Perhaps you’ve head some of the backstory of the making of the motion picture Rocky, written and starring Sylvester Stallone. I had heard whiffs of this but I stumbled on a series of videos that interviewed Stallone and when I dug down a little more, found an incredible story of perseverance and determination. The videos are assembled at the bottom of this post if you’re interested in hearing it right from the horse’s mouth.

In the early 70’s Sylvester Stallone wanted to be an actor and was striking out. He was broke, no money and living in New York. Times were so desperate that he hocked his (first) wife’s jewelry. (Something that he advises that you never do. Duh!)

One day he went to the library just to get warm and stumbled on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and was inspired to start writing.

He moved out to California with his dog and best friend, Butkus, and ends up living in one room where he could open the window and door while sitting on the bed.

California is not going much better and he’s so destitute he couldn’t feed his dog. He went down to the local liquor store tried to sell for him $50. Someone beats him down to $25 and he took it.

Then one night he saw the heavyweight boxing match: Muhammad Ali vs. Chuck Wepner. Wepner was a boxing ‘stumblebum’ brought out to fight the champ, and heavy underdog. But the fight lasted all 15 rounds and he actually knocked Ali down. Stallone was inspired by the story and wrote the whole movie screenplay for Rocky in just a couple of days.

A few weeks after, Stallone was at a casting call for an acting part. He did not get the part, as usual, and as going out the door he mentioned that he had a script that he was working on. He asked if they’d be interested in taking a look. They consented.

Well, after reading the script, they liked what they saw, and they offered him $25,000. So, here’s someone who sold his dog for $25 and is offered this seemingly huge sum. There was one condition Stallone had: he had to play Rocky. There was no way. The producers had Ryan O’Neil, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, or James Caan in mind to play Rocky.

From there, they sweetened the offer until they reached $375,000. Stallone still refused! Frustrated, their final offer was that he could star in the movie but he would only get $35,000 for the script and less than a million to produce. He took it.

His first step was to go back to liquor store to buy back his dog. He staked it out for 3 straight days and the dog and his new owner finally showed. He explained how much the dog meant to him and offered $100. Nope. $500? $1000? Nope. They settled on $15,000 and a part in the movie. The dog is back and actually appeared in the movie!

So even in 1976 $1M is not allot of money for a full feature film. They worked on site in Philadelphia, with a hand held camera and many members of his family had bit parts in the movie. The movie gets done in less than a month and on budget.

The big coming out for the movie before hitting the theaters was a screening for the Director’s Guild in Hollywood. Stallone had his mother with him and the theater was packed with around 900 people from the film industry.

It was not going well. They did not laugh where laughs should have been, and the fight scenes were not eliciting any response at all. Sly and his mother sat there for a while after everyone filed out and he told her that he could come back home, put his life back together, get a job, and so on.

Stallone guided his mother down the 3 flights of stairs to the lobby and there, the entire audience was there waiting for him and started applauding wildly. Stallone wept.

Rocky went on to receive 9 Oscar nominations – 3 wins including best picture. The movie that was made for less than $1M with hand held cameras brought in over $200M.

Wow!

The Making of Rocky: 1 of 4

The Making of Rocky: 2 of 4

The Making of Rocky: 3 of 4

The Making of Rocky: 4 of 4

It’s possible that you have only bits and pieces of the theme song from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This song was also use on Michael J. Fox’s movie: The Secret of My Success.  Here’s the entire song: Oh Yeah!

This month, 25 years ago, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released.  There was some wonderful and prophetic casting (Charlie Sheen as a druggie, Ben Stein as the economics teacher) and some of great and memorable lines.

Here’s a bit of FBDO history and trivia from Wikipedia:

Economic lecture

Ben Stein’s famous monotonic lecture about the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act was not originally in Hughes’s script. Stein, by happenstance, was lecturing off-camera to the amusement of the student cast. “I was just going to do it off camera, but the student extras laughed so hard when they heard my voice that (Hughes) said do it on camera, improvise, something you know a lot about. When I gave the lecture about supply side economics, I thought they were applauding. Everybody on the set applauded. I thought they were applauding because they had learned something about supply side economics. But they were applauding because they thought I was boring…It was the best day of my life,” Stein said.

Last week I was doing a little late night research on a song that I was working on, Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing. Some of the covers that I stumbled upon were quite amazing, and it got me thinking: Could this be the greatest cover song ever? Take a listen/look at some of these:

by Calos Vamos

by The Coors

by Bob Culbertson

by Sting

by John Mayer

by Eric Clapton & Duane Allman

by Derek and the Dominos

by Eric Clapton & Carlos Santana

by Toto

by Eric Clapton & Allman Brothers

by Satriani, Vai, Malmsteen

by Eric Clapton & Steve Winwood

by Santana & Joe Cocker

by Stevie Ray Vaughan

by Eric Clapton & Sheryl Crow

by Steve Vai

and, the studio version by Hendrix

I watched a documentary recently on the life and career of musician, Bill Withers.  The film is entitled: Still Bill, and shares some of his musical pasts but also his distaste for the music business in general and his present day life. He has largely eschewed the music business for the past 25 years, and refers to it as ‘The Fame Game.’

Many may remember him as the iconic author of soul/pop hits from the early 1970′s such as Ain’t No Sunshine, and Lean on Me.  The former is one of my favorite pieces of music and I’ve been working on a version of it for the past 30 years or so.

He has a really interesting background. He was one of 13 children and grew up in a small coal mining town in West Virginia, joined the Navy at 18 and was in the service for 9 years. He was building toilets for 747′s when his music career took off. (He got out of the service in 1970 and I wonder if our paths ever crossed when we were in Japan and the Philippines.)

Here’s the trailer for the film:

Ain’t No Sunshine:

Have you ever been so obsessed by a piece of music that you just left it on repeat and listened to it over, and over, and over, and over?

I found myself in that mode this past fall after I heard Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs and their thrice nominated album: God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise.

Frankly, I was not all that familiar with his work, but I am now.

I was first hooked by the song, Beg Steal Or Borrow, which was nominated for song of the year. But after a few listens to the album that obsession was transplanted to For the Summer.

The Grammy Awards are on Sunday, February 13, at 8 PM on CBS.
There are awards in over 100 categories. Here is the complete list on Grammy.com

Here are both of those songs that I was railing on about:

Well, it looks like Christmas cards will be delayed this year. I’m thinking that we’ll send out something after the first of the year with details for our 25th anniversary event.

Here’s my favorite card that we sent out in 2005.

That’s our house in the glass ball, from the opening scene of Citizen Kane, and the cast from Mystery Science Theater 3000 in theater. This was a project that I did when I was back in school for graphic design.

Here’s a link on this site to some of our Christmas cards from the last 5 years or so.

• Mystery Science Theater 3000

• Citizen Kane

I love it when someone shares music with me and I’m inspired. This happened recently when a new friend of mine, Tom Lanen, pointed me towards the Brit Duo: Underworld.

To describe it as ‘electronic/dance/techno’ is somewhat accurate, but does not do it justice IMO. I think Tom had the best explanation when he told me, “It’s great winter music.”

Here’s Bird-1 from their album released recently. If you do take a listen, the song builds and then rips it up at around the 3:20 mark.

Bird-1 by Underworld

Here’s Tom’s recent blog post on Underworld. Tom is a branding and design guru so there’s more meat on the bones here than a mere music review.

Wikipedia’s Underworld entry.

I saw this amazing video of the Gettysburg Address and on this anniversary of its delivery on November 19 many years ago, here it is.

Also here’s the link to a previous blog post, and our trip to the Gettysburg Memorial: Thoughts on Sacrifice and Humility.

This is a video of a performance at TED by Natalie Merchant. From her new CD, Leave Your Sleep, that takes a group of 19th poems and sets it to music.

For my friends in the music business: you must go and watch some of these videos produced by Derek Sivers.

Derek is the creator of CD Baby and put up a bunch of mini-interviews of people that he met at the recent South by Southwest Conference.  Derek’s posting on his site.

Here’s Derek’s presentation at the conference: