Posted on 01/29/2006 8:17:08 AM PST by wjersey
It's a clear, chilly, noir midnight on bombed-out Jasper Street in Kensington. An El train chugs against the sky two blocks away. To the right, peeking above a roof, One Liberty Place shines brightly, a million miles away.
Beneath lonely streetlights, a film crew huddles around a white van parked outside one of the two habitable houses on the block. Inside the van, Rocky Balboa is listening to his friend Marie: Go for it. Get in the ring one last time.
That also happens to be why Sylvester Stallone is in Philadelphia. Rocky's creator is giving the big lug one last shot as he directs and stars in Rocky Balboa, the sixth in the epic series. Stallone also wrote the screenplay.
Filming began Jan. 9 and is expected to wrap within two weeks. The film is not expected in theaters until February 2007.
Although Philadelphia settings also figured into all previous Rockys except for IV, Stallone said he had to come back to do all the exterior work on Rocky Balboa.
"The city itself is the costar," said Stallone, sucking on a cigar between takes.
Stallone owes the city a lot.
In December 1975, he was a broke young man - New York-born, Philadelphia-raised - with something to prove when he shot his gritty story of an up-and-coming club fighter who goes the distance.
And now with Rocky Balboa revisiting many of the same haunts from the Oscar-winning first movie, Stallone might be a wealthy guy on the brink of 60, but he has something else to prove:
Don't count out people just because they're getting up there.
If 1976's Rocky was a story for the ages, Rocky Balboa is a story for the aging.
Stallone is among the oldest of the baby-boom generation, and in this installment - where we pick up his story 15 years after V - Rocky is not ready to pack it in as he gets into the ring against a guy two decades his junior.
"I think that it's a philosophically sound piece," Stallone said. "People that are on the cusp of wanting to just give up and really not participate in life would recognize maybe a sense of optimism.
"In my generation, it seems that no one wants to go away gently anymore. They're staying healthier, they're looking out for themselves... . They're driving race cars... climbing mountains. I think that's the wave of the future. Rocky kind of typifies that sense of adventurousness at the cost of looking foolish, but he's willing to pay the price.
"I think that people should be willing to walk on thin ice because it's really rewarding if you happen to get across that lake that's frozen."
•
Here's how it goes: The long-suffering Adrian - the girl Rocky met in the Kensington pet shop in the original - is dead. Rocky owns a restaurant in South Philadelphia. He's pals with Adrian's brother Paulie (Burt Young), but he's distant from his son, Rocky Jr. (played by Milo Ventimiglia), who goes by Robert as he lives the yuppie life in Center City.
He's friendly with Marie - played by Geraldine Hughes - who was a kid in the first Rocky. She's a single mother living on the edge of poverty.
The world has changed, but Rocky hasn't.
One day, ESPN simulates a boxing match between a computer-generated Rocky and the current champ (Mason "The Line" Dixon, played by boxer Antonio Tarver).
Dixon's people want a fight.
Rocky accepts, then balks.
"He's called upon to [do this], almost as a publicity stunt that turns out to be a foolish gesture, but it starts to spark something in him," Stallone said.
"What starts out as an outlet for his grief becomes a magnet for all the people around him who have given up in life and they start to bond with him," Stallone said.
"If the mountain is there, why not try to climb it? He's being just scourged by the press, scourged by his friends, You're nothing.... Just because you've had a few too many birthdays, you should stop trying things? That's what Rocky would say. 'Time goes by for everybody. Especially if you're standing still.' "
The state boxing commissioner - played by Philadelphia lawyer Jimmy Binns, who played Rocky's lawyer in Rocky V - is against it, too, until Rocky convinces him otherwise.
But fight Rocky must, and he gets into the ring with Dixon. Stallone and Tarver shot their ring scenes last month in front of a full house at Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino. "Those were real blows," Stallone said balefully.
•
If Stallone owes the city a lot, he's paying it back with this film.
Sharon Pinkenson, head of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office, said that the shoot - with a local and Hollywood crew of 120 - would put $20 million into the local economy. She and civic boosters are cheered by recent shot-in-the-region film projects including In Her Shoes, Annapolis and National Treasure.
Work on Rocky Balboa started here in October, when location scouts set out to find the haunts used in 1975. "It was kind of fun," said Patricia Taggart, who has scouted for the former CBS series Hack and the Oprah Winfrey film Beloved. People had a good idea, but "no one knew where they all were." Some spots had been torn down.
This was a good thing, Stallone said. He wanted to show change.
Taggart, California-based location director Paul Schreiber, and production designer Franco Carboni toured familiar places and found a few new ones - 21 in all.
City Hall serves as an exterior, and a courtroom figures in the scene with Binns. The Irish Pub at 20th and Walnut Streets and an apartment across the street get screen time. At West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Rocky grieves for Adrian.
Stallone himself found one location. On his way to Kensington one day, he was being driven past the razed Schmidt's brewery at Second Street and Girard Avenue. He was struck by the mounds of dirt and got permission to be filmed running up a mound with the skyline in the background.
Front Street in Kensington slid from bad to worse over 30 years. The pet shop had closed. So had the building that served as Mickey's gym, across the street.
There's nothing different about the Art Museum steps - that iconic fixture on the Ben Franklin Parkway - except for a new skyline.
The Italian Market will show up on screen, of course, but Rocky won't be running through it. In Rocky Balboa, it's where he buys provisions for his restaurant. It's a subtle touch. Stallone wants to show the change in the market's ethnic makeup; in 1975, vendors were mostly white, now it's a veritable United Nations.
•
Stallone has said he was down to his last hundred bucks in 1975 when he wrote Rocky. The film had a minuscule $1.1 million budget when shooting started that December. Cast and crew traveled from California by train to save a few bucks, recalled Frank Stallone, his brother the musician. The company rented a van to work out of and drove it to pizzerias to pick up food.
The film won three Academy Awards, including best picture. The first five Rockys grossed nearly $500 million, combined.
Rocky Balboa's budget is a reported $24 million - still low by Hollywood standards - but the production has 120 crew members and trailers galore. Stallone flew in by private jet and is staying at one of the fanciest hotels in town.
Stallone has most of the story down on paper. When told that the Cambria Athletic Club - a landmark in local boxing circles until 1963 - happened to be near one location at Kensington and Somerset, Stallone worked a mention into the script. "He's like John Ford, including the original fabric of the area," Frank Stallone said.
Even some actors were cast on the fly. Stallone, looking for a hard-edged girl in a bar scene, said he tested dozens of trained actresses. "As fate would have it, I ran into her," he said, pointing toward Angela Boyd, 20, a skinny kid with blond hair and a Fishtown mouth.
After shooting her scenes, Stallone hired her as a production assistant.
•
People will be speculating for the next year about how it all ends, Stallone hopes.
He said he's shooting three endings: over Adrian's grave, in the boxing ring, and on the Art Museum steps. Dismissing chatter on the Internet, he insisted that Rocky would live.
But there won't be a seventh movie. Asked whether the series would continue, Stallone waved his gnarled hand briskly and, with a grin, said: "No, no. I doubt it. This [movie] really puts a cap on the situation."
Word is, Stallone is itching to do the fourth Rambo film, anyway.
Just like a typical Liberal.(I don't know where Sly stands) When you do something well once, just keep doing only the same thing til everyone is sick of it, then do it one more time.
He already did that with Rocky V.
I've tried, I really have tried, to watch 'Rocky V' for more than 20 minutes,.
Just can't do it.
ESPN.com has a dot.comedy with the sports guy. In it he's buying the Rocky movie DVD set. He asks the cashier if he can only buy the first four.
Rocky is so stone-age!
Enough already!
--one of the places he, the owner of a state of the art shooting range in one of his houses, is that the "government should go door-to-door and pickup all the guns"----not,presumably, his, however--
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