Sylvester Stallone sold his first screenplay for $100. He regretted the deal, he writes. The story had a piece of him in it, and now someone else owned it. So when bids for a later script started to climb, he held one term. He’d sell only if he played the lead. The script was Rocky.
The story comes from The Steps, Stallone’s memoir. Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews it in the Journal’s Fall Books alongside Michael Douglas’s One Helluva Ride. Both books, she writes, are shadowed by two quick-tempered fathers and one cutting mother. Douglas calls it “the hitting generation.” Both men say they were knocked around as boys. Douglas at least had a gentle mother. His father, the movie star Kirk Douglas, had the temper. Stallone, by his own account, got it from both parents.
Stallone’s book is the sharper one, the reviewer says. A forceps injury at birth left him with heavy eyelids and a curled lip, he writes, and people in the business decided the look wouldn’t sell. He was thrown out of a dozen schools and spent a hard stretch in a facility for troubled teens. He got to New York by bus, slept outside and couldn’t find an agent. Odd jobs covered the rent. One was ushering at a movie theater, where, the review says, he got a free lesson in how stories are built. Then came a move to California, the $100 sale and the vow. When the boxing script went out, word spread and the bids rose. Buyers backed away when the funny-looking unknown insisted on starring. One finally said yes. Rocky was the top-grossing film of 1976 and won best picture.
What the fathers did, and when
Douglas had a different problem, the reviewer writes. The son of a star, he had a way in and a father to prove himself to. He produced the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and took home the best-picture Oscar. His father had owned the rights and played the lead on Broadway. The son hoped that would make him proud. Instead, the elder Douglas wrote in his own memoir that he resented Jack Nicholson getting the role. Kirk Douglas softened only after a stroke in 1996, when he tried to become a warmer, more present father. The reviewer thinks it came a little late. Stallone’s parents were no better by 1977, where his book stops. His mother turned down the Oscars because she couldn’t bring a friend. He says he has learned to live with it. “You can change the future, but not history,” he writes. Douglas’s book, written with two co-authors, is full of Hollywood detail but baggy, the reviewer says.
Our read
This is a career story with an estate story inside it. Stallone learned on a $100 check that he’d sold the wrong thing. The money wasn’t the problem. The ownership was. Next time he knew the one term he wouldn’t trade before the bids arrived. Anyone selling a business, a practice or a piece of land faces the same question. The price is the easy part. The hard part is what you keep. Decide that first, in writing, before a buyer’s number does your thinking for you.
Then the fathers. Kirk Douglas started trying after his stroke. His son records it without anger and without much forgiveness, the reviewer says. The family talk about money, care and who gets what goes better before the hospital than after it. We’ve seen a lot of those talks. The early ones are easier and kinder. You don’t wait for the first drop to find the umbrella, and you don’t wait for a stroke to say the thing. Bring the family in before the paperwork needs them.