Word: avildsen
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Rocky brought Avildsen the Academy Award for Best Director, and the movie itself bested such high-profile con-tenders as Network for Best Picture of 1976. Avildsen's pride in the picture comes from more down-to-earth achievements, he said. Rocky was completed in 28 days for $950,000 so that even without the multimillion dollar windfall, ticket lines around the block and Hollywood's highest honors, Avildsen said, "it was hard to lose...
Throughout his talk and the reception that followed, Avildsen stressed the practical and financial side of film-making. The Oscar for Rocky was nice, but better than that, "it afforded me four flops." The films he made after Rocky--Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978), The Formula (1980), Neighbors (1981) and A Night in Heaven(1983)-- were trademark Avildsen: competent, unthreatening, inexpensive. Like the director's first hit, 1970s hippie-bashing Joe, each was in tune with its time, picking up on common wisdom and simply laying...
...Avilden's pragmatism could never be mistaken for the opportunism that seeps from his erstwhile protege, Stallone, now himself a director. Avildsen is a professional movie maker--neither a pop star soaking up adulation nor an artist basking in alienation. He likes to make movies, and he likes to do it cheaply. Why do Rocky and Adrian come to the skating rink when it's closed? We wonder. Simple, Avildsen says: it cost less to film without all the extras needed to make the place look open. That's pretty cool, you think, not pretty cheap...
...CONVENTIONAL film-maker, Avildsen said he had no secret dreams waiting to burst onto the screen, no particular places to show or tales to tell. A good story and good characters, in the median sense of the word, is what he likes. His opinion of artsy films, such as Room with a View, is no-nonsense Hollywood: "It was pretty," he said, "but it was endless. The characters weren't that compelling." Certainly not as compelling as, say, Apollo Creed...
...Avildsen's quest for the midline of American moviemaking keeps him from joining Stallone's exploitational bandwagon. He didn't want to take part in Rocky II, he said, because "I thought the script was really lame." Avildsen had hoped to make a Rocky trilogy: In the path not taken, Rocky would have become the populist mayor of Philadelphia in II and get tossed out because of a corruption scandal in III, ending up back in the ring where he started. Stallone decided Philadelphia City Hall was small-time; the Rocky-Rambo-Cobra hybrid which has terrorized movie screens near...