GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Just done watching Rocky V

Trivia for Rocky (1976)

Sylvester Stallone sold the rights to make this film with the condition that he be cast in the title role. Producers offered him $150,000 to let Ryan O'Neal play the part.

Sylvester Stallone wrote the script in three days after he saw a boxing match between the unknown Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali in which Wepner went the distance.

The film was shot in 28 days.

Sylvester Stallone insisted that the scene where he admits his fears and doubts to Adrian the night before the fight be filmed, even though production was running far behind and producers wanted to skip it. He had one take for that scene, and was so nervous about screwing up the only scene he thought was important that he got himself drunk to do it.

The fight scene was filmed in reverse order starting with the fifteenth round, with Stallone and Carl Weathers in heavy make-up. As filming continued, the make-up was slowly removed until they were at round one. Because of this technique, the movie won an Oscar for Best Film Editing.

Sylvester Stallone appears in every scene.

The studio agreed to cast Stallone as Rocky as long as the cost of the picture remained under one million dollars. The producers even mortgaged their homes. The overall production cost was 1.1 million dollars.

The puppies Rocky sees before he goes into the pet store where Adrian works are boxers. Also, Butkus (Rocky's dog) is an overweight boxer mix.

Another ending for the film was for Creed's fans to carry him out of the ring and then Rocky's fans do the same. However, since there were too few extras, plus some of them began to punch Stallone and Weathers, the scene was scrapped.

Originally the filmmakers wanted all of the real former heavyweight champions to appear at the beginning of the fight between Rocky and Apollo. They put out a call for all of the former champions to show, but on the day of the shoot only Joe Frazier showed. The filmmakers thought it worked well however, because Frasier is a resident of Philadelphia, which was where the movie was shot and took place.

The scene that involved Rocky and Adrian kissing in Rocky's kitchen was originally not scripted the way it was shot. Talia Shire had contracted the flu and was worried about getting Stallone sick, so she was very hesitant to kiss him. Her hesitation and behavior was actually such an improvement over the scripted scene that they decided to keep it.

The light jazz song (with the soaring pedal steel riff) that Rocky plays on his record player (which would later be used in both John Singleton's film Baby Boy (2001) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) (VG)), is "Summer Madness" by Kool & The Gang. It does not appear on the original Rocky soundtrack.

Stallone based his Rocky character on a little-known New Jersey club boxer named Chuck Wepner. In March 1975, Wepner challenged the then-heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali to a title fight in Cleveland, Ohio. He lasted almost the entire fifteen rounds and became one of the few challengers to Ali to knock him to the ground.

Bette Midler turned down an offer for the role of Adrian.

Was the first major motion picture to employ the use of the Steadicam, having been invented by Garrett Brown.

Parts of the scene where Rocky runs up the stairs in training are played backwards. Originally the shot zooms out but was reversed to zooming in in order to better match the musical score and for dramatic effect. This has been confirmed in interviews with by Bill Conti, who wrote the score.

The photos on Rocky's mirror are actual photos of Sylvester Stallone as a young boy.

Two scenes were written that do not appear in the final cut of the film: a scene where Rocky visits his gym with Apollo Creed as a photo op and Rocky beats up Dipper, the fighter who took his locker earlier in the story and a scene the night of the big fight in the locker room between Rocky and Adrian. The locker room scene was at least filmed because production stills from it exist.

The two scenes where Rocky runs up the museum stairs (the first where he can't do it and the second during the "Gonna Fly Now" training sequence where he runs up them triumphantly) were filmed two hours apart. The first before the sun rose, the second afterwards.

The producers didn't know who Sylvester Stallone was when the script came to them. Someone showed them a group photo from The Lord's of Flatbush (1974) and they became enthused about making the movie, but wondered why someone named "Stallone" had such blond hair and blue eyes. It turns out that the producers mistook Stallone's co-star Perry King for him. When they saw who Stallone really was, they almost passed on the movie.

The screenplay was written in just three days.

Sylvester Stallone really did punch the frozen meat in the training scene in the movie. In fact he did it so many times in many different takes that after filming was finished, he noticed the shape of his hands was different. His knuckles were left completely flattened and they remain that way to this day.

credit: http://imdb.com/title/tt0075148/trivia