“Rocky”: Look Back at the Film on Its 40th Anniversary

getty_rocky_120216_630

United Artists/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Saturday, December 3, marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Rocky.

The 1976 film was made for around $1 million and ended up grossing $117 million domestically, taking home Best Picture at the Oscars the next year.  Not bad for Sylvester Stallone, a down-on-his-luck character actor with about $100 in the bank who wrote the movie in three days after watching a fight between Muhammad Ali and beleaguered brawler Chuck Wepner.

“I was watching the fight … and I said to myself, ‘Let’s talk about stifled ambition and broken dreams and people who sit on the curb looking at their dreams go down the drain,'” Stallone told The New York Times 40 years ago.

Studios wanted Rocky, but they didn’t want Stallone to headline the original underdog story. They offered him money, as much as $265,000 for just the script, yet he turned it down.

“I never would have sold it … I’d rather bury it in the backyard and let the caterpillars play Rocky. I would have hated myself for selling out,” he told The Times.

He finally got what he wanted though and put everything he and the crew had into the film.

“When we finally knew that Rocky was going to be made and I was going to play Rocky, I knew this wasn’t only my shot, this was my life. Everything had to be perfect. I was hard on the crew when we were shooting — they thought I was a miserable b****** — but I had to give the movie my best shot,” he told film critic Roger Ebert in 1976.

“People say Rocky is realistic, but I don’t want realism, I want romance,” Stallone told Ebert all those years back.

Copyright © 2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.