Today I learned that Michael Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone (b. 1946) both wrote and starred in “Rocky” (1976). He was 29-years-old when he wrote the screenplay. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1976 and won three Oscars.

“Rocky” won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film Editing in March 1977. It was also nominated in seven other categories, with Stallone personally being nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay, though he didn’t win those.

Stallone wrote the screenplay for “Rocky” in three days and 20 straight hours after having seen a famous boxing match a few days before.

I also learned today that of Stallone’s three most-famous franchises — Rocky (1976-2018) (eight movies), Rambo (1982-2019) (five movies) and The Expendables (2010-2014) (three movies) — he wrote or cowrote all but one of the 16 films in the three franchises, and directed six of them.

Expendables 1 — director, cowriter
Expendables 2 — cowriter
Expendables 3 — cowriter

Rambo 1 — cowriter
Rambo 2 — cowriter
Rambo 3 — cowriter
Rambo 4 — director, cowriter
Rambo 5 — cowriter

Rocky 1 — writer
Rocky 2 — director, writer
Rocky 3 — director, writer
Rocky 4 — director, writer
Rocky 5 — writer
Rocky 6 — director, writer
Rocky 7 — coproducer
Rocky 8 — coproducer, cowriter

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen any of those movies. I know bits and pieces of many of them, of course, and am familiar with all the imagery and pageantry, but I don’t recall ever having sat through one of those movies. Maybe one of them was on in the background during a sleepover or a party, or something.

Here’s a link of Stallone talking about the making of “Rocky”.

http://www.espn.com/page2/s/stallone/011207.html

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