“I’m not Paulie,” said Young, “but there’s a part of Paulie in all of us … cowardice, bravado, false bravado. And I knew how to beat the drum to make the guy interesting and ugly and pathetic.”
Young initially balked at the invitation to do the first sequel – “I didn’t want to be part of an ensemble,” he said – but eventually agreed. “It wasn’t the money,” he says. “It don’t mean that much to me, I find a way to get by, and I find a way to blow it.”
Will he see the new “Rambo” with Stallone when it opens Jan. 25?
“You know,” he said, and this is why you have to love Burt Young, “I’ve never seen a ‘Rambo.’“
Burt Young on Paulie, Rocky, and Sly:
“I first met Stallone, I was in the studio commissary, he comes to my table, he says, ‘Mr. Young, I’m Sylvester Stallone, I wrote “Rocky.” You gotta do a part, you gotta do a part.’
“I says, ‘Shush, whaddaya doin’? Let me twist their arms [the producers] a little bit, lemme make a buck.’ And he lit up. Turns out I was the highest-paid actor in the first one.
“Stallone wrote exquisitely; he wrote street prose. I think he saw me when he wrote it. Like Arthur Miller, he’d cut the commas off. You’d say, hey, he saying somethin’ without the commas.
“Seventeen years after ‘Rocky V,’ we came back [for ‘Rocky Balboa’], and it was pretty sentimental for me. Stallone was […] Michelangelo painting the chapel. He wouldn’t let anything alone. He was a force. It was touching.”
For the full article click HERE. – Craig
