‘I Play Rocky’ Celebrates Sylvester Stallone the Screenwriter — but Rocky Balboa Was Only the Beginning

In “I Play Rocky,” screenwriter Peter Gamble and director Peter Farrelly tell the unlikely true story of how an unemployed actor named Sylvester Stallone wrote “Rocky” and turned himself into one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Like “Rocky” itself, it’s an inspiring and extremely entertaining crowd-pleaser; it also devotes a surprising amount of screen time to Stallone’s writing process and the machinations required to actually get his screenplay produced — the movie doesn’t get to the actual production of “Rocky” until over an hour into its running time.

Even though it’s a love letter to Stallone’s script, “I Play Rocky” presents his screenwriting aspirations less as an all-consuming goal than as a means to an end, a way for the young actor to create parts for himself when no one else would. Yet not only did Stallone keep writing after “Rocky” made him a movie star, he continued to do so at a pace that would shame all but the most prolific screenwriters. Stallone has writing credits on over 20 produced features — and not all of them were vehicles for himself as an actor.

As early as 1983 (when he wrote the “Saturday Night Fever” sequel “Staying Alive” sequel at John Travolta’s behest) and as recently as last year (when he wrote “A Working Man” for his “Expendables” costar Jason Statham), Stallone has sat behind his keyboard to script films for other performers, indicating that there was always a deep drive to write that went beyond the need to self-generate acting work. Factor in that he wrote or co-wrote every “Rocky” and “Rambo” movie and even worked on the scripts for one-off oddities like “Rhinestone,” and it becomes clear that Stallone’s been nearly as single-minded about writing as “I Play Rocky” depicts him when it comes to acting.

After “Rocky” won the Oscar for Best Picture (Stallone was nominated for his screenplay but had the bad luck to be up against Paddy Chayefsky for “Network”), Stallone no longer had to write to find parts — he was presumably getting acting offers thrown at him every time he picked up the phone. Yet he followed “Rocky” with two movies that established the precedent for the career to come, the labor drama “F.I.S.T.” and the wrestling picture “Paradise Alley,” on both of which the actor did double duty as a writer.

“Paradise Alley” was a passion project, a script Stallone had written before “Rocky” that he now had the juice to get made — and on which he made his directorial debut. “F.I.S.T.” was something different, a movie that came Stallone’s way in the form of a screenplay by Rolling Stone journalist Joe Eszterhas. The authorship of the script became a bone of contention when Stallone worked with director Norman Jewison to pare Eszterhas’ work down for production; Stallone thought he deserved a screenwriting credit, Eszterhas didn’t. According to Eszterhas, Stallone strong-armed him into sharing credit by threatening to withhold approval for a novelization that would net Eszterhas a boatload of cash; after sparring in the press the two writers reconciled, became friends, and collaborated years later on the notorious flop “Burn Hollywood Burn: An Allan Smithee Film.”

For the rest of the 1970s and 1980s, then more sporadically in the decades to follow, Stallone would follow the “F.I.S.T.”/”Paradise Alley” pattern, alternating rewrites of movies he came on to as an actor like “First Blood” and “Cliffhanger” with passion projects he originated like the “Rocky” and “Rambo” sequels and “Driven.” “Rocky II” followed “Paradise Alley” in 1979, and it was essentially a remake as much as a sequel, with Rocky Balboa once again finding himself the underdog up against Apollo Creed. It was also hugely successful at the box office, though slightly less so with critics who saw it as an embalming of the original.

If Stallone was bothered by reviewers like Janet Maslin calling “Rocky II” lifeless, he made his retort in the form of the propulsive “Rocky III,” which refined the “Rocky” formula and created the screenwriting sensibility that would define the majority of Stallone’s 1980s output. “Rocky III” strips its plot down to the bone — Rocky loses a fight, gets humiliated, trains rigorously, then comes roaring back in triumph — but then inflates it again with muscular melodrama. The motives and rooting interest are uncomplicated and impossible to misinterpret, and each straightforward emotional beat is delivered with such sincere and amplified force that resistance is futile.

This approach would reach peak effectiveness in “Rocky IV,” a film that both simplifies the formula to its barest essence (there’s barely any actual plot in it at all) and builds it up to have global consequences, as Rocky’s match against Russian boxer Ivan Drago is presented as nothing less than a battle to determine the winner of the Cold War. Before Stallone could write “Rocky IV,” however, he got an intriguing offer from fellow movie star John Travolta — would he be interested in writing and directing the sequel to Travolta’s 1977 smash “Saturday Night Fever?”

‘Staying Alive’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Travolta’s years-long attempt to bring back Brooklyn disco dancer Tony Manero had gone nowhere; none of the writers he worked with saw the character or the movie the way he did, and he was growing frustrated. When Travolta saw “Rocky III,” he realized Stallone was a filmmaker with the narrative and visual energy he needed for his sequel. Stallone was game, and together he and Travolta crafted “Staying Alive,” a crowd-pleaser in which Tony Manero would trade the disco floor for the Broadway stage.

Much as Stallone had minimized the grittiness of the original “Rocky” in the slicker “Rocky III,” “Staying Alive” ditched the racist and misogynistic characters of “Saturday Night Fever” (and their relatively bleak prospects) in favor of a rousing showbiz tale in the tradition of “42nd Street” and “Footlight Parade.” Critics scoffed, but audiences loved it — “Staying Alive” was one of the biggest hits of 1983, and after a brief stumble with “Rhinestone,” an ill-advised musical from the director of “Porky’s” pairing Stallone and Dolly Parton, Stallone the screenwriter came back with three smash hits in a row.

1985 represented a peak year for Stallone as both writer and star, with the release of two of his most successful pictures, “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (cowritten with a young James Cameron) and “Rocky IV.” Then came 1986’s “Cobra,” the cop movie in which Stallone’s screenwriting voice reached its fullest apotheosis and purest form. The film grew out of Stallone’s aborted stint playing Axel Foley in “Beverly Hills Cop”; Stallone drastically rewrote the screenplay before leaving the project, but when Eddie Murphy came on board and the tone shifted from action to comedy, Stallone’s material was scrapped.

Stallone reworked his discarded scenes into “Cobra,” a blatant “Dirty Harry” ripoff that replicates the vigilante formula of that film and its sequels but removes every trace of their ambiguity. In “Dirty Harry,” “Magnum Force,” and “Sudden Impact,” parallels are drawn between Eastwood’s detective Harry Callahan and the villains to suggest that the cop and his prey are not as far as apart as Callahan would like to believe. “Cobra” doesn’t entertain such moral complexity for a single second — from the moment the first bad guy is introduced parking in a handicapped spot to later revelations about other villains sexually assaulting children, it’s made clear that Stallone’s Lieutenant Marion “Cobra” Cobretti is completely justified doing whatever he has to to wipe these guys off of the planet.

Just as Stallone pared down the structures of his own “Rocky” and “Rambo” films to the essentials in their sequels, with “Cobra” he takes the iconography of the “Dirty Harry” movies — right from the “Magnum Force”-inspired pre-credits sequence in which Stallone provides crime statistics in voice-over as a gun fires into the camera — and expresses it with pure id, stoking the audience’s bloodlust to a fever pitch. This is not a criticism. “Cobra” is, in its way, as perfect a script as “Chinatown,” a supremely engineered entertainment machine without a wasted line or shot. While some of this was reportedly dictated by commercial concerns — the movie was cut down to its lean 87-minute running time in an effort to squeeze in an extra showtime each day — the ruthless efficiency is so characteristic of virtually every movie Stallone ever wrote that it can’t really be arbitrary.

‘Cobra’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Stallone the screenwriter would follow “Cobra” with “Rambo III” and “Rocky V,” two of the weaker entries in their respective franchises, but 1993’s “Cliffhanger” was a truly perfect action movie that revived Stallone’s career as an actor after a pair of comedy flops, John Landis’ criminally underrated “Oscar” and the merely criminal “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.” After that Stallone slowed down as a screenwriter and focused more on acting — he didn’t take another writing credit after “Cliffhanger” until “Driven,” another collaboration with “Cliffhanger” director Renny Harlin, in 2001.

Stallone returned to his typewriter (or, presumably by this time, laptop) in 2006 to revisit Rocky Balboa for the sequel of the same name, and the project seems to have reignited something in the writer’s artistic soul. “Rocky Balboa” begins a new phase for Stallone as a writer, one in which he switches from trying to perfect his formulas to pondering their purposes and effects. This film and the “Rambo” sequels that would follow are among Stallone’s best work as a screenwriter, and they tend to be overlooked given that they fall outside of his most popular era as a movie star.

“Rocky Balboa” doesn’t abandon the franchise’s standard tropes, but it pokes around at their edges to rediscover the humanity that made the original “Rocky” such a hit. Rousing and deeply heartfelt, it’s a formula movie that rarely feels clichéd thanks to Stallone’s genuine love for his characters and his determination to end the series on a high note. At the time, after a series of underperforming and undernourished films, Stallone had as much to prove as his onscreen alter ego, and in “Rocky Balboa” he wipes his slate of artistic and commercial failures clean with 102 minutes of unadulterated cinematic passion.

As “Rocky Balboa” begins, the title character is living a comfortable but dull life as a restauranteur, and mourning the death of his beloved wife Adrian. Desperate to prove to himself that he still has what it takes, Rocky applies for a new boxing license and, through a series of slightly unconvincing but quickly paced circumstances, ends up in the ring with the current heavyweight champion of the world. The boxing story is a lot of fun, and as a director Stallone stages the final match with energy and style, but the movie’s real heart is in the scenes leading up to the fight.

As usual, Stallone packs a surprising number of subplots and emotional high points into the film’s compact running time, and he’s able to do this by building on what has happened in the previous films via a kind of cinematic shorthand. He doesn’t need to waste a lot of time on what Rocky has lost or where he has come from, because those of us who have seen the other movies can fill in the blanks. Stallone uses his alter ego to explore all the things that matter to him as an aging legend: missed opportunities, lost and found loved ones, and the desire to give what he was born to do one last big shot.

It’s impossible to avoid the parallels between Balboa’s story and Stallone’s own, but this isn’t a case of an actor playing himself — he and Rocky may have the same feelings, but they express them in completely different ways. One of the pleasures of the first two Rocky films was Stallone’s blunt, authentic dialogue writing, and his talent for clumsy but entirely appropriate urban speech returns in “Rocky Balboa.” The film contains several significant relationships, from the expected sparring with brother-in-law Paulie to a new romance and a sweet father-son love story, and in each of these storylines the dialogue is pitch-perfect.

Early on Stallone figured out how to write in such a way that Rocky communicates his emotions with total clarity even though he’s an uneducated, inarticulate character, and the style reaches its zenith in “Rocky Balboa.” This kind of screenwriting is awfully tricky, but Stallone never gets the balance wrong; less astute viewers might mistakenly assume that the awkward dialogue is stupid or unintentionally obvious, but it’s exactly right for this character and this story.

‘Rocky Balboa’©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

After “Rocky Balboa” got Stallone’s creative juices flowing again, his output as a screenwriter resumed; in 2010 he created a whole new franchise with “The Expendables,” and scripted two solid Jason Statham vehicles, “Homefront” and “A Working Man.” He even returned to Rocky Balboa one more time for “Creed II.” Stallone’s best late-career screenwriting efforts, however, were devoted to his other iconic character, Vietnam vet and one-man killing machine John Rambo. In fact, the last two entries in that series are so good they recalibrate our entire understanding of the character and the franchise as a whole.

That the “Rambo” series became one of the more durable franchises in American cinema is a bit surprising in retrospect, given that it didn’t really find its voice until the fourth installment and began with a film that didn’t lend itself to sequels at all. By the time Stallone returned to the saga in 2008 for the simply titled “Rambo,” he had clearly spent years thinking about the character and where his own ambitions for the franchise might intersect with his audience’s expectations.

The result was a movie in which Stallone was able to have it both ways, digging deeper into the self-doubt and unremitting pessimism that always made John Rambo an unusually interesting mass appeal action hero while also delivering bloody set pieces that made “Dawn of the Dead” look like “Driving Miss Daisy.” The most recent entry in the cycle, 2019’s “Rambo: Last Blood,” continues along those lines with a tale that brings Stallone’s ongoing philosophical inquiry into the possibility of meaningful action in a meaningless world to its fullest fruition.

“Last Blood” was underestimated during its initial theatrical release, including by me — I didn’t fully grasp its greatness until revisiting the entire series. Watching the films in order I was surprised to find that for all the stylistic disparities between the movies, they do have a common thread in Stallone’s depiction of Rambo as a hero who doesn’t really like himself or what he has become — the cumulative emotional impact is comparable to what might have happened had Clint Eastwood decided to make a whole series of movies about his William Munny character from “Unforgiven.”

The authentic turmoil that Stallone conveys gives even the cartoonish second and third “Rambo” films more depth than they’re normally given credit for, and undercuts their reputations as simplistic expressions of rah-rah Reagan-era patriotism. (In championing the films, Reagan showed that he misunderstood them almost as badly as he misunderstood Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”) Stallone’s status as an eighties action icon alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris has overpowered his actual appeal and value as both an actor and a writer in the films that made him a star; his specialty isn’t invulnerable supermen but haunted antiheroes plagued by regret.

James Mangold understood this about Stallone and used the actor’s traumatized quality to enormous advantage in “Copland,” a movie for which Stallone the actor deservedly received his best reviews since the original “Rocky.” Mangold was one of the few filmmakers who really knew how to use Stallone to his maximum potential, though others (like Richard Donner in the underrated “Assassins”) occasionally came close, and Stallone recently pulled off a late triumph with Taylor Sheridan’s “Tulsa King.” For the most part, though, Stallone the actor has always been best served by Stallone the writer — not just in the days documented by “I Play Rocky,” but throughout his career.