What it takes to make it (the Stallone way)
Imagine you’re a broke 28-year old guy, living in a small, drafty apartment in Midtown Manhattan, and you want to be an actor.
But doctors screwed up something when you were born.
So now you have a birth defect that makes your face look funny and talk kinda funny.
Not the best start.
But you REALLY want to be an actor, so you go to auditions aaaand….you get rejected.
You go to the next one, and the next one, and the next one.
Still nothing, rejection after rejection.
Obviously this is not gonna happen, you might as well give up and go do something “more realistic”.
And who would blame you, right?
That’s what I’d think. Maybe you too.
But there’s a reason Sylvester Stallone is SYLVESTER STALLONE.
He doesn’t think like that.
Instead he’s thinking:
“If those fools are not casting me in their movies, I’ll make my own movie, to hell with them!”
The problem is….
For a movie to be made, you first need to write a script for it.
And if there’s one thing Stallone hates doing (besides dieting and Ivan Drago), it’s writing.
I mean, I get it. I also hate writing when I’m staring at a blank page and procrastinating by cleaning up my inbox, organizing finances and scrolling Twitter (I refuse to call it X).
But he wasn’t writing a short blog post.
He was writing a freaking movie script. Those monsters run between 20,000 and 25,000 words.
(The one for Rocky was 20,958 words, 124 pages.)
So he says to himself:
“Alright I hate writing so I wanna get this over with ASAP. I won’t leave my house until I’m done with this script.”
He goes and paints his windows black, so he doesn’t even know if it’s day or night outside.
Let me repeat that: He paints his windows black.
Insane, right?
But it worked. He wrote the script for Rocky in 3 days. Again, insane.
People take months to write their movie scripts, and this guy wrote his first one in 3 days.
The movie is basically about his struggle to become an actor, but he chose boxing instead because it’s more physical, and easier for the audience to understand.
And he was writing the script right around the time when huge boxing events were happening -- Rumble in the Jungle where Ali beat Foreman and Thrilla in Manilla where Ali beat Frazier.
People were really into boxing back then, so it’s no surprise that he was getting offers left and right for his script.
Not just any offers.
He declined a $350,000 offer for the script. That’s over 2 million (!!) in today’s dollars.
Why?
Because they only wanted the script, not him to star as Rocky.
When I hear 2 million, I think retirement.
But Stallone was thinking “nah, I wanna become an actor and be famous”.
So he was willing to take a lot less money, just so he could be the main actor too.
Keep in mind, he wasn’t a trust fund kid who could afford to wait. He was in survival mode, trying to make ends meet.
He was so broke that he was eating canned beans.
So broke that he SOLD HIS DOG for $50 to a stranger, because he couldn’t afford to feed him.
And it’s not like he had 5 dogs and sold 1 of them.
Butkus was his only dog, the one he loved dearly.
That’s how much Stallone wanted to become an actor.
He had reached rock bottom.
After months of trying to sell his script, he finally found producers who would buy it AND let him be the star of the movie.
They only paid him $25k, but hey, he was finally an actor!
The first thing he did with that money?
Tracked down the guy who bought his dog and asked to buy it back.
That didn’t go so easy because -- big surprise -- the guy loved Butkus.
In the end he agrees to give the dog back for a (small) role in the movie and $15k.
Not cheap, but at least Stallone got the dog back and now was shooting a movie he wrote, and starring as the lead actor.
And the budget wasn’t super big so they had to be creative when shooting: handheld cameras, no permits, sneaking into places.
That might’ve slowed him down but certainly didn’t stop him.
And we all know what happened next…
The movie became a huge hit, Sylvester Stallone became the huge star he still is and Butkus was probably eating steak for the rest of his life.
The lesson?
Paint your windows black (aka remove distractions) and get to work.