Director: Peter Farrelly

Cast: Anthony Ippolito, AnnaSophia Robb, P.J. Byrne

Synopsis:

A struggling actor with a partially paralyzed face and a speech impediment writes a script that a big movie studio wants to buy, but he refuses to sell it unless he gets to play the lead. Turning down an offer of life-changing money, he instead works for pennies to get the movie made with himself in the starring role. The movie becomes the biggest box office hit of 1976, notching ten Oscar nominations and winning Best Picture. The true story of the making of the iconic movie Rocky.

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If you saw Rocky in theaters in 1976, you were witnessing, without realizing it, a movie that wasn’t supposed to exist. It was cheap-looking, for good reason: It had been made for just a little over a million dollars which, even in the mid-1970s, was almost nothing. Yet its cheap vibe was part of the excitement. You felt that this somewhat elementary story—of a scrappy small-time boxer who goes against the reigning heavyweight champ and almost wins—was letting you in on a little secret: You weren’t immune to stories that you thought you’d seen a hundred times before.

If anything, you were as susceptible as ever, and a movie’s budget had nothing to do with it. Kids went to see Rocky with their parents. Teenagers trekked out in small packs, and grownups turned it into a date night. The ultimate underdog movie, set in the ultimate underdog city of Philadelphia, it became the film everyone talked about. And its star—a guy who mumbled his lines and whose heavy-lidded eyes conjured the spirit of the goodnight poem "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod"—seemed to have come out of nowhere. That he’d also written the movie seemed slightly miraculous, the opposite of business-as-usual in Hollywood.

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