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The director of “I Play Rocky” narrates a scene that takes place on the set of “Rocky,” during a breakthrough moment for Sylvester Stallone.
The movie “I Play Rocky" charts the long and obstacle-hurtling path that Sylvester Stallone took to getting the movie “Rocky” to the big screen. Directed by Peter Farrelly, the movie structures its making-of-“Rocky” narrative in the same triumphant underdog way that the director of “Rocky” structured the original.
This sequence takes place during the shooting of a dramatic sequence in “Rocky.” Anthony Ippolito portrays Sylvester Stallone as he is playing Rocky. And Robert Morgan portrays Burgess Meredith as he is playing Mickey, a trainer, former boxer and the owner of the gym Rocky frequents. In the sequence, after Rocky has been picked to face the heavyweight champion of the world, Apollo Creed, for a chance at the title, Mickey offers to be Rocky’s manager. But Rocky sends him away because he believes Mickey never cared about his potential during the many years he’d been training there.
But in the scene as originally written, Rocky immediately chases after Mickey, without a sense of what might have motivated him to do so. During the shoot, the director of “Rocky,” John G. Avildsen (played by Jay Duplass), feels that the scene is not making sense because he doesn’t understand why Rocky would go after Mickey when Mickey has been critical of Rocky’s talent until now. He challenges Stallone to devise a way to make the sequence come together emotionally.
Stallone takes a break and has a conversation with his wife, Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb). She pushes him to think about why he wrote the scene, and who in his real life never gave him a chance to succeed. With his dismissive father in his head, Stallone returns to the set to shoot the scene, ad-libbing a monologue that feels like an outpouring of his anger over how he’s been treated.
It’s not a scene that most people discuss when talking about “Rocky” (the training montage is usually at the top of the list), but in an interview, Farrelly said, “This is gonna be the scene that people most remember in ‘I Play Rocky.’”
It’s a turning point in the movie, one that zeros in on the many obstructions that have impeded Stallone as he is trying to star in his first movie, the studio skeptical that he will be able to make it work, or that his performance will be up to par. But he transcends those negative thoughts in this moment, wowing both his director and his producers on the set.
Mekado Murphy writes about the world of movies and produces the Anatomy of a Scene video series.