I Remember ‘Rocky’: My Front Row Seat to the Marketing of a Million-to-One Blockbuster

Back in 1976, no one knew who Sly Stallone was. Luckily, the United Artists marketing department knew how to build a box office contender.

It was my first job out of NYU Cinema Studies. I replaced the assistant publicist at United Artists, Allen Eichhorn, who invited me to college press screenings when I was doing radio reviews for WNYU FM. On my first day, the head of the advertising department, Gabe Sumner, spotted a fresh pair of eyes and pulled me into his office to look at a series of potential one-sheets (posters) leaning against his sofa. I remember the one they used. It was a piece of unit photography, a black and white image of Rocky and Adrian holding hands with their backs to the camera. The log-line: “His whole life was a million-to-one shot.”

Filmmaker Howie Deutch (“Pretty in Pink”), who started out as a New York advertising department trainee and rose to advertising director, remembers being assigned to watch the “Rocky” dailies because the United Artists executives Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow famously didn’t want to make the movie. (See Amazon/MGM’s “I Play Rocky”). They were more interested in the producers Bob Chartoff and Irwin Winkler’s other projects, “Comes a Horseman” and “Valentino,” said Deutch on the phone. “I had no idea what I was looking at.”

Only when the movie scored big at a Los Angeles preview did West Coast exec Mike Medavoy talk the UA brass into watching it. The person who believed in it was Sumner.

He made sure that the publicity department screened it individually for critics. UA senior publicist Gary Kalkin carefully booked one key interview after another over months. The launch pad: columnist Guy Flatley in the New York Times. Nobody knew who Sylvester Stallone was. He had written a great script that Chartoff/Winkler wanted to make, and so did UA, but not with him starring in it. That was the deal-breaker. No matter how much money they threw at him, and he was barely scraping by, he insisted on being the star. (See “I Play Rocky.”) When he came to the UA office, the women were always aflutter. They knew.

Alas, The New York Times’ Vincent Canby delivered a scathing review. “Rocky” is “absurdly oversold,” he wrote, calling it a “sentimental little slum movie.”

The $1 million movie did not open well initially — no one knew Stallone or the cast. But when the sales department decided to book it in urban centers like Baltimore and D.C., it started to pick up steam. It was a word-of-mouth engine that could, ultimately grossing $225 million worldwide and spawning five sequels and the “Creed” spinoff movies.

The publicity department kept chugging on the Oscar campaign, and sure enough, the movie wound up nominated for 10 Oscars: Actors Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, and Burgess Meredith all earned nominations, and Stallone also scored an Original Screenplay nod, joining the ranks of such screenwriter thespians as Woody Allen and Orson Welles. (Oddly, while “Gonna Fly Now” landed a Best Song slot, the Music Branch overlooked Bill Conti’s memorable Score.)

At the 1977 Oscars, “Rocky” beat MGM’s “Network,” Warner Bros.’ “All the President’s Men,” Columbia’s “Taxi Driver,” and UA’s own “Bound for Glory” for Best Picture, and took home two more for Editing and Directing.

It was a million-to-one shot.