Legend has it that Sylvester Stallone wrote the script for “Rocky” in three and a half days, but that’s not the case. enough how things happened. The storyline that emerged from those frenetic three days had nothing to do with the last film audiences embraced in 1976. In fact, the character of Rocky Balboa was initially so unlikeable and mean-spirited that it made Stallone’s then-wife cry.
Sly embodied Rocky Balboa’s “it’s about how hard you can be hit and still move forward” philosophy when he wrote the pugilist’s first film. Having moved to New York in 1969 to pursue his acting career, the future star found himself working odd jobs and appearing in low-budget fare just to make ends meet. We’re talking about cleaning out the cages at the Central Park Zoo. No one walking past the enclosures in the early ’70s would have guessed that the kid “making $1.12 an hour for getting pissed off by a lion” (as Stallone told Playboy in 1978) would soon be a major star.
But the young actor wasn’t just struggling with his career. At home, he had a pregnant wife and rent to pay. This house was a small apartment delivered with a landlord who was, as Sly told the BBC in 1977, “so big that when she came to collect the rent a whole shadow covered the building”. This “vicious individual” collected the $300 rent, even though Stallone often ended up with less than half that amount. With a pregnant wife, a less-than-ideal career trajectory, and a large male mastiff who would “eat anything organic or not,” the actor produced the script that would prove to be his breakthrough. But if he had stuck to his first draft, it is likely that this breakthrough would not have happened.
Credit to Sylvester Stallone’s Wife for Giving Rocky Hope
Sylvester Stallone married his then-girlfriend Sasha Czack in 1974. Two years later, he became a big star with “Rocky” — although he had to fight for the lead role in his own movie and almost lost the role of Rocky Balboa to a “Gunsmoke” actor. It’s a good thing he fought, though. Stallone’s charm and gentle manner, along with his undeniable underdog spirit, immediately made the character a modern American legend. But it seems that Czack has as much to thank for Balboa’s easy affability as Sly himself.
After blacking out his apartment windows and typing up his first draft of “Rocky,” Stallone was no doubt surprised to see Czack reduced to tears. Nor were they tears of joy at the thought of her husband becoming a big star. Instead, she disliked Rocky Balboa as a character, so much so that she was visibly upset, prompting Sly to make major changes.
In a 2025 interview with the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Stallone recalled that his first draft was particularly rough. “Not many people know this — and I didn’t think about it for many, many years, but in the first version of ‘Rocky,’ he wasn’t a nice character. He wasn’t even a boxer. He was just a thug.” The actor, who will soon return for a fourth season of the Taylor Sheridan-written “Tulsa King,” went on to explain how Czack immediately made his feelings about Balboa clear. “My wife, who was typing the script on this crappy typewriter, said, ‘I hate this character,'” Stallone recalls. “She had tears in her eyes, she was sad. That one comment from my wife changed my whole life. And I said, holy shit. I have to change this paradigm and give Rocky hope.”
Rocky only became a boxer in later versions of the storyline.
In the 1977 BBC interview, Sylvester Stallone explained his decision to make Rocky Balboa a boxer as stemming from his desire to create an allegory for his days spent as a struggling actor. But it seems like Sly left out a lot of the story at the time. Sasha Czack’s reaction to the first iteration of “Rocky” shocked Sly and led him to overhaul his main character, and only after that did he envision Balboa as a boxer. As he told AARP, “He still has one foot in the game, maybe as a sparring partner. It’s opened up this gigantic world of all these other characters in the fighting world.”
Without the boxing element, you arguably don’t really have a movie, which just begs the question of where is that first draft today and how can we all read it? What is “Rocky” without the lovable leading man and the boxing? This must have been a truly stark story, no doubt reflecting Stallone’s state of mind at the time. As such, Czack is surely the unsung hero of the “Rocky” franchise (well, her and “Happy Days,” without which “Rocky” arguably wouldn’t exist). Come to think of it, this threat from an owner and a voracious dog probably deserves some of the credit.
Even Stallone admits that the legend surrounding his original project simply isn’t true. As he told AARP: “When people say, ‘You wrote the script in three days,’ I say I wrote the script. And then it just kept branching out into something better, more empathetic. No, the original was rough.”
