being a product of the American new wave and where it transforms before our eyes into the future of cinema. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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