Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy: A Pre-Fame Sylvester Stallone Shows Us His 'Italian Stallion'

Throughout cinema history, there have been some iconic nude scenes that have transcended the bounds of the films in which they appeared. Our weekly column Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy will take an in-depth look at these scenes, their history, their deeper meanings, and their legacy. This week, Sylvester Stallone shoots a softcore porn before he becomes famous, only to see it released after he hits the big time with the title The Italian Stallion!

The desire to become famous can drive people to a lot of desperate situations. Such is the one in which a pre-fame Sylvester Stallone found himself in 1970 when he was evicted from his New York City apartment and spent three weeks sleeping in the Port Authority bus terminal. It was here that he spotted a casting notice for a softcore pornographic film titled The Party at Kitty and Stud's, offering a $200 paycheck for two days of work. In a 1978 interview with Playboy Magazine, Stallone spoke about the decision to take the part saying...

"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."

Technically, this was Stallone's first starring role in a film as he plays "Stud" at whose pad he shares with girlfriend Kitty (Henrietta Holm) the titular party takes place. The part required very little of Stallone other than playing an oafish brute who is naked for most of the film's running time. The film's numerous sex scenes seemingly go out of their way to show Stallone's flaccid member as that's the main distinction between softcore and hardcore. Take this sex scene, for example, in which he and Holm go at it for over three minutes while neither of them do anything overtly explicit...

Though it may seem that he went right from the set of this film to major movie stardom, Stallone's journey to the top had only just begun, as he spent the next few years after shooting the flick struggling to make ends meet. He was met with rejection after rejection and bit part after bit part, leading him to start writing a screenplay in which he could finally play the leading role. That film, of course, was 1976's Best Picture winner Rocky, for which Stallone got an Oscar for his screenplay. Overnight, Stallone went from relative obscurity to the biggest leading man in Hollywood, something which the producers of The Party at Kitty and Stud's hoped to capitalize on and fast.

Writer, director, and producer Morton Lewis went to Stallone, offering him to buy the rights to his early softcore effort for $100,000 in order to prevent its re-release. In that same Playboy interview cited earlier, Stallone said that he refused this offer saying he "wouldn't buy it for two bucks." Rather than flush away the potential for a big payday, however, Lewis decided to rebrand and re-release the film using Stallone's nickname from Rocky, and thus The Italian Stallion was born.

The novelty of seeing Stallone in a "porno" was enough to help the film turn a modest profit, particularly considering it was made for next to nothing, but once word got out that the film was more of a "nudie movie" than a porn, the fervor quickly died down. That didn't stop rumors and urban legends from persisting over the years that Stallone had actually shot hardcore material but used his considerable influence to bury the footage.

Then in 2007, those fabled hardcore scenes turned up online causing a brief media sensation. However, it turned out that the scenes were actually hardcore insert shots from another film, 1976's White Fire. This was a common practice throughout the history of hardcore filmmaking in which pornographic footage was either shot apart from the main production or taken from another film and inserted into the film to skirt certain production restrictions. There's a halfway decent 1975 film titled Inserts starring Richard Dreyfuss about this very thing.

The age of clickbait has allowed the rumor to persist that Stallone did indeed shoot a porno back before he was famous, but don't believe the hype. The footage isn't real, it doesn't exist, it hasn't been suppressed, and it will never surface. The Party at Kitty and Stud's is the reality we've all had our expectations meet at some point in time and while it's a curiosity, it's just not as good or as crazy as the rumors would have you believe.

Catch up with our other editions of Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy...

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Ewan McGregor Has Got It, Flaunts It in Velvet Goldmine

A Pair of Stars are Born in Y Tu Mamá También

Harvey Keitel Goes Hog Wild in Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant

Viggo Mortensen is Naked From Every Imaginable Angle in Eastern Promises

There's No Shame is Michael Fassbender's Dick Game

Kevin Bacon Steals the Show Going Full Frontal in Wild Things

How We Met Jason Segel's Dick in Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Jack Reynor is Uniquely Vulnerable for a Man in Midsommar

Jaye Davidson Knows All There is to Know About The Crying Game

David Bowie Battles Rip Torn for Dick Supremacy in The Man Who Fell to Earth

Al Pacino Doesn't Get In All That Deep for William Friedkin's Cruising

John Cameron Mitchell's Ass Gives Hedwig and the Angry Inch the Perfect Ending

Ross Lynch Makes One Sexy Future Serial Killer in My Friend Dahmer

Rocketman Not-So-Boldly Goes Where Bohemian Rhapsody Refused

Color of Night Brings Us the Return of Bruno's Dick

Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu Get Serviced in Bertolucci's 1900

Future Oscar Winner Mark Rylance Gets Real and Really Nude in Intimacy

Louis Garrel Lets It All Hang Out in the French New Wave Biopic Godard Mon Amour

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