On August 9, 2010, Variety posted an excellent article by Paul Duran titled, Stallone’s Ascent Rooted in Indies. Here’s a taste:
With all the success Stallone has had as a Hollywood star, it’s hard to remember this is a guy who literally had to fight for his big break when nearly everyone around him was saying no, that he turned down big money (for him at the time) to do it his way and that in spite of all the surface attributes of his boxoffice success, he is really an independent filmmaker at heart.
Producer, Avi Lerner: “Our company is independent. We cannot compete with the studios; we’ll never compete with the studios. But with Sly, we found a great partner to do movies with budgets less than half what the studio would make and still compete with them on the level of production values.”
Producer, Bob Chartoff: “We scheduled 15 minutes to meet with him as an actor, then spent over an hour because we were just so impressed with the guy, his intelligence and sense of humor… And just as he was leaving, his hand on the doorknob, he said, ‘Listen, I am a writer, too, and I’ve written a script. Would you mind reading it if I give it to you?”
After “Rocky,” everyone knew who Sylvester Stallone was, but he took that hard-earned fame and gambled it to make the movies he wanted to make, not only directing “Paradise Alley” and “Rocky II” and “III” but also working with top-flight directors Norman Jewison (on the Teamsters period drama “F.I.S.T”) and John Huston (on the WWII soccer P.O.W. thriller “Victory”).
Stallone was a legitimate global phenomenon, opening up the world for other stars and films to come. With the success of the “Rambo” series, the game suddenly became independent filmmaking on steroids.
Throughout his career, Stallone has continued to seek out relationships with producers and filmmakers who give him the freedom to make the movies he wants outside the studio system.
While there are others who have made that same leap — Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner, to name a few — Stallone is unique in that he started out exerting so much control over his projects from the beginning, working independently rather than relying on studio relationships, while using the foreign market to make him a global superstar who could call his own shots.
