'An Insolent American Sadist: Sly Stallone and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

    This October, the Victims of Communism Foundation is holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival. I came up with the idea over a year ago. Celebrities are being invited - Gary Oldman, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney.

    Yes, and Sylvester Stallone. Stallone is an American icon, of course, who gave us Rocky, Rambo, and the underrated, un-woke Demolition Man.

    Stallone also went up against real Communists in 2013. It’s a long-forgotten episode, here reported by the Hollywood Reporter:

MOSCOW — St. Petersburg communists have unsuccessfully tried to ban an exhibition of paintings by Sylvester Stallone, calling him “an embodiment of the U.S. military machine.”

An exhibition of Stallone’s paintings is on show at one of the country’s best-known art institutions, the State Russian Museum, featuring his works made between 1973 and 2013.

“For those who were born and raised in the Soviet Union, Rambo/Stallone will always be an embodiment of Cold War and the U.S. military machine, someone who kills countless Soviet soldiers and our Vietnamese comrades, a maniacal fighter against the so called ‘red threat’,” reads a statement issued by the Communist Party of Leningrad Oblast.

The St. Pete communists were especially upset by the fact that the Stallone exhibition opened at the Russian Museum, which they see as a symbol of Russian culture.

“An insolent American invader, sadist and Russophobe has settled for a month [at a venue] where masterpieces of Russian painting have been on display for more than a century,” reads the statement.

“Stallone referred to our country as an evil empire, he was a soldier of [Ronald] Reagan,” Sergei Malinkovich, a leader of St Petersburg’s communists, wrote in an address to the Russian Museum, in which he called for cancelling Stallone’s exhibition. “Renowned artists and characters of their paintings wouldn’t want to be placed next to daub by a Cold War relic, filled with hatred.”

    I actually have a small bit of personal history that may make it easier for me to coax Sly into attending the festival. His stepmother Rose Marie once babysat me. As is revealed in the forthcoming book Going the Distance: Stallone, Philly, and the Story of Rocky (I got an advanced press copy), Stallone’s father Frank moved from New York to Maryland in the early 1950s. He started a successful chain of beauty salons and cosmetology schools. Stallone lived on Tanager Lane in Potomac, Maryland, not far from the street where my family lived. Somehow Rose Marie Stallone, who my mom called “Candi,” was my babysitter for a night in 1974. The main thing I remember is that I had a nightmare based on a horror movie - it was probably The Exorcist - and Mrs. Stallone comforted me, even putting her hand on my forehead and saying a prayer. She was a lovely person.

    Going the Distance also dispels the myth that Stallone was poor growing up. From the book: 

The Stallone family—as it was constituted when Sylvester was born in Hell’s Kitchen on July 6, 1946—relocated from New York to Maryland to Philadelphia. Frank Sr. and Jackie didn’t move so often because they had to. They moved because they had the financial means to move. They moved because they could, and Sylvester himself has acknowledged that the perception that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps from a disadvantaged childhood—a perception that flavors the story of and myths around the making of Rocky—doesn’t reflect his reality. “It’s totally blown out of proportion,” he once said. “Everyone likes to think of a trashcan, struggling, battling youth, throwing away his brass knuckles, finding God, pulling his way out of the gutter. That’s not what happened. I left Hell’s Kitchen. We did live in poverty. Left when I was five. By the time I was seven . . . it was definitely a middle-class existence. It was all well and good. Psychologically, it wasn’t so good for me because I didn’t have a flowing rapport with my parents. But materially, I only wish everyone could have that.”

    This doesn’t take away from Stallone’s accomplishments. He had plenty of other obstacles to overcome, from a birth injury that damaged a nerve in his face to a Hollywood that didn’t recognize his brilliance as a writer. In fact, Stallone proves that more middle- and upper-class artists should tell stories that reflect regular people - boxers, soldiers, and babysitters.