Anthony Ippolito Plays Stallone in the Movie Stallone Predicted in 1976
The clip that turned a press stop into a loop
Jimmy Fallon did something smarter than a plug. Before bringing out his guest, he rolled a clip of Sylvester Stallone on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1976, promoting Rocky, telling Carson: "It's quite a story in itself. If they'd made a movie about how this movie came about, you wouldn't believe it." Fallon let the audience sit with that, then pointed out the obvious: that movie now exists, it stars the man waiting in the wings, and it is being promoted on the same show fifty years later. Anthony Ippolito's late-night debut arrived with its own thesis built in, and the episode aired the night before the film's November 6 limited release.
A film about getting exactly one take
The clip Fallon chose from I Play Rocky is the key to all of it. A crew member informs a young Stallone that he gets one take — "two if you really [bleep] the bed or if I got a hair in the gate" — and that a director saying he is happy after one is a compliment, not a slight. That is also the plot. Stallone was offered $350,000 for the script and refused it to keep the role, which pushed the budget down to roughly $1 million and a 28-day shoot. The film's subject is a man who understood he would not get a second chance, so he declined to give away the first.
To play a nobody, study a nobody
The research problem was the inverse of the usual one. Stallone in 1976 was not yet a star, so there was almost no footage of the man Ippolito had to become. He worked from scraps — an episode of Kojak, The Lords of Flatbush, Death Race 2000 — because, as he put it to Fallon, "I just tried to piece together whatever I could find." What the fragments preserved was physical evidence: the stance, the run, the slur left by the facial paralysis he was born with and the ridicule that came with it. It is a strange species of method work, reconstructing an icon out of the years when nobody was watching.
The men who said no are in the cast
Most coverage lists the supporting cast as a roster. Read the roles and it becomes an argument about how Rocky got made. P.J. Byrne plays producer Irwin Winkler and Toby Kebbell plays Robert Chartoff, the two who eventually mortgaged their houses to keep the production afloat. Jay Duplass plays John G. Avildsen, hired because he could shoot fast and cheap. Stephan James plays Carl Weathers, the actor cast as Apollo Creed. Matt Dillon plays Stallone's father, AnnaSophia Robb plays Sasha Czack, and Tracy Letts, as the composite studio boss Sandy Maddox, is the voice saying get a star.
What the Fallon stop was actually selling
I Play Rocky opens in limited release on November 6 and expands nationwide on November 20, from Amazon MGM Studios: 128 minutes, PG-13, Peter Gamble's screenplay, 87% on Rotten Tomatoes across 62 reviews. It premiered at TIFF in September, where the festival's programme note called Ippolito's work a "career-making performance," and Stallone — who was not involved in making the film — has said they got it right. Fallon's clip finished the job by showing a man who looked like Stallone and sounded like Stallone, and who had clearly studied the years when being Stallone was not yet a good bet.
