Posted
on Fri, Aug. 01, 2003
Stallone
Courts Controversy in Comeback Attempt
By Eric Harrison
Houston
Chronicle
Settling in for an interview
in an Austin hotel suite recently, Sylvester Stallone
bypasses a nearby couch and instead chooses a straight-backed
desk chair across the room.
"I'll get too comfortable
if I sit in one of those," he says.
It seems too easy, this ready-made
metaphor, but comfort is a commodity Stallone no longer
can afford. A box-office heavyweight in the 1970s and '80s thanks
to his Rocky and Rambo movies, the 57-year-old
actor-writer-director has spent the past decade on the ropes.
Studios balk at hiring him. Distributors won't touch his movies.
In this summer of comebacks,
Stallone joins Demi Moore and fellow strongman
Arnold Schwarzenegger in making bids for continued viability.
His is modest: He plays the villain in Spy Kids 3D: Game
Over. His real hopes reside in his next project, an ambitious
film he calls Thugz Lives, about the murders of rappers
Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. that Stallone
wrote and hopes to direct and star in. It's a risky proposition,
unlike anything he's ever done, with the potential to resuscitate
his career or blow up in his face.
It isn't his first comeback attempt.
He tried in 1997, in Cop Land, an intelligent drama about
police corruption that co-starred Robert De Niro, Harvey
Keitel and Ray Liotta. Stallone spent six
weeks gorging on pancakes to gain 40 pounds. His character found
a core of courage and became heroic at the end, but for most
of the movie he played a mope, looked down on by nearly everyone.
Stallone hoped the role
would show that the early promise he displayed as an actor was
real, that he could do more than cartoon action heroes. But
despite the stellar cast and good reviews, the movie did middling
business. Stallone took that as evidence his audience
didn't want to see him flex his acting muscles; they wanted
the old familiar Sly, talking tough and cracking heads.
"Nobody wants to see John
Wayne perform The Nutcracker, you know," Stallone
says. "He may be the best ballet dancer in the world, but
nobody wants to see him like that."
After Cop Land, things
went from bad to worse with a string of flops.
"It can eat you up,"
he says of failure. "It just does a number on your self-esteem.
The acting part is easy. The hard part of this business is maintaining
your equilibrium and confidence. That's why so many actors get
hooked on alcohol and drugs."
And maintaining that confidence
has indeed been hard lately. Shade, the last movie in
which he starred, languishes without a distributor. D-Tox
(also known as Eye See You) opened on a handful of screens
last year, earning $79,000, before going to video. Avenging
Angelo, the film before that, never got an American
theatrical release.
Driven, Stallone's
last film to open wide, earned back less than half of its production
costs before it vanished from domestic screens in 2001. And
the total U.S. gross of Get Carter ($15 million) was
less than some major movies make on opening night.
Stallone isn't the only
one who wants to change that run of failure. Robert Rodriguez,
the Austin filmmaker who created the Spy Kids
franchise, met Stallone in 1997 at the Venice Film
Festival. Following the premiere party for Cop Land,
they hung out together, and Rodriguez was surprised to
see a side of Stallone that rarely came through on film.
"I'd always been a fan of
his, but I'd never known how funny he really is," says
Rodriguez, adding sheepishly, "I wondered why his
comedies weren't any good." Then he realized Stallone
was always a hired hand in the comedies, working for other directors
from scripts he didn't write.
"He was always funny in
the Rocky movies," Rodriguez says.
So when it came time to cast
the role of the Toymaker, the villain in Spy Kids
3D, he thought of Stallone.
For his part, Stallone
says he had no choice but to accept. His kids (he has three
with his third wife, former model Jennifer Flavin) are
big Spy Kids fans.
"I had to do it," he
says. "Otherwise, I'd be disowned by a 6-year-old."
He had a ball, he says. He loved
not being the center of attention, not being the star who has
to carry the picture.
Now, as he begins to plan a sixth
Rocky film, Stallone is pushing ahead with Thugz
Lives. The movie, like a previous documentary and book on
the cases, will link the murders of Shakur and Biggie
to corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department and
to geographical rivalries within the hip-hop record business.
Stallone, who hopes to start filming in September, hints
there also will be a suggestion of FBI involvement.
"This is like the JFK
assassination to the black community," Stallone
says. "And like the JFK assassination, they'll
be battling this out for the next 100 years, trying to figure
out what happened."
Which is exactly what Stallone
wants: to be back in the middle of a big fight.
- Craig Zablo
