Sylvester Stallone’s most surprising autobiographical movie: “It’s all the same kind of situation”
Writers relying on their own experiences when crafting their latest screenplay has been part of the business since the earliest days of the moving image, and it was instrumental in turning Sylvester Stallone into an overnight sensation.
While Rocky was a boxing drama inspired by the actor and filmmaker’s love of the sport, it wouldn’t have been as affecting as it was had he not poured so much of himself into the character. Rocky Balboa was a struggling underdog who believed he deserved a better life for himself, unlike Stallone, who was a jobbing actor struggling to make ends meet.
He joined Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles in rare territory when he became only the third person in the history of the Academy Awards to earn ‘Best Original Screenplay’ and ‘Best Actor’ nominations for the same movie, with Rocky winning ‘Best Picture’ and transforming him into a made man.
Stallone would go on to write plenty of screenplays in the years to follow, but none of them were even remotely autobiographical. Whether it was the action-packed likes of Cobra, The Expendables, the Rambo sequels, and Cliffhanger, sports drama Paradise Alley, wretched Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive, or arm-wrestling oddity Over the Top, he was hardly looking inwards for inspiration.
When he did decide to get autobiographical again, though, the results were dire. Stallone admitted he penned upwards of 25 drafts for racing thriller Driven, time that would have been much spent doing literally anything else looking at how things turned out.
Reuniting with his Cliffhanger director Renny Harlin, Driven was torn to shreds by critics and completely ignored by audiences, losing a fortune and earning itself the ignominy of seven nominations at the Golden Raspberry Awards, including ‘Worst Picture’ and both ‘Worst Supporting Actor’ and ‘Worst Screenplay’ for Stallone.
Playing veteran driver Joe Tanto, Stallone takes on a mentorship role to a brash young racer with eyes on the top. It was something he was familiar with offscreen, having become the elder statesman of action cinema, but he failed miserably in trying to recreate those real-life sentiments on the page.
“A lot of it’s autobiographical,” he mused to Cinema. “Racing’s very much like the world of acting. You have your front runners and you have guys that are there for the long race, and you have other guys that block for other people, that are called supporting and character actors. It’s all the same kind of situation. And you realize that you can’t always be number one. You just can’t be the guy in front all the time.”
His heart was in the right place, but his skills as a scribe had clearly deserted him because Driven was just awful. Stallone wanted to utilise his own feelings of ageing gracefully and pass on words of wisdom to the next generation and reflect it through the characters, and all he got out of it was yet another flop.
