When producer Toby Emmerich, the onetime chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures, sent Peter Farrelly the script for a movie about the making of “Rocky,” the director known for hit comedies like “There’s Something About Mary” and “Dumb and Dumber” was dubious.
“I thought, ‘Eh, I kinda know that story already,” Farrelly recalled.
But after reading Peter Gamble’s screenplay, Farrelly realized he did not, in fact, know the story — at least not the most curious and compelling parts of it — and he signed on to direct “I Play Rocky,” which opens in Boston on Thursday.
Sylvester Stallone’s quest to write and star in “Rocky,” at a time when he was virtually unknown in Hollywood, was as improbable as the 1976 movie itself. Indeed, when Stallone appeared on “The Tonight Show” two weeks after “Rocky” was released, Johnny Carson told his TV audience: “If they made a movie about how this movie came about, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Fifty years later, Farrelly has made that movie.
The director’s first task was finding an actor who could embody — not just impersonate — the young Stallone, capturing the New Yorker’s slow, almost slurred baritone and his slouched yet swaggy gait. Stallone’s performance as Rocky Balboa, the small-time fighter who nearly becomes the heavyweight champion of the world, helped make him a global star. Getting the right guy to play him was imperative.
“The toughest thing about making this movie, obviously, was going to be casting,” Farrelly said after a private screening at the Coolidge Corner Theater in September.
While Stallone had no involvement, financial or otherwise, in making “I Play Rocky,” the 80-year-old actor did meet with Farrelly and offer him a bit of casting advice.
“He said, ‘I recommend you hire a relative unknown,’” the director said in a recent video interview with the Globe.
Enter Anthony Ippolito. The 27-year-old actor, who won’t be unknown much longer, portrayed young Al Pacino in “The Offer,” the Paramount+ series about the making of “The Godfather.” He heard that a “Rocky”-related project might be in the works and made an audition tape, which he filmed with a friend in his grandmother’s basement on Long Island. Before the search for a Stallone stand-in had begun, the tape found its way to Farrelly.
“I was like, ‘That’s the guy!,’” the director said. “It never went past him. He’s the only person we saw.”
The legend of “Rocky” is well known. Made for $1 million — a pittance even in the mid ’70s — the feel-good film was an enormous commercial and critical success. It went on to win the Oscar for best picture — beating “All the President’s Men,” “Network,” and “Taxi Driver,” no less — and another for John Avildsen’s direction. (Both Stallone’s performance and his screenplay, written when he was 28, also earned Oscar nominations.)
Not as widely known is the “Rocky” origin story. For a time in his 20s, when his fledgling acting career had stalled, Stallone was briefly homeless, sleeping on the stone floor at Penn Station with his dog Butkus. (He eventually sold Butkus for $40 to buy food.) Offered only bit parts or roles in seedy softcore porn films like “Party at Kitty and Stud’s,” Stallone resolved to write a screenplay for a film he could also star in.
His inspiration was the story of Brockton-born boxing legend Rocky Marciano and the bloody 1975 heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner. With the help and encouragement of his then-wife, Sasha (played in the film by AnnaSophia Robb), Stallone wrote the “Rocky” screenplay in just three days.
“The entire time he was writing it, he said he was listening to Buffalo Springfield on a loop,” said Farrelly, who uses their song “Rock & Roll Woman” in a montage of Stallone scribbling dialogue and passing the handwritten pages to Sasha to type. “We tried to do everything as accurately as possible.”
Hollywood producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff read Stallone’s script and were impressed, but they did not want him to play the lead, preferring to cast a bankable star — Ryan O’Neal, Burt Reynolds, or Robert Redford were all under consideration — as Balboa.
“There’s a reason they didn’t want Stallone,” Farrelly said. “There were no leading men like that at the time. Stallone was, you know, a big galoot. This was before Schwarzenegger or John Cena.”
When Stallone would not budge — he refused to take $350,000 to let someone else play the part — the studio’s flinty boss, portrayed in the film by actor-playwright Tracy Letts, finally relented. But with stipulations: If the movie went even a tiny bit over budget, or took more than 28 days to shoot, the studio could replace Stallone with another actor.
“They basically tried to break him,” said Farrelly. “When we made ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ we had a ball. Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels, Lauren Holly — we were having the time of our lives.
“But this guy, making this movie,” he said, referring to Stallone, “they were torturing him, yet somehow the movie worked out.”
Maybe motivated by Stallone’s experience on “Rocky,” Farrelly worked quickly, said Robb, the actress who plays Stallone’s wife.
“The set was light and fast. Pete isn’t precious,” the actress said in a video interview. “He’s a rhythm guy because he comes from comedy. He’s not always looking for a laugh, but when he directs, it feels rhythmic.”
Farrelly, who grew up in Rhode Island and attended Providence College, is most famous for the crowd-pleasing comedies he’s made with his brother, Bobby, but he says that’s not all he can, or wants, to do, as he demonstrated with “Green Book,” the story of interracial brotherhood that won the 2019 Oscar for best picture.
Farrelly, who will turn 70 next month, says the success of that film was bittersweet. It helped change Hollywood’s perception of him as “just a comedy guy,” but the movie also was disparaged by some critics who felt it delivered a “facile message of racial harmony.”
“It hurt,” the director acknowledged. “It was like if you won the Masters golf tournament and everybody booed.”
Judging from the reaction at this fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, where it was first runner-up for the People’s Choice Award, “I Play Rocky” could be applauded by audiences and critics alike. Five decades after a small-budget boxing film became a box-office sensation, Farrelly’s underdog story could likewise surprise people.
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com.