Beyond the museum steps, Philadelphia was central to the production for a specific reason: it is where the Rocky story actually happened. Stallone wrote the screenplay in three days in 1975, inspired partly by a Muhammad Ali fight, and pitched it to studios who wanted a star – not a broke unknown – in the title role. The city's working-class neighbourhoods, its Italian-American community, its gritty 1970s street life – all of it is embedded in the original film, and all of it needed to be recreated for a production set fifty years in the past.
New York City provided the executive suites, the studio meetings, the rejection scenes – the Hollywood machinery that kept telling Stallone he could sell the script, but not play the part. The production filmed across Manhattan locations appropriate to the 1970s entertainment industry world, with Jersey City providing additional urban texture and period streetscapes that doubled for New York's outer boroughs.
Los Angeles completed the geographic triangle – the city where United Artists finally agreed to Stallone's terms, where the deal was struck, and where the film eventually went into production in 1975.
Play Rocky arrives in cinemas on November 6 – fifty years after Rocky premiered on November, 1976.
