#166: Rocky – Not Just Another Bum in the Neighborhood

The Empire Builders Podcast

Sylvester Stallone was not making it, trying to be an actor. So, instead of giving up, he tried a different path.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

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Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young. That’s Stephen Semple sitting to your right, however you’re facing your podcast listening device. As we normally do, Stephen whispered the topic into my ear just as the countdown thing was going, and I’m a little flustered and confused because I’m not sure what we’re talking about. He said, “We’re going to talk about the Rocky franchise.” And literally, the first thing that came to my mind was Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, no, no, no. Not Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Dave Young:

And I’m like, really? That’s an empire? Really?

Stephen Semple:

No, no, no, no, no.

Dave Young:

No, you’re talking about Sylvester Stallone.

Stephen Semple:

I’m talking about Sylvester Stallone.

Dave Young:

Yo, Adrian, and all of that.

Stephen Semple:

All that stuff. All that stuff, yeah. That movie is almost 50 years old.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Came out in 1976. There’s been five Rockys. There was, then, Rocky Balboa, there’s been three Creeds, there’s another Creed coming out.

Dave Young:

Really?

Stephen Semple:

There’s plans for a prequel to be done on one of the streaming ones. There’s a spinoff that’s being talked about to be done on Drago. Remember the Russian, the Russian fighter?

Dave Young:

Oh, sure, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

When you go to Philadelphia, there’s the Rocky statue in Philadelphia of him holding his hands up near the stairs that he ran up.

Dave Young:

Sure.

Stephen Semple:

And today, there is a lineup. There’s a lineup of people to take their picture with that statue. And it’s 50 years ago. 50 years ago. Amazing.

Dave Young:

Well, Sylvester Stallone, he’s got to fund his retirement somehow.

Stephen Semple:

The story was first shared with me by Tony Robbins, and it blew me away. And I did a little bit of additional look into it like, is this an urban legend? And it turns out much of this is true, although some of the details, I don’t know the exact numbers, but it is actually really speaks to Sylvester Stallone’s determination and understanding and ability to get things done that I believe every entrepreneur needs to embrace and understand.

Dave Young:

Awesome.

Stephen Semple:

And that’s why I wanted to talk about Rocky. One of the other things I want to talk about when it comes to Rocky, it won best picture, best director, best film editing. It’s considered, by many, one of the greatest sports films of all time. Stallone was nominated for best actor, and also was nominated for best supporting actor in Creed. And is wild today that when you’re at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you still see people who run up the stairs and do the whole thing.

Dave Young:

Sure.

Stephen Semple:

And it’s that, the statue is there, and there’s a lineup. There’s a lineup to take your picture with the Rocky statue. And yes, I have a picture of myself with the Rocky statue. I had to do it.

Dave Young:

How long was the line?

Stephen Semple:

Actually, I was there during the week on a weekday, so it was not too bad. It was probably about 15 minutes.

But here’s the story behind Rocky that I find remarkable. So Sylvester Stallone found himself, like many in Hollywood, wanting to be an actor, and he was a struggling actor, look, not a good-looking guy, mumbles in his speech, had a really, really hard time finding roles. Look, the other part is what’s amazing is hearing him speak today versus how he used to speak. He’s worked hard to become also a better actor. But let’s go back to the early days. So he’s struggling to do all those things, he’s flat busted broke, and he can’t make his way into getting the types of roles that he wants. He just basically gets roles as tough guys and all this other stuff. So what he decides to do, so think about this for a moment. He says, I can’t break in. I could give up, I could keep trying, and this is the reason why Tony Robbins talks about him, I could try a different approach.

So here’s what he decides to do. He says, you know what I’m going to do? I am going to write a movie that I star in. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to learn. So he goes on this journey of learning screenplay writings, and he writes the movie Rocky and starts shopping it around. He’s going down this path of doing this. Now, here’s where the real determination comes in. Here’s how broke is; he reaches a stage where he has so little money, he has to sell his dog.

Dave Young:

Oh man.

Stephen Semple:

He sells his dog because he just has no money.

Dave Young:

That’s sad.

Stephen Semple:

But at the same time, one of the movie companies comes along and says to him, “We’ll take your movie. We’ll give you a check.” I believe the closest I found was it was like $250,000 plus some royalties, things like that, which when you’ve got nothing-

Dave Young:

In 1974 or five, whenever that was, right?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. When you’ve got nothing, that is life-changing money.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

But he’s not going to star in the movie. He’s not going to be in, they’ll maybe give him a minor part, but he’s not going to star in the movie. And guess what he does? He says no.

Dave Young:

My goal was to be an actor. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Now think about the strength that it would take to do that. You’re flat busted broke, you sold your dog, somebody’s giving you this amount of money that’s life-changing money, still going to make your movie, but you’re not going to star in it. How many of us would say no?

Dave Young:

They’d be like, oh, well, okay, I’ll take the money.

Stephen Semple:

I’ll take the money.

Dave Young:

Right.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Most people would say yes, few would say no. He says no. Holds to his guns. So they continue to go back and forth and go back and forth and go back and forth on it. And finally, he finally finds a place that’ll take the movie. They’ll say, yeah, we’ll take the movie. We’re going to do it as a low budget film, it’ll probably do okay because it’s got this boxing thing. We’ll let you star in the movie.

Dave Young:

In your own movie. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Right, in your own movie, but we’re going to give you significant less money. They really dropped down the amount of money they were going to give him, but he was okay with that. He was like, look, it’s not about the money. It’s about this. But here’s where he’s also brilliant. Here’s where Sylvester Stallone is brilliant and really understands things.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

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Dave Young:

Let’s pick up our story where we left off. And trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

Stephen Semple:

He said, “Great,” he said, “but here’s what I want. I want the lifetime rights to Rocky and I want this amount of the take forever on any future Rocky movie.”

Dave Young:

There you go.

Stephen Semple:

And of course, the studio said, “Sure.”

Dave Young:

You’re a nobody. You’re going to star in it. It’s not going to do very well. There’s no second movie.

Stephen Semple:

There’s no second movie. There’s no food, movie.

Dave Young:

There’s no action figure.

Stephen Semple:

There’s no action. You can have this, that’s fine, it’s yours, no problem. Done. so for almost nothing, he got the rights. Think about it. He is one of the few actors in Hollywood who his franchise, Rocky, he owns and controls a hundred percent, not the movie studio.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

How big is that? When you talk about funding his retirement? Oh, no, the dude’s fine. But also, the control that this gave him over his career and his livelihood and over Hollywood, it’s unheard of. They didn’t believe in it. They believed in it enough that they thought, if we do this low budget thing, we’ll make a little bit of money. He believed in it enough that he said, I’m going to do that thing. I’m going to do that thing. And he understood he had the leverage because they didn’t believe in it, so what the hell?

But here’s where he also gets interesting in terms of this guy understanding, negotiating and leverage and things along that lines. Remember how he said he sold his dog?

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

So he gets this money, so he gets an advance on it, and he manages to track down the guy who had his dog, and he said, “I want to buy the dog back.”

Dave Young:

Oh, good.

Stephen Semple:

Now, the initial reaction of the guy who he sold the dog to was, look, anybody who’s going to sell their dog doesn’t deserve. I’m a dog lover. Anybody who sells their dog does not serve to have their dog back. But what he finds out, this guy, too, wants to get into acting. So he says to him, “Well, not only will I buy the dog back, I’ll give you a role in this movie.” So Rocky gives him a role. Sylvester Stallone, not Rocky, Sylvester Stallone gives him a role in the movie, and the dog appears actually in the movie, Buttkiss, the dog in the movie, That’s his real dog. That’s Buttkiss. That’s the dog that he sold and got that.

Dave Young:

Who’s the guy that?

Stephen Semple:

I was never able to track down what his name was and what role he played in it. I only heard. That was one of the things I only heard as a story that I couldn’t really confirm. But I believe it to be, I believe to be true.

Dave Young:

Yeah. Awesome.

Stephen Semple:

I believe this to be one of these things that Tony Robbins heard from Sylvester.

Dave Young:

Well, you’ve closed the deal for me. He got his dog back. That’s all I was really worried about from the beginning of the episode.

Stephen Semple:

Got his dog back. Here’s the thing that, when I heard this story, that I really admired about Sylvester Stallone, and it was a couple of things. One is, he was going down this path and it wasn’t working, and what he didn’t do is he didn’t give up on it. He said, there’s got to be another way to make this work. And so he tried another path, and there’s a greatness in that. There’s a greatness in, I’m not giving up on it. I need to have a different strategy to make this happen.

Another guy who was like that was Harrison Ford. So Harrison Ford, when he first became an actor, what he knew is he said, look, it can take a long time to break into Hollywood. So he learned carpentry, and his attitude was, carpentry has got flexibility and time and whatnot. I can pay my bills being a carpenter, which means I can actually hang in there and do this for a long time. There was one point, one of his first roles that he was offered by Stephen Spielberg, he initially turned it down because he said, “I make more money doing carpentry. This doesn’t pay enough.” And they ended up matching what he would make doing carpentry, and he got the role. But still, it’s that whole idea of, in Harrison Ford’s case, this is going to take a long time, so I have to have staying power. In Sylvester Stallone’s case, it was, this isn’t working, I need to create a new strategy. What can I do? Well, I’m going to write a movie that I star in.

And in Sylvester Stallone’s case, he did not take his eyes off the prize. He could have very easily taken the tack up, I’ll take the money and I’ll write another movie. But he believed in it and held to his guns.

Dave Young:

It’s a hero’s journey story, whether it’s Rocky or Rambo. He became the guy that puts those stories together and people love that story. We’ll watch that story all day long.

Stephen Semple:

The other thing that’s interesting in the first Rocky, there’s two stories. There’s the hero’s journey story that Rocky Balboa goes through, with an interesting thing where he wins but doesn’t win. It’s a really interesting outcome because he wins, but he actually lost the fight. So it’s a really nice, interesting twist because from the hero’s journey standpoint, he still gets the elixir and he still wins and still gets all these rewards, but he actually lost. So that’s an interesting plot twist on that storyline.

But it’s also a love story. It’s a story of him and Adrian and why they actually love each other, because she sees his gentle side and he’s her protector and honors her. And so it’s actually a very rich, for somebody who just went out and said, boy, I’m going to study screenwriting, write something. When you actually look at the storyline, it’s a very rich story.

Dave Young:

Well, and you could make the case that the winning came from just getting the fight.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

Right?

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

The outcome of the fight doesn’t matter so much. The important thing that it does is it sets us up for movie two.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Right?

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

The comeback. And that’s another hero’s journey.

Stephen Semple:

It is.

Dave Young:

It’s that same loop. And gosh, we talk about this at Wizard Academy, the Chapel Dolcinea sits on a pedestal off of a cliff that’s in the shape of a baseball diamond. And Bart Giamatti, when he was the baseball commissioner, talked about baseball being the hero’s journey of sports. You’re not trying to just take territory from the other team, you’re setting out on a journey and your only goal is to get back home again.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. Yeah. It’s the only sport which your goal is to return from where you started.

Dave Young:

And so you see that, you see that thread in all the Rocky movies.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

We love watching that story and hearing that story, because that’s the story that we’re all living.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

It just resonates in the human heart.

Stephen Semple:

And you had the mentor and you have the transformation that goes through, and you had the call to action and the refusal, the call. You have all the elements of that story, and if somebody’s interested in learning more about the hero story format, I highly recommend reading Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It’s fascinating.

Dave Young:

Oh, absolutely, yeah, classic.

Stephen Semple:

Because it’s also fascinating when you learn how long this story arc has been around and why it’s as powerful as it is. But I just thought this story, to me, is so inspiring, and it really did build an empire. Sylvester Stallone built a movie empire because people go, oh, but it’s part of Hollywood. It isn’t. He owns it.

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

It’s his.

Dave Young:

There’s a lot of people that have made a lot of money off of it because of him, yeah. Amazing story. What about Bullwinkle?

Stephen Semple:

Rocky and Bullwinkle? We’ll have to look at the Rocky Bullwinkle.

Dave Young:

That’s a whole different Rocky story,

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, but then we would also have to talk about Boris and Natasha, of course.

Dave Young:

Yeah. Well, thank you for bringing the story of Rocky to the Empire Builders. That’s a great one. I love it.

Stephen Semple:

All right, awesome. Thanks, David.

Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to [e-mail].