Sylvester Stallone: On the Sly

Did he drink? Drug? See shrinks? Order stuff he didn't need from QVC? "I took it out in art, painting 100 of the angriest. blackest. Rorschach test-like paintings that are like fingerprints of my soul," asserts Stallone, who owns a mighty art collection, and whose own surrealistic and impressionistic works sell very nicely, thank you. "Luckily, I had my painting and, also, exercise, which, for me, is like Zen movement and is like going to a psychiatrist. Exercise is truly a narcotic."

Stallone is too shrewd a careerist and businessman not to know that his career can hardly survive many more Judge Dredds, Still, having heard once that he nearly did Waterworld, I ask how he feels about that megabudget boondoggle. "I hate to see a movie go crashing down," he says, adding merrily, "unless it's up against one of mine. But don't the producers watch the dailies? If it's. 'OK. we're into this movie and it just hit $25 million and nothing is going right,' I say. 'stop everything.' Take a $10 million loss, but regroup or scrap it. Hollywood is a car with one gear that only goes forward, no reverse. Often, you fail upward in this business. A Waterworld creates concentric rings. Because of that, we're having to shoot my next movie, Daylight, in Rome to save money when we most likely would have done it in America."

Now. Stallone will get $17.5 million to star in that movie, which buys him a lot of time, but does he look to the careers of any past screen action stars for a compass for his future? To, say. Kirk Douglas, who's a best-selling author and occasional actor? To Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris, who flip-flop between ever-worse movies and TV? To Charlton Heston, who alternates acting with championing the right? "I'd love to get a cameo like Alec Baldwin did in Glengarry Glen Ross," he says, "just come in and nail it. For some odd reason, the audience identifies with me when I react physically, rather than a verbal one-on-one. At 55, no one is going to want to see me flying on a trapeze, though. I take offense to people writing off action films as some occupational hazard that actors occasionally must do so that they can be in something financially profitable, then do something 'serious.' Action films are a physical challenge and, because you don't have a great deal of dialogue, you have to become a partial mime to get things across. People dismiss them with a stroke of the pen, but, if there were no action films, there would be no Warner Bros., no Movieline magazine. Still, I can't be doing them forever. Acting is a great pleasure, but I just don't think, as I become more and more mature, it's going to be as vital to me. I find myself trying to regain a bit of that fire down below by writing screenplays. I'm taking out some scripts that I wrote 20 years ago. A lot of it's dated, but there is a naïveté and innocence that I've perhaps lost, but is still retained in the words, I'm gearing up to direct again, because I think that's where my strong suit lies. If Judge Dredd does well internationally, I wouldn't mind trying a sequel."

Rather than contemplate another Judge Dredd, Staying Alive or Rocky IV in my lifetime, I ask if he's serious about reported plans to turn Rocky into a Broadway musical, with music by Elton John. And who will be a young, singing Stallone? "I was just talking to Elton today and he's doing a musical for Disney first, but I'm holding him to his saying he was going to do this. Casting it, who knows? We've lost hardness, color, that take-the-bull-by-the horns kind of actor. About 10 years ago, John Milius told me, 'Here's how the movie business has changed. If I were casting the life of General Custer 20 years ago, we'd have 15 guys who could have done a wonderful job. Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, on and on. Today, De Niro? No, he's not right. Tom Cruise? Too young. Harrison Ford?' Today, your Leonardo DiCaprios, your Brad Pitts, they're not dogging it by any means, but it's just a different time, a different kind of actor from when I was coming up and I just don't know what's going to happen. In the next 20 years, is it gonna be totally ethereal, nonphysical actors? Because that seems to be the direction it's heading."

The direction this totally earthbound, physical actor is heading is to the set, where he'll be shooting through the evening and weekend. "Joel Silver runs this thing tight--a budgetary problem is addressed immediately," he says. "Days are cut, I'm working evenings." As he gets ready, I ask how he's looking at the future. "I feel as though I've been through three tours of duty in some battle-crazed foreign land and survived. I'm seeing this incredible new transition to a new kind of Hollywood, what with computer-generated images and new technologies that's like we're watching the electric bulb being made when I've been on candlepower all my life. I don't think I've ever been happier."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Molly Ringwald for the September Movieline.

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