The Book of Stallone (eBook)

The Extraordinary Career of Sylvester Stallone

Graham Clews (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
315 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-1-64667-049-9 (ISBN)

Infos

THE BOOK OF STALLONE
The Extraordinary Career of Sylvester Stallone
From Rocky to Rambo, The Expendables to Tulsa King and everything in between, this is the complete and comprehensive guide to every screen project of the cinematic icon.
What led to the critical and commercial hits like Cliffhanger, Demolition Man and Copland and the disasters of Rhinestone, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Oscar?
How did he go from desperate actor to global icon after watching one boxing match? How did Arnold Schwarzenegger dupe Stallone into making a flop? What caused him to be rushed to hospital while making Rocky IV? Did Rambo really cause a change in US foreign policy?
This is the legendary story behind the young writer and actor who beat the system and changed Hollywood forever. This is the extraordinary and ongoing story of the life and career of Sylvester Stallone.

This publication is 100 percent A.I. free

Textauszug

INTRODUCTION

S

elling your pet dog to get enough money to eat and pay the rent that day is a fairly extreme point to reach in life. Sinking to that level of desperation is dramatic to say the least but anyone working in Hollywood would tell you that it would make for a decent plot point in a family movie screenplay with a heartwarming finale. How about if the birth of your child was complicated when the forceps being used during delivery accidentally severed a nerve causing a permanent paralysis on the left side of the baby’s face? That could be spun out into a gritty script centring on a boy battling with stigma, then overcoming his insecurities and eventually becoming the poster boy for late twentieth century masculinity. Perhaps there’s a comedy drama to be created which is set in the uncompromising ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ neighbourhood of the New York City borough of Manhattan where two brothers grow up with an eccentric women’s professional wrestling promoter as a mother and a hairdressing father with anger issues. Or most unrealistic of all, a frustrated writer and actor with no foot in the door of Hollywood, blackmails a major studio into allowing him to play the lead role in the movie he wrote about a blue-collar, Philadelphia native who gets a shot at boxings’ world heavyweight title.

In the current age and overabundance of streaming platforms there have been a thousand worse premises that have been elongated into a ten-part season or a forgettable film. But, imagine going to Netflix, Apple TV or Disney Plus or one of the many others and during the pitch meeting you told them that all four scenarios above are part of the same narrative. They have the same lead character and there are plenty more twists and turns and bizarre incidents and side-stories to incorporate into the finished draft; there’s the three marriages, the family tragedy, the arch rival, the soft porn, the restaurant business, the art and the perpetual comebacks. The Oscars won and the Oscars lost, the sequels, the body building, the writing and directing, the accidental action hero, the vast pay cheques, the roles that almost were and the roles that should never have been. And along the way he became the biggest movie star on the planet. More than half a century of unparalleled silver screen success which then branched into TV, wouldn't fit into a miniseries or a feature film. Maybe only in a book.

No actor’s career, no actor’s life has ever been comparable to Sylvester Stallone’s. From his troubled birth on July 6th 1946 up until his 30th year, he was just one of thousands of stumbling artistic souls looking for an outlet. Painting, writing, acting…anything would do, especially if it would pay for dinner. He’d already survived childhood in regular foster care and coped with bitterly divorcing parents. At five, his immigrant father moved the family to Washington where Frank Stallone Sr. opened a beauty parlour chain after attending hairdressing school in New York and learning the trade that would put a roof over his kid’s heads. Brother Frank was born three years after Sylvester but parental stability was to be short lived. Frank Sr. and astrologer Jaqueline Labofish had married for love but their clash of wills boiled over repeatedly. The pair worked hard to build a home but long hours and fiery fights meant the two boys often got shipped out to boarding houses and kept at arm's length. While his reputation as a hairdresser grew, Frank Sr. also held stifled dreams of acting and writing but his desire to perform largely stayed dormant aside from amateur fare and his writing consisted of wholly unpublished works. (His only professional acting credit turned out to be a 1992 episode of US TV show The Fifth Corner which only aired three episodes before being cancelled and his unnamed timekeeper role in Rocky. He published one novel in 2010 called Stewart Lane).

When the acrimonious divorce began, he lived with his father in Maryland but his already tumultuous upbringing was affecting his ability to study and engage in education and he attended 13 different schools in 12 years. Jaqueline married Anthony Filti two years after divorcing Frank Sr. and Sylvester went to live with his mother and new step-father in Philadelphia where he was admitted into a high school that was calibrated for troubled youths. He scraped through graduation but quickly felt the need to escape and explore and enrolled in the American College of Switzerland. In the town of Leysin he earned some cash by selling hamburgers on campus and as a dorm bouncer and gym instructor. As the Vietnam War raged in South East Asia, Stallone discovered he enjoyed building his body and the attention of female students that came with it. On a whim, he auditioned for a role in an amateur staging of the Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman and to his bemusement he was offered a part. He found he loved the craft, the process of acting, the interpreting of the dialogue and raw human emotion involved. Despite the low-fi production having only completed a few performances, he was casually approached by a visiting Harvard professor at the end of the show. The stranger singled him out to tell him he should pursue acting as a passion and a career. He had been considering the arts as an avenue since he loved painting, writing and reading but hadn’t focused on anything up to that point. But crucially, as a younger child, he and his brother Frank had escaped the reality of their peculiar upbringing inside a cinema. They would watch everything that the spare change in their pockets would allow and quite often they would use nefarious means to sneak in undetected. Gazing up at that huge window into other worlds, Stallone was transfixed by what he saw and in particular, he responded to the strong male figures represented on the silver screen. James Cagney, John Wayne and Kirk Douglas became favourites but more than anyone else, he was enraptured by Steve Reeves. The Montana-born former body builder became an actor after military service and his uncommonly muscular physique saw him cast in fantasy epics. 1958’s Hercules was Stallone’s gateway into movie fandom and heroic idolisation and many of Reeves action scenes contain plenty of the DNA of Stallone’s biggest physical performances on screen. His love of cinema grew as he grew and by the time he had the chance to explore the medium himself at college, he pursued it doggedly. He dove into drama and writing and instigated workshops and performance spaces whenever the creative opportunities arose. He returned to the U.S. to the University of Miami to officially study drama but despite not graduating, he’d found his passion and so the New York acting scene became his life.

Early on in his twenties, he ditched the stage name Mike Stallone and started using Sylvester E. Stallone when he occasionally found some acting jobs, mostly unpaid. His real middle name of Gardenzio didn't get a chance. He found love in the big apple while he forged a career path and he and his new girlfriend Sasha Czack moved into a tiny, one room apartment that should have been closed down by health inspectors. Sasha was also an aspiring actor and took on waitressing jobs to help keep a damp roof over their heads. Stallone himself took jobs as a zoo cleaner and theatre usher and when acting work still wasn't forthcoming, he developed his love of writing. But with no major upturn in their fortunes, he couldn't say no to a $200 paycheck to be in a softcore porn flick called Party at Kitty and Studs. He would later claim that it was either take that job or rob someone on the streets, such was the low ebb that the pair found themselves at. The film was low-rent, unerotic drivel and only became notorious when Stallone became a star, it would otherwise be completely forgotten. But it was a job on screen as an actor and it extended his stubborn willingness to keep trying to break into the industry. His attempt to be an extra on the new film being made around town called The Godfather went nowhere but there were some modest moments to spark more dreams of hope. Playing a subway hoodlum in Woody Allens’ Bananas was one. A blink and you’ll miss his background appearance in the Barbara Streisand vehicle What’s Up, Doc was another. Spot him if you can in Klute and also Prisoner of Second Avenue where Jack Lemmon confuses Stallone’s unnamed character as a pickpocket. While none of these jobs were particularly inspiring or well compensated, he was gaining valuable experience of the industry and in particular, the nuances and hierarchy of working on film sets.

1974 presented a step in the right direction but he was a long way from climbing the most famous steps in movie history. He bagged one of the main roles of Stanley in the 50’s set comedy drama Lords of Flatbush where he met and became lifelong friends with fellow cast member Henry Winkler. The film plays as a curious time-capsule of post-war Americana, almost like watching Grease but without any music and choreography and it was part of a wave of 1950’s nostalgia that swept mid-seventies America. The leather jackets, the oiled-back hair and the James Dean/Marlon Brando infected youth are all present and correct and there’s a welcome flicker of hope and love woven into the slight story. Set in an area of Brooklyn in New York known as Flatbush, Stallone played Stanley Rosiello who was part of a four-person, edge-of–adulthood gang filled out by Winkler, Perry King and Paul Mace. But in rehearsals, one of the four was a young actor named Richard Gere. The charismatic and intense 23-year old was well accustomed to the era the film was set in as he’d made a name for himself playing the lead role of Danny...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Schlagworte: Actor • Cinema • Hollywood • Movies Film • rambo • Rocky • Sylvester Stallone
• ISBN-10: 1-64667-049-3 / 1646670493
• ISBN-13: 978-1-64667-049-9 / 9781646670499