What do you do when you really believe in something?

The new (last) one is out now.  The story of the making of the first Rocky is kind of a legendary Hollywood story -- Nobody Makes Oscar Winner!  It's about faith, commitment, perseverance and redemption (like the movie).  It started when Sylvestor Stallone had given up acting and started writing scripts...

I proceeded to buy a nineteen-cent Bic pen and a forty-nine-cent pad...I did sit down and I did complete a story from beginning to end. For better or worse, it's there. This was something new for me because I was a man who had never passed an English course in his life...

He wrote eight scripts, but none sold and he hadn't made a dollar...

The turning point came without a doubt at my twenty-ninth birthday party. It was in July and I was sitting across the table from my wife who was growing wider with pregnancy and my dog who was eating his own fleas because we were so broke. My wife had purchased a $1.15 cake at a local store and we were looking at one another and talking. 

She was saying, "Make a wish," and I looked around and I wished I was out of this place so badly and I knew that the only way I was ever going to get out of this place was not through "physicalization" but actually through creative endeavor, dedication, discipline...

So he wrote about what he knew best -- himself...

So I took my story and injected it into the body of Rocky Balboa because no one, I felt, would be interested in listening to or watching or reading a story about a down-and-out, struggling actor/writer...For the next three and a half days straight, Sasha, my wife, who had always done the typing, was called upon to go above and beyond the call of duty. I wrote and she typed. We had a two-person factory going. We'd watch the sun go up and the sun go down and we'd eat standing up and she would struggle and slap herself in the face at the typewriter to keep herself awake. I don't know why we were pushing so hard. No one was asking for the script. I didn't have a producer giving me a dead- line, but deep down inside I knew that something was brewing. There was heat.

The movie people ended up wanting to buy the script, but without him acting.  The price went to over $250,000, but he wouldn't sell it...

But then something down inside, or wherever our real conscience lives, told me that the money meant nothing. This is it. You're on the ride of your life. Don't let go because if you do, you're going to hate yourself for the rest of your life. The movie is about not selling out. The movie is about going the distance. The movie is about that million-to-one shot. Don't become a hack.

You can read the whole thing HERE.