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  • 2015-07-22 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Struggling Sylvester Stallone Sell His Dog for $25? (no)
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  • In July 2015, an attention-grabbing story about the early days Sylvester Stallone's acting career began circulating online via Facebook. While the story touched on several fascinating tidbits of Stallone's life (e.g., he was homeless before managing to sell the screenplay for Rocky) the section garnering the most attention had to do with Sly and his dog: The story of Sylvester Stallone's film career and the Rocky film franchise is commonly been reported as a quintessential American rags-to-riches tale, as exemplified by this 1976 New York Times review of the first Rocky film: According to some other sources, however, that backstory was nothing more than a public relations tale cooked up by United Artists (UA); a creation myth fabricated in keeping with Rocky's theme of the underdog triumphant: According to an interview he gave in 2013, Stallone was so broke before he managed to sell his Rocky script that he had to raise cash by selling his dog Butkus (who later appeared in the first two Rocky films) for $50 outside of a liquor store: While it's certainly possible this anecdote is true exactly as Stallone told it in 2013, we're still a bit skeptical. The details of this story vary quite a bit from telling to telling, and although numerous articles published in the wake of Rocky's release in late 1976 touched on Stallone's straitened financial circumstances prior to the film's tremendous box office success, we've haven't yet found any that mentioned his having sold his dog and then repurchased it at a much greater price. Also, given that Stallone was supposedly living hand-to-mouth prior to selling his Rocky screenplay and had no idea whether his low-budget film (whose release was still over a year away) would bring him any additional money, his spending several thousand dollars to reclaim Butkus at that point sounds rather extravagant (although many dog lovers might claim that no price is too high to regain a beloved pet). So we're marking this one as a legend until we can turn up a confirming source for it other than a long-after-the-fact interview. (en)
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