PLAYBOY: Can we assume that made you two for two in the failure department?

STALLONE: I was about to go three for three: My next one was called Till Young Men Exit, a nifty title, but the script stunk. It was about a group of unemployed actors who kidnap a producer like David Merrick and all his employees; they replace the producer and his people with actors who are their doubles, and in this way, they take over the theatrical business. Oh, it was very bad. They tie Merrick up in a chair and they feed him Fizzies and Kool-Aid -- I didn't like the character, so I put him on a bad diet. Just as they're ready to ransom him back, the guy suddenly drops dead and the actors all realize, "Well, we got our man running things and no one's on to us." So they put the producer in a blender or something to get rid of him, and that was the end of that. Really bad! I wrote that while I was an usher. As a matter of fact, I wrote that entire script standing up.

PLAYBOY: Is that what you wanted to be at that point -- a screenwriter?

STALLONE: No, I was going to be an actor, but I figured that if I kept writing, eventually someone would buy a script. I didn't know if it would be a schlocky film company or not, but someone would buy one of my scripts and give me the acting break I needed. Writing was the key; if I kept on writing, nothing could stop me. And I didn't think I was going against the odds. I felt like I was the house and that the law of averages was on my side. I mean, if you write 400 scripts, the law of averages says you've almost got to sell one. Now, I hadn't done 400 scripts, but before Rocky came along, I probably had written ten or so.

PLAYBOY: Had you always wanted to be an actor?

STALLONE: No, as a kid, I wanted to be a shepherd in Australia, and if I thought there was an opening for a viking, I would've taken it. I wanted to do something adventurous and odd, which, come to think of it, is a very good description of my childhood. By the time I got to high school, I must've broken about 14 bones in my body doing things that were kind of adventurous and very, very odd.

PLAYBOY: Like what?

STALLONE: Well, when I was about 11, I broke my collarbone jumping off the roof of our three-story home in Monkey Hollow, Maryland. To give you an idea of where my head was, I jumped with an umbrella, thinking that I might go up! I didn't. I fell straight down into a cement trough that was half filled with water -- my father was building a barbecue pit at the time. When I landed in it, my father came out and saw me lying in slimy gray water with the umbrella wrapped around my neck. He said to my mother, "This boy will never become President. You've given birth to an idiot." I looked up and told him, "They said the same thing about Thomas Edison, Dad."

Actually, I wasn't such a happy kid. I was very self-conscious, because I had a terrible slur: An accident at birth had completely immobilized all the motor nerves on the left side of my face. That's why my mouth tilts down to the right, and sometimes my nose and eyes also lean to the right, and there's nothing I can do about it. I spent many, many hours fighting about that as a kid. Kids like to taunt and ridicule, and they were always calling me Slantmouth. Or they'd pull down the corners of their mouths and ask me if I ever used mine for an umbrella rack. I really was a very bad person to grow up with. In fact, I was a nightmare.

PLAYBOY: Did you get into trouble with police?

STALLONE: From about the time I was 13, yes. Part of it was due to having an overactive imagination. One night, for example, I saw a car parked beneath a streetlight. The way the shadows fell on it made the car look somewhat like a tank and I began to envision being attacked by Rommel's tank corps. So I began throwing bricks at it, and by the time I was ready to stop, the car looked like a dented can. I stopped before I really intended to, because the guy who owned it came running over and nearly beat me to death. From that point on, Maryland's Juvenile Department considered me someone to keep under surveillance.

PLAYBOY: What did your mother think of all this?

STALLONE: Mom thought I was mischievous. At the time, my mother owned a gym called Barbella's and she could bench-press 170 pounds. Whenever she thought I got too mischievous, she would tie my body into a square knot -- she knew all kinds of wrestling holds -- lay me across her lap and spank me with a brush. I wasn't left with just a red spot on my butt; she was very powerful, so when she hit me with a brush, it was like a mild concussion. I almost needed surgery to remove the brush.

It was right about then that I got interested in body building -- through a movie. I remember seeing things like On the Waterfront, and I'd always end up in a deep snore. But one day I saw Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained and I thought, Hey, it's one thing for Brando to stand up to the union, but this weird guy with the beard and big calves can pull down a temple all by himself. He's able to take on the entire Roman army using only the jawbone of an idiot, and I'd like to do that, too. I began thinking about what I wanted to look like physically, in terms of the proportions I wanted to develop. You didn't want to go too big, because then you'd no longer look terrestrial. You'd look like Hercules, which isn't bad, but that can get kind of tough if you want to play an accountant or something.

PLAYBOY: If you were worried about playing accountants, were you already involved in acting?

STALLONE: No, that didn't happen until we moved to Philadelphia and I enrolled at Lincoln High School. I wouldn't say that I had my throat torn up by the acting bug, but for some reason, I went out for the school play. Auditions were held in front of the drama class and the class would vote on who got the parts. The play was Mr. Todd Goes West, one of the greats. I tried out for the part of Mr. Todd and I had to read in a British accent: "Oy om your brouther. Don't you rehudnize me?" A bad, bad showing. I lost the election by a landslide.

PLAYBOY: Did that temporarily halt your acting career?

STALLONE: It buried it. I was very resentful, because I would've looked better in tights than the other guy. His legs were much thinner than mine -- and mine looked like a couple of threads hanging from my waist. So I put my acting career in dry dock and went on to more rewarding extracurricular activities, such as hanging out at the bowling alley, fighting and trying to open my classmates' lockers. I was soon put into a private school for bright kids who couldn't get along in the public system. But I still didn't know I possessed a brain.

PLAYBOY: Any particular reason you felt like that?

STALLONE: When I was 16, my mother -- who always thought I had some talent -- took me to the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia for tests to see what I was cut out to do in life. At the end of three days of extensive testing, my mother was told, "Your son is suited to run a sorting machine or to be an assistant electrician, primarily in the area of elevator operations." In other words, I'd be the guy who crawls through the trap door of an elevator to tighten the cables. My mother was disappointed, but then, as parents always do, she reverted to her original beliefs about me.

Meanwhile, I found it a little shocking, because I thought I'd done great. Really, when I was told to put the square blocks into the square holes, I did it very well. And then it comes out I'm one step above being an idiot. I'd always been very verbal and I wasn't shy with girls, and I thought these things indicated I had something on the ball. But according to Drexel, I belonged in an elevator shaft. I wound up feeling like an imbecile, a complete moron.

PLAYBOY: You couldn't have been that bad if you went to college. But why the American College of Switzerland?

STALLONE: It was either that or a place like the College of the Ozarks. I think my mother had read that American College was looking for students because the school needed money. Being a straight-D student, I figured that if they took me, they'd have taken a cretin. I guess my mother vicariously wanted to go to Switzerland, and that being the case, she packed my bags, tearfully drove me to the airport and put me on a plane to Geneva.

PLAYBOY: Did that seem rather drastic to you?

STALLONE: It was very drastic. The school was in the village of Leysin, about a two-hour drive from Geneva and at an elevation of about 4500 feet. The lack of oxygen kept me dizzy at first, everybody was wearing berets and goatees and talking French, and I didn't know what to do. So right away, I decided not to go European but to see if I could get the Europeans to go American. I gave it about a week. I refused to eat the food, go skiing or learn the language. My big problem was that I didn't have any spending money. My room and board were paid for and the plan was for me to find some kind of part-time job.

PLAYBOY: Did you?

STALLONE: Well, the first thing I tried was panhandling in English, but that didn't work. And then I made an important friend. Prince Paul of Ethiopia -- Haile Selassie's grandson or nephew, I never was sure which -- was a student there, and some of the boys trapped him in an elevator shaft one day. I helped get him out of a sticky situation, and for that, he bought me a Volkswagen. But I didn't feel like going anywhere, so I sold the car, took the money and started my own version of McDonald's. There were no hamburgers in that town, so I invented a thing called a vacheburger, which was part lamb, part beef and part sawdust. I set up a little oven in the garage of an abandoned chalet and went into business without a license, so I had to keep it quiet. I got a couple of aluminum suitcases made up to keep the hamburgers warm, and then I got friendly with a Swiss mountain climber named Keith. His job was to strap the suitcases on his back, throw his grappling hook over the side of the girls' dorm, climb up -- and take orders. I made enough money to support myself without any problems.

PLAYBOY: How did you do scholastically?

STALLONE: The first time our class averages were posted, I remember there were 97 freshmen and I was 97th. I had a grade point average of .02. But I made a comeback before the end of the year. When finals came around, Keith and I got into the dean's office and photographed our tests.

The following year, to get out of a creative-writing class, I auditioned for the school production of Death of a Salesman. I'd never acted before, and when it was my turn to read, the drama teacher told me to give a poetic speech. I got up there and said, "I tell you, darling, I can't offer you anything but a handful of stars and a slice of immortality." I couldn't believe garbage like that was coming out of my mouth, but the drama teacher liked it. "Not bad for a guy who looks like a Neanderthal," he said. "Why don't you play Biff?"

I thought that was terrific, and we gave two performances in front of audiences that didn't understand English. I got a very big laugh when I said, "Why don't you give Dad some Swiss cheese?" Actually, the second time we performed it, the audience gave us a standing ovation, and right then and there, I knew what I was going to do with my life: I was going to be an actor. At the end of my second year, I came back to the U. S. and I spent the next couple of years as a drama major at the University of Miami. And then I got on a plane for New York City. I was going to be an actor, period. No bones about it. I felt I was a natural ham and at the very worst, I could play heavies because of my size. I took a room in a Manhattan flea trap and to get by, I worked nights as an usher at the Baronet Theater on 59th Street. That left me free to haunt the city during the day, looking for acting work.

PLAYBOY: Were there jobs available?

STALLONE: Sure there were, but I didn't get any. My first audition was for Sal Mineo, who was directing Fortune and Men's Eyes. I went to an open call and I stood outside in sweltering heat for three hours, waiting to read for the part of a character named Rocky. When I finally got into the theater, there was Sal Mineo wearing a straw hat and an earring. As I walked up to the stage, he told me, "Try to be intimidating." I was very intimidating. I pushed the stage manager out of the way, I threw chairs around the stage -- I really overdid it. All Mineo said was. "Well, I don't find that so intimidating." So I jumped off the stage and put my finger under his nose and told him, "Now say it. I'm not in front of the footlights now. Tell me I'm not intimidating you." Mineo said, "OK, you're intimidating me -- but I don't think you're right for the part." And I left. For a year or so, I really perfected the art of being rejected.

PLAYBOY: Is that how long it took you to land an acting job -- a year?

STALLONE: You got it. My first part was in the only play ever written by Picasso. It was called Desire Caught by the Tail and it was done very far off-Broadway -- on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. I played a Minotaur. Wonderful part: I wore a tail, a fright wig that was supposed to be pubic hair and a huge phallic symbol that hung down to my knees.

We did the play for three weeks in front of audiences that averaged about seven people a night. At that point, the director decided that maybe we needed a little something extra at the end, when this girl who played the Angel of Death kills the Minotaur. The director gave her a fire extinguisher and the first time we did it that way, she came out dancing in sequins, chiffon and a lot of aluminum foil -- and she let me have it with the CO2 right in the face. Instant frostbite! My lips were frozen shut, my eyes were frozen shut -- and I'm going crazy because I want to kill the director! I was rushed to a hospital and after they thawed my face out with a heat lamp, I turned a splotchy brown from the neck up and stayed that way for about four months.

PLAYBOY: Did you begin thinking you might have chosen the wrong career?

STALLONE: Oh, I reconsidered becoming a shepherd, but I was committed. The show closed after my accident and by then, I couldn't get my usher's job back, so I got a job cleaning the lions' cage at the Central Park Zoo. Not too many people ever have the thrill of seeing lions taking giant leaks. Let me tell you, they're accurate up to 15 feet, and after a month of getting whizzed on, I quit. I couldn't put up with it anymore. Lion urine is intensely odorous, and I became the only man in New York who invariably wound up in his own private subway car. I told myself, "This is marvelous, Sylvester. You've gotten to the point in your life where you're now making $1.12 an hour to get pissed on by a lion."

I'd had it with part-time jobs. My acting career had pretty much fallen apart and I resolved to write every day. I took a cheap apartment over an abandoned delicatessen on 56th and Lexington and painted the windows black, because I didn't want to know if it was night or day. I cut off the telephone, cut off the electricity, and I wrote by candlelight. Except for a crate that served as my desk, I had absolutely no furniture. I didn't even have a bed; I slept on top of an old coat. It was the most pathetic, threadbare joint you could hope to see. The rent was $71.84 a month and I spent most of that year -- 1972 -- getting by on $30 a week unemployment.

But I got into writing on a very intense level, and if it's possible to do such a thing, I increased my intelligence that year. I'd never read books in college, but I began going to the library every day, reading the American classics and, in the process, becoming somewhat of an authority on Edgar Allan Poe. By then, I'd written a script about my school days in Switzerland, and one day I got a call that Otto Preminger wanted to talk to me about it. My big break!

PLAYBOY: Is that what it turned out to be?

STALLONE: Not exactly. I met Mr. Preminger at a fancy French restaurant, and I'd never been in a French restaurant in my life. I was very worried about meeting him, because I couldn't afford to have my clothes cleaned, and to tell you the truth, they smelled. It was a very depressing situation: After we sat down, he starts talking about the script, and I'm thinking about the holes in my shoes.

But Preminger really was interested in the script and asked how much I'd want per week to do a rewrite. I looked at him very meekly, crossed my fingers and said, "Would you consider $70 too heavy a sum?" Preminger looked at me with such disdain, as if to say, "You're not a writer. No writer in the world would sell out for only $70." He dropped the script into his chocolate mousse and said, "I don't think we have anything further to talk about." A laugh-a-minute guy, Otto Preminger.

A year later, I made my first sale. I got $2500 for a half-hour script for the Touch of Evil television series. Now I'm on my way, I thought. I wrote five other scripts for Touch of Evil -- and none of them sold.

PLAYBOY: Was that the low point of your years in New York?

STALLONE: No, because things were looking up, in a strange way. Sasha and I were together by then, and after she left her job as an usherette -- we'd met at the Baronet -- she got a job at a restaurant and I began eating again. Actors need to get film of themselves, and for that reason, a friend and I somehow put together $1500 and made a short called Horses. It was about a cowboy and an Indian who come back to life in 1973 and find everything so weird that they go back into their graves. The film was so bad that when I showed it to my parents, they actually walked out of the room -- and they'll normally sit through two hours of flower slides. I decided to give up on acting forever.

PLAYBOY: What got you back into it?

STALLONE: A stroke of luck. The friend I made Horses with had to do a scene for his acting class and asked me to be in it with him. The scene was from Death of a Salesman, which I had down pat, so we did it. He was studying at the Herbert Berghof School, and after our scene, Berghof came up to me and offered me a scholarship. Which I turned down: I was through with acting. But Stephen Verona was sitting in the audience that night and six months later, when he got ready to direct The Lords of Flatbush, he remembered me and sent me a telegram to come down and audition for him. And that's how I got into my first real film.

PLAYBOY: What about that porn film you were supposed to have acted in?

STALLONE: It was a sexploitation movie called Party at Kitty and Studs. I played Studs, who posts a sign on a bulletin board inviting people to come to a party. About ten people show up and they do a lot of kissing and necking, and that's about it. By today's standards, the movie would almost qualify for a PG rating. It was much, much tamer than The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea or Don't Look Now.

PLAYBOY: Weren't you nude in that film?

STALLONE: Yes, I was. I was also starving when I did it. I'd been bounced out of my apartment and had spent four nights in a row at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, trying to avoid the cops, trying to get some sleep and keeping my pens and books in a 25-cent locker. I mean, I was desperate. That's why I thought it was extraordinary when I read in one of the trade papers that I could make $100 a day. And the fact that I had to take off my clothes to do it was no big deal. There wasn't any hard-core stuff in the movie, so what did I care?

The people behind it were a group of wealthy lawyers, very, very solid, and I auditioned for them in a high-rise office building. But they came up with a turkey. Party at Kitty and Studs was a horrendous film and was never released.

PLAYBOY: Didn't they try to semiblackmail you into buying the film after Rocky came out?

STALLONE: I think they asked for $100,000, but I wouldn't buy it for two bucks, and my lawyer told them to hit the pike. You know, when you're hungry, you do a lot of things you wouldn't ordinarily do, and it's funny how you can readjust your morality for the sake of self-preservation. What's really ridiculous is to get in front of a camera in that situation and delude yourself into thinking you're doing something artistic. I thought, Well, maybe this will be an art film. Brilliant. In a way, though, it was either do that movie or rob someone, because I was at the end -- the very end -- of my rope. Instead of doing something desperate, I worked two days for $200 and got myself out of the bus station.

PLAYBOY: You've come a long way since then. Rocky may well go down as a movie classic, but aren't you pushing your luck by doing a sequel -- Rocky II?

STALLONE: If you have a character that's well liked and if you can use the character in a successful film that has a message applicable to today, why desert him? I've never understood that, which is why I don't like any of my characters to die. Killing them off is just too Hemingwayesque for me. I don't need to have my matador on the end of a bull's horn and being paraded through the streets of Pamplona. I'd much rather have him jump on the bull's back and ride into the sunset, and maybe we'll see where he goes in the future.

I like Rocky. To me, he's a 20th Century gladiator in a pair of sneakers and a hat, and he's out of sync with the times. When I first thought about doing Rocky II, I wanted to have him fight in the Colosseum in Rome. I was thinking about giving him more glamor, but that also meant giving up the neighborhood, the street corner, the guys back in Philadelphia. If he were to become Continental and big-time, I think I'd lose the essence of Rocky. Rather than make it big, his world should remain within a three-block radius in Philadelphia. I'd forgotten for a moment that Philadelphia parallels Rocky Balboa: It's never taken seriously. It is the underdog of America's big cities.

But Rocky will change and grow. There's always the death of one facet and the birth of another in people's lives. He'll see how quickly success is forgotten. He didn't win the championship. He gave a good showing of himself; fine. He's hot for two weeks, and then he's not, and he's back to being a pug. Well, he wants to regain the status and esteem he briefly enjoyed. But he knows he's 32 and that time is running out on him in his profession -- and that's where Rocky II will start from.

PLAYBOY: That sounds as if it could be your own motivation for making the film. Is it?

STALLONE: The age part certainly is, because I always feel I'm being chased by Father Time. I think that if I slow down, the omnipotent clock is going to catch me and just cut me to pieces with its second hand. I feel I have a certain number of hours and minutes to spend on the earth, and I want to accomplish as much as I can before the final gong sounds.

Right now, my age is an asset, but it will soon be going against me. Most of the films I've devised are youth-oriented. The characters themselves are in their late 20s and early 30s, so I don't have that much time left to play them before I'll have to hire younger actors to be in my movies.

PLAYBOY: Do you think that will take the edge off your desire to make movies?

STALLONE: No, because the work itself is pure fun for me. Movies are my reality. When I step outside the studio, I step into an alien world, a world I'm not too comfortable in. When I was a kid in Montgomery Hills Junior High, the teachers voted me the student most likely to end up in the electric chair -- and without acting and writing, I just might have lived down to their expectations. Quite honestly, I function so poorly in society that when I wasn't working on a film, I was averaging a fistfight every two to three weeks, and I'm talking about a major brawl.

PLAYBOY: When was your last fight?

STALLONE: About ten months ago. But that was because someone had the audacity to run into the back of my car. I got out and said, "Don't you think you should apologize?" And he said, "Go to hell." I'd just dropped my son off and I told the guy I could've had my kid in the car -- and he again told me to go to hell. Well, I felt obligated, morally and every other way, to stretch him. And he was stretched. In true Rocky fashion, I hit him with a wide, arcing left. It cost me $15,000 to throw that punch.

Anyway, to get back to what we were discussing, acting nourishes only the egocentric side of me. I like to see myself up on the screen. Sometimes that's not true because of certain acting choices I've made, but it's not to the point where I'm going to run to a psychiatrist. Directing is like an all-encompassing thing, sort of like being the coach of a team. Writing, though, is almost pure eroticism for me. When I can produce a well-turned phrase or what I think is a perfect scene, I'll jump up from my desk and do a cart wheel and almost slam my head through a window out of sheer ecstasy. One writer creates work for 300 people and entertainment for 3,000,000 people, so who's the most important person on a film?

PLAYBOY: Do you think that Stallone the writer is absolutely vital to the career of Stallone the actor?

STALLONE: Sure, because other actors have to wait for the kind of scripts they're looking for, but I can write my own. If I feel it's time for me to be in an action film, I'll write an action film. If I feel I need to do a love story, I'll write one. Short of brain damage or Providence deciding to turn its love light off me, I really don't think I'll ever get stale as a screenwriter.

PLAYBOY: Do you foresee the possibility of one day doing something other than act in motion pictures?

STALLONE: That day will never come. I see myself making a vast variety of films that will eventually cover just about every facet of my fantasy life. And when that's done, I'll begin to shrink in the business and I'll probably have to put myself into someone else's hands -- I'll have to direct or act in films written by other people. One way to avoid that may be to do biographies. For instance, if I were to do a film of George Washington's life, I'd begin to vicariously experience life through his eyes and I could direct it and act in it, too. Anyway, at the end of it all, I'd just like to be beneath a quilt in a nice, warm bed with all the best moments of my films spliced onto a giant loop that keeps playing over and over and over. And then I figure I'll just slip away into a warm, peaceful Valiumlike demise. Goodbye, world.

PLAYBOY: Any idea of what the world's response to that is likely to be?

STALLONE: People who knew me will say, "Well, Sylvester was quirky -- but he had his moments."