Italian Stallion

How's this for a plot: a street-wise Italian kid, who thinks of himself as "an intellectual caveman," grows up dreaming about being a tough fighter, a writer and a famous actor. He stumbles from job to job, then weaves his daydreams together: he writes a boxing movie, stars in it himself, and--even before the film is released--Hollywood hails him as the next Mitchum, Brando and Pacino rolled into one.

The plot is coming true for Sylvester ("Sly") Stallone, 30, a brash, genial bit-actor who wrote the script Rocky in three days, and held out against the producers, James Caan and Burt Reynolds, to star in it himself. Jaded preview audiences are giving it ovations, and much of Hollywood is assuming that star and movie will be up for Oscars next year. "I can't recall such excitement about a new movie and a new star since maybe Giant and James Dean," gloats United Artists Boss Mike Medavoy. Says TV's Norman Lear: "That movie sent me through the ceiling."

Rocky is a slum fairy tale, its plot simple even by Hollywood standards. A broken-down neighborhood fighter, who boxes, "because I can't sing or dance," is picked as a last-minute replacement to fight the heavyweight champion of the world, mainly because the champ sees the promotional possibilities of the hero's monicker: "the Italian Stallion." The hero produces a rousing fight and, of course, finds love. The movie is fun- ny, unpretentious and relentlessly upbeat, sort of what Mean Streets would have been if Frank Capra had made it. Its only message--endure, reach your potential, be a man--is enough to give machismo a good name.

Eating Grass. Stallone is doing all he can for the new machismo. He has a will that seems more than a match for Hollywood. Producer Irwin Winkler (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) says, "I still can't believe I did it. I mortgaged my house to put up the $50,000 completion bond for Rocky." Winkler and Coproducer Robert Chartoff were stunned when Stallone insisted on playing the title role himself--and got his way, although he had $104 in the bank at the time. He remembers telling his wife Sasha: "If you don't mind going out in the backyard and eating grass, I'd rather burn this script than sell it to another actor. She agreed." United Artists put up a modest $1 million for Rocky, and Director John Avildsen (Save the Tiger) shot the film in a brisk 28 days.

Though Stallone is no boxer, the film is clearly autobiographical. "Rocky is me," he says, "but he's more gallant and simple than I am." Like his hero, Stallone is a raffish charmer and hustler. He used to be an usher at a Walter Reade theater in Manhattan, but was fired fo trying to scalp a ticket for $20 to a customer who turned out to be Walter Reade. Later he lived on bootlegged Walter Reade passes, which he made Xerox copies of and sold to students.

Born to a volatile Italian couple in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, Stallone grew up in Monkey Hollow, Md., where his mother ran a beauty parlor. He attended twelve schools by the time he was 15, and was thrown out of most of them. "I was into J.D.," says Stallone. "If I saw a housefly on the hood of a car, I'd stamp him out with an iron pipe. A very nice kid."

Seeing Paris. When he was 15 Stallone and his mother moved to Philadelphia, the setting of Rocky. Soon bored with street-gamy life there, he took off for Europe and landed a job as a bouncer in the girls' dorm of The American School of Switzerland. "It was fox-in- the-hen-house time," says Stallone with a grin. The highlight of his bouncer career came when he chaperoned a group of girls on a visit to Paris, boarded them in a cheap pension and pocketed most of the ample hotel money. "What the hell," he says. "They saw the real Paris that way."

Stallone spent the past six years in New York and Los Angeles looking for acting jobs and trying to write. In addition to working the Walter Reade theater, he sold a few scripts and landed his only lead role (along with Da Fonz, Henry Winkler) in the 1974 low-budget turkey The Lords of Flatbush.

Now he is flushed by his rise "from roaches to riches." He has 10% of Rocky, which U.A. hopes will gross more than $40 million and a five-picture contract with the studio. He is holding out for a seven-figure deal on his next project, a "great romantic gothic" movie about Edgar Allan Poe. He also wants to star in the upcoming version of Superman. But Marlon Brando, who will play Superman's father, has veto rights on casting. Says Sly: "I hope he doesn't think I do a cheap imitation of him in the love scene with the undershirt. Italians do wear undershirts."

Onscreen, Stallone radiates more boyish bravado than Brando's brooding rage. Says Co-star Talia Shire, sister of Francis Ford Coppola: "Francis was an innocent when he first succeeded and so is Sly." Innocent or not, Stallone is probably onto the right screen image at the right time. Boggled by grim, paranoid plots like Marathon Man and savage heroes like the Taxi Driver, audiences may be ready to buy his gentler, uncomplicated machismo. Stallone is sure of it. At a private screening of Rocky for his mother last week he leaped on-stage during the first reel and shouted, "Hey, Ma, I made it. I made it, Ma." Ma nodded and wiped away a tear.

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