In a special three-part series — including All the Presidents’ Men and Taxi Driver — Deadline is looking back a half-century at 1976, an incredible year for movies.

Things could have gone very differently for Sylvester Stallone in the year he broke out; by 1976, he was just a jobbing actor with seven years of minor credits to his name. Though it would later be re-released as The Italian Stallion to cash in on his subsequent superstardom, Stallone’s first major role was a soft-porn romance called The Party at Kitty and Stud’s (in which he played Stud). It didn’t exactly make him an overnight sensation, and his scenery-chewing performance as Tommy gun-wielding bad guy Joe “Machine Gun” Viterbo in Roger Corman’s ultraviolent 1975 cult classic Death Race 2000 could have easily stereotyped the actor for life.

Good reviews for his part in the rock’n’roll-era coming-of-age story The Lords of Flatbush (1974) — for which he wrote some additional dialogue — encouraged Stallone to sit down in March 1975 and write a movie for himself to star in. Three days later, he had a script called Rocky. Inspired by the then-recent story of boxer Chuck Wepner — who lasted nearly 15 rounds in a fight with Muhammad Ali, even knocking him down — it was an underdog story about an unknown Philadelphia southpaw, Rocky Balboa, who is picked from obscurity to go up against world heavyweight champion Apollo Creed.

United Artists loved the script, but they weren’t so hot on Stallone’s demand to play the lead, offering him serious money to walk away. With just $106 in the bank, Stallone refused, and after the studio gave in, that determination was rewarded big-time.

When Stallone looks back on the Oscar night that changed his life 50 years ago, he counts it as a career pinnacle rivaled only by being recognized in the Kennedy Center Honors last year. For the screenwriter and star of the Best Picture-winning Rocky, that Oscar night was just as surreal and unlikely as his hungry journey from playing the muscle in The Lords of Flatbush to global superstar.

First off, he was surprised by the number of diminutive people looking to take a punch at him, the way Apollo Creed did his alter-ego Rocky Balboa — starting with Paddy Chayefsky, the playwright and Network screenwriter who was up against Stallone for Best Screenplay. Network and All the President’s Men were the favorites, and Chayefsky wasn’t above talking some trash to the wide-eyed newcomer Stallone.

“He’s a tiny guy, very brazen, and he comes up to me and says, ‘You’re new in this town,’” Stallone recalls. “‘First of all, your screenplay is never going to win.’ I go, ‘Why do you say that?’ He says, ‘Because I’m the president of The Writers Guild, and mine is going to win.’”

That wound up happening, and after spending so much time studying boxing for his breakout turn, Stallone couldn’t help but wonder if the fix was in.

Then Chayefsky landed a second blow. “He goes, ‘You’re not winning Best Picture either, because Network is going to win Best Picture.’ I thought, ‘Holy crap!’ I’d never been hit with such blunt force, and then he walked away. He got Best Screenplay, but we got the big one.”

Others were kinder, including some of the actors he’d grown up loving. Kirk Douglas was effusive in his praise, but this was long before he and Stallone would clash on First Blood (Douglas dropped out of the role of Colonel Sam Trautman after Stallone balked at allowing his Rambo character to be killed by him). Network star William Holden was also encouraging, Stallone recalls. It was a lot to take in.  

“Me being me, it was all quite profound, and after we won, I thought, ‘The good news is, I’ve peaked — and the bad news is, I’ve peaked.’ I’d just turned 30 years old and was like, ‘How are you going to top this?’ But here we are, 50 years later, and we’re still talking about it.

“I’m really starting to embrace just how f*ucking lucky I’ve been, now that I’m getting closer to the end of the line. I had written about 22 screenplays before Rocky, so I had been practicing, but I never concentrated on the kind of messaging or politics those other films had. I just channeled what I was living through, what I was thinking and the way I philosophized life. I just put it in the body of a boxer because the body of an actor is not necessarily interesting. It was not narcissistic or cynical, and that’s what people responded to. It was apolitical and humanizing.

Me being me, it was all quite profound, and after we won, I thought, ‘The good news is, I’ve peaked — and the bad news is, I’ve peaked.’

Sylvester Stallone

“There was this total shift in filmmaking for a while where we started going for the different types of stories, more escapism and less message. It was 1976, the country’s birthday. People were getting tired of dark, nihilistic films. They were looking for something life-affirming, and I just happened to catch that wave. But writers by nature are inward people, existing in their own heads, and that night… I try to be a more outward person now, and maybe my biggest regret was I was unable to just be in the moment, to really relish all the incredible sights and sounds.”

That would have been asking a lot of a young man with a script about an underdog boxer who suddenly rises up to the world heavyweight championship. It was as unlikely as the underdog path Stallone traveled to get his Rocky script turned into a movie with himself in the titular role. He still shudders when he thinks of the numerous times he could have taken a much-needed payday in exchange for letting go of the Rocky Balboa role. He turned down the telepic deal at ABC his Lords of Flatbush co-star Henry Winkler used his Happy Days clout to get for him. There’s also this story: The studio execs that finally gave the movie the go-ahead with Stallone starring had mistakenly thought he was Perry King, the handsome lead actor from The Lords of Flatbush.

But back to Oscar night. Rocky got 10 nominations. Although it was up against some of the most revered movies that year, the film KO’d them all at the box office. Rocky was 1976’s top-grossing film with $225 million in worldwide ticket tales. It was one of the very first films shot with a Steadicam — an innovation that lent a visceral reality to the boxing scenes and had audiences following the rounds of the fight as though it was a sporting event.  

“Rocky was done in 24 days, and we just happened to be in Philadelphia because that’s where the story took place,” Stallone says. “Garrett Brown, the inventor of the Steadicam, happened to live there, and he was doing things with the cam, and I don’t think people knew what was going on. They were just being taken on this journey visually, and they couldn’t figure out why. And Bill Conti’s music elevated the film as much as any camera work or acting. They wanted to use rock music like Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, and I begged them to do something unexpected: ‘Why don’t we have romantic classicism?’ They said the movie was ‘streety’ and that was the sound, but I said, ‘I understand, but the story is generational. So, let’s not just use something from one generation. Let’s use something that will cross all those generations.’”

Maybe all that seat-of-the-pants success made him a target for the elite in a shifting Hollywood. At the Oscars that night, Stallone found himself being pummeled by Mr. Blackwell, who was more famous for his Worst Dressed List than his own fashion designs. Blackwell was outraged that Stallone was fashioning himself into a style rebel by breaking tradition and showing up collar open, with no bow tie. But the truth was a little more prosaic.

“As I’m in the backseat, driving up to the front door, my tie breaks,” Stallone says. “I’m so naive at this point, because a year earlier I was destitute. I didn’t own a tie. This was a rented tux, like a prom tux, a real beauty with the ruffled shirt. The driver sees my tie break and says, ‘Hey, you want to borrow my bowtie?’ I go, ‘Nah, it’s OK. No one will really notice.’

“I opened the shirt up like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever and put the collar on the outside of my tux. And from that moment on, I get out of the car and it became a very, very bizarre night. I’m sitting in the theater and watching Burgess Meredith lose. I thought he was a shoo-in for his role as Mickey [in Rocky]. Bill Conti — who wrote this unbelievably iconic music in one day and recorded it in less than one other day for under $25,000 — he loses. And then Talia Shire didn’t win. I figured it was because all these other films are very intellectual and political with a vast message. Mine really had no message other than personal fulfillment, standing up and challenging your fears. And of course, the final piece was the love and support of a woman, which was something Rocky never had and why winning the fight didn’t mean as much as making her proud.”

Since it didn’t win Best Actor, Screenplay, or six of the other categories it was nominated in, he figured Rocky would end the night as a bridesmaid. But when Avildsen won Best Director, his mood changed. When Jack Nicholson got up to announce Best Picture, the producers of all the other nominated films looked supremely confident. And then Nicholson opened the envelope…

“When we won, I was so stunned, I just went, ‘Oh my god,’ Stallone says. “If I wasn’t holding onto the chair, I probably would’ve just done a back flip.”

He took the stage between producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, and they gave Stallone the last word.

“I got up there and then realized, with my Tony Manero look the world might be thinking, if this Guido is taking home the trophy, I don’t know what to think of the future. What a wonderful night it was.”