Sylvester Stallone is one of the greatest action megastars of all time. His career as an actor is legendary and helped establish and popularize the action genre in Hollywood. But his road to success was not creamy rather had a bumpy road that gave him cramps in the stomach.
Stallone has faced severe rejections multiple times before the dawn of his career. As he faced these rejections, he was far from giving up, rather he used his ability of storytelling and started writing screenplays, one of which gave him the breakthrough and changed his life.
Sylvester Stallone Was Rejected Even as Background Talent in The Godfather
Almost no one can deny the fact that The Godfather is a masterpiece and one of the greatest movies of all time. Francis Ford Coppola-directed, the Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro starrer movie has marked a feat of both commercial and critical success. The gangster movie, however, rejected Sylvester Stallone even as a background artist. Stallone told ABC News once,
“I couldn’t even get casted as an Italian. I said, ‘If there is one movie I can definitely get into, it would be ‘The Godfather’ because there’s a party scene and there’s three hundred guests.’c
Perhaps, the makers were too much selective even while picking up background artists. Of course, it would be fair to assume that is one of the traits of Coppola’s filmmaking. But the rejection was a hard hit on Stallone. “They said no,” Stallone added. Any struggling actors would want to work under great directors even for a minor and unnoticeable role. Stallone’s dream of working under The Godfather director was shattered but he was far from giving up on the idea of acting.
Also read: “I am not the richest, smartest or most talented”: Sylvester Stallone Broke Silence on Being Broke
Sylvester Stallone Started as a Screenwriter
Beyond acting, if there was something Stallone could do at the time, it was writing screenplay, which in a way shaped his towering career. “I started writing around 1969, when I realized the acting wasn’t materializing,” Stallone once told Deadline. Writing a screenplay about Edgar Allan Poe changed the actor’s way of seeing other people’s lives and changed his perspective altogether. Then he wrote Paradise Alley because “I wasn’t getting any acting jobs.” Later, he sold the rights to the script for just a hundred dollars.
By the time the Rambo actor got some minor roles.
“I’m always kind of the street guy or the thug or the mugger. I did that with Woody Allen, and with Jack Lemmon in The Prisoner of Second Avenue.”
“And then this Chuck Wepner fight [against Muhammad Ali] came on, and I thought of Rocky Marciano and how he was physically in the same ballpark as me. This character wasn’t that smart, but he had heart. A lot of heart. Man, I just started writing and writing and writing and writing, and I came up with this idea in about three and a half days. Ninety percent of it was not good, but at least it had a beginning and a middle. I had something to work on.”
Later, a working script for the iconic sports movie, Rocky was born in just three and a half days. Stallone was offered $360,000 for it but despite being broke at the time, he refused to sell it unless he could play the lead character.
Source: Far Out Magazine
