The Steps

Sylvester Stallone's memoir traces his path from a directionless 23-year-old backpacking through Europe to the night Rocky won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Organized around a series of metaphorical "steps," the book chronicles the poverty, rejection, and relentless creative ambition that defined the decade before Stallone became one of Hollywood's biggest stars.

In 1969, while wandering through the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain after dropping out of the University of Miami, Stallone visited a fortune teller named Madame Pilar. She predicted that an older woman would launch him into a theatrical life and that he would find fortune by 1976. Reflecting on a hilltop above the Mediterranean, Stallone realized he was wasting his most valuable asset: time. He resolved to return to America and pursue acting in New York City.

Stallone arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in August 1969 with no contacts and no plan. He walked to his childhood neighborhood in Hell's Kitchen, a rough Manhattan district where he had been born on July 6, 1946. A forceps delivery had partially paralyzed the left side of his face, leaving him with a crooked mouth and a permanent slur. His parents had a volatile marriage: His father, a barber, was prone to violence, and his mother had forgotten to divorce her first husband before remarrying. They sent young Stallone to live in a boardinghouse for three years, visiting about once a month. Unable to find affordable housing, he settled into the Sutton Hotel, a derelict building where his room was smaller than the minimum recommended jail cell size, and began cold-calling talent agents.

Rejection was immediate and constant. Agents told him he lacked the right look, that his slur and crooked mouth disqualified him from leading roles. With his money dwindling, he took a job cleaning lion cages at the Central Park Zoo, then moved to the night shift at a delicatessen. He spent a lonely first winter eating raw eggs and cottage cheese, his only company the pigeons on his fire escape. He found inspiration in Moondog, a blind street musician and accomplished composer who stood on a Midtown corner dressed as a Viking. Moondog represented what someone could achieve by following an unconventional path.

A turning point came when Stallone took a job as an usher at the Baronet and Coronet Theatre. The position became his informal film school: He studied movies obsessively, recording dialogue on a secondhand tape recorder and transcribing it into notebooks, performing what he called "cinema autopsies." Having written one-act plays at the University of Miami, he shifted to screenplays as a more viable path. His early scripts were overly autobiographical, but he developed a discipline of relentless revision, sometimes producing dozens of drafts. At the New York Public Library, he discovered original manuscripts by Edgar Allan Poe and became obsessed with Poe's life, eventually writing a screenplay about him that earned him representation from a literary agent at the William Morris Agency.

Stallone's personal life stabilized slightly. He saved enough to move into a rent-controlled apartment. His colleague at the theater, Sasha (born Jane Czack), a ticket-taker from Pennsylvania who was also pursuing acting, began typing his screenplays and bringing him leftover food. His brother Frank, an aspiring rock star, arrived and moved into an adjoining condemned space. Stallone acquired an English bullmastiff puppy he named Butkus, who became his closest companion.

His break into film came through The Lords of Flatbush, a low-budget 1974 movie set in 1950s Brooklyn. His friend John Herzfeld informed Stallone that director Stephen Verona remembered him from an acting-class scene and wanted him to audition. Cast in a small role as Stanley Rosiello, Stallone transformed the part through extensive ad-libbing, and a Time magazine review praised the performance as an "exceptional characterization." Through his castmate Perry King, Stallone met Jane Oliver, a manager who told him his success was "inevitable," echoing Madame Pilar's prediction about an older woman launching his theatrical career.

After the film's release, Stallone felt he had achieved as much as he could in New York and decided to move to Los Angeles. He and Sasha drove cross-country in a rusted-out 1963 Oldsmobile his father sold him for $40. Before they left, his father unexpectedly apologized for years of harsh treatment and kissed him for the first time. They arrived in LA nearly broke and rented a tiny house in Encino.

Hollywood proved no kinder. A casting director told Stallone he had no chance in the business. He landed small roles in low-budget films, including Death Race 2000 and Capone, where his costar Ben Gazzara advised him to chart his own course rather than remain a passenger in someone else's career. Financial desperation forced him to sell Butkus for $40, a decision that devastated him. He married Sasha in a small ceremony and sold the option on a screenplay called Paradise Alley for $100 to a red-faced lawyer from Texas. Through his new manager, Herb Nanas, he met producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler at United Artists, but the meeting went badly when they learned about the cheap option deal.

At his lowest point, in winter 1975, with Sasha pregnant and their money nearly gone, Stallone walked the streets at three in the morning searching for an idea. He arrived at a concept rooted in his own experience: the frustration of never getting a chance to prove one's worth. He envisioned a down-and-out boxer as a metaphor for anyone denied their opportunity, drawing on the undefeated heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano as inspiration. He wrote the first draft of Rocky in roughly three nonstop days. When Sasha read it, she told him the character was unsympathetic. Stallone rewrote Rocky as a washed-up fighter who gets a miraculous title shot, a premise lent credibility by the real-life fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner, a 40-to-1 underdog who knocked Ali down. He transformed Adrian from a peripheral figure into the soul of the story. After the rewrite, Sasha loved it.

What followed was an extraordinary standoff. Chartoff and Winkler wanted the script but refused to let an unknown play the lead. They offered escalating sums, from $20,000 up to $360,000, while stars like James Caan and Robert Redford circled the project. Nearly everyone urged Stallone to take the money. Only Sasha and Jane Oliver supported his refusal. When director John Avildsen endorsed Stallone for the role, the producers relented. Stallone dropped the phone when Herb called with the news, fell to his knees, and cried.

He immediately bought Butkus back for $1,500. The studio treated the film as a B movie, budgeting under $1 million with 28 days to shoot. Stallone pushed for Talia Shire as Adrian, nearly getting fired. Burgess Meredith agreed to audition for the role of Mickey, Rocky's trainer. Carl Weathers won the role of Apollo Creed. When the studio-hired boxing coordinator quit, Stallone choreographed the 15-round fight himself using index cards with punch combinations drawn from classic fight reels.

Filming in Philadelphia was chaotic and improvisational. Budget cuts eliminated extras from the ice-skating scene, so Stallone reimagined it as two lost souls alone on empty ice, deepening the love story. The film's emotional center, a bedroom scene where Rocky confesses to Adrian that he cannot beat Creed but wants to still be standing at the final bell, almost went unfilmed when producer Chartoff tried to end the shooting day. Stallone secured one take and delivered the monologue; the producers called it the best scene in the movie.

Composer Bill Conti created a score that gave the film its emotional power. Stallone and Avildsen fought to reshoot the ending, replacing Rocky's lonely walk through arena debris with the iconic moment of Rocky screaming for Adrian as she fights through the crowd to embrace him. After a disastrous first test screening where most of the audience walked out, a triumphant screening for film students confirmed the story's power. The film opened on November 21, 1976, at a small New York theater to an audience that threw imaginary punches and erupted in cheers.

Rocky became the highest-grossing film of 1976 and received 10 Academy Award nominations. Stallone invited his mother to sit beside him at the ceremony, but she declined. When Jack Nicholson announced Rocky as the winner of Best Picture, the producers led Stallone onstage. Bill Conti struck up the Rocky theme, and Stallone stepped to the microphone: "To all the Rockys in the world, I love ya!"

In the epilogue, Stallone reflects on Rocky's legacy at a ceremony on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the same steps where he filmed the movie's most famous scene. Standing with his wife, Jennifer, and his three daughters, he declares that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they refuse to quit, and that true victory lies not in winning but in going the distance.