The Steps

The numbers are what you remember. Two producers at United Artists love the script about a washed-up Philadelphia club fighter, and they open at the Writers Guild minimum. Then they double it. Then they keep going, through six figures and past $300,000, on one condition: a real star plays the lead. Each time the offer rises, the bank balance of the couple in a rented Encino bungalow falls, down toward the price of a week’s groceries, with a baby on the way. The writer says no. He is the boxer or there is no deal. The Steps by Sylvester Stallone is the story of how a man with a crooked mouth, a slur and a Woody Allen walk-on to his name came to make that bet, and it is at its best when it behaves like a thriller about money.

Out now from William Morrow (it was published on 29 September 2026), the memoir covers a tight window: Stallone’s return from a European drift in 1969 to the night Rocky won Best Picture. Everything after that is left for another book.

The Bet on Playing Rocky

The Rocky chapters are the reason to buy this, paced like a story told at fifty years of dinners. He gives you the walk at three in the morning when the idea arrives, the three and a half days of writing on coffee and cigarettes while his wife Sasha types up the pages, and then her verdict that she does not like the hero, who reads as a mean thug. He rereads it, agrees, and rebuilds the character as a gentler, wasted talent. The Ali and Wepner fight lands mid-rewrite and makes the premise credible.

Film buffs will devour the casting. The studio floats Bette Midler and Cher for Adrian before Stallone pushes Talia Shire, sight unseen. Lee J. Cobb walks out rather than audition for Mickey. Ken Norton is cast as Apollo and quits for a television sports contest. Carl Weathers arrives cranky from a cancelled flight and mistakes Stallone’s in-character dimness for the real thing.

Two production details stand out in The Steps by Sylvester Stallone. When the boxing coordinator insists on stock moves, Stallone studies reels of classic bouts and writes out more than fifty index cards of punch combinations, which become the fifteen-round finale. And the bedroom scene where Rocky admits he only wants to go the distance is nearly lost at midnight, when a producer orders the power cut to save overtime. Stallone stops the electrician and begs for one take.

Before Rocky, The Steps by Sylvester Stallone covers the long apprenticeship in brisk anecdotes. The best is the Bananas audition, where an assistant director rejects him as not intimidating enough, so he buys a jar of Vaseline, greases his hair, rubs subway grime on his face and walks back down to the platform. He gets the part.

The Father in the Corner

The thread that gives The Steps by Sylvester Stallone its weight is not the film. It is his father, a hairdresser with a volcanic temper who communicated mostly with his fists and spoke more tenderly to his cheap polo ponies than to his son.

Stallone is unsparing. There is the Saturday afternoon his father drags him off a horse in the middle of a junior polo match in front of watching families, and the remark that he did not ride again for nearly thirty years. There is the early short film he and a friend shoot on his father’s land, with his father cast as a bounty hunter, which collapses into a scene of all three swigging red clothing dye for fake blood. It is the funniest stretch in the book and also a little frightening.

Then the payoffs, which deserve to reach you unspoiled. A goodbye at a Maryland gas station, before the drive west, that the son clearly never expected. And a day on the Rocky shoot when the father is handed a small job ringing the bell, and the scene ends with the two of them squaring up in the ring in front of a few hundred paid extras. Stallone does not resolve his feelings, and the memoir is better for it.

Where The Steps by Sylvester Stallone Gives Ground

• Fate is doing too much work. The book opens with a Spanish fortune teller’s predictions and keeps finding omens, from a car’s air conditioning kicking in at the city limits to a rival quitting at the right moment. Read once, it is charming. By the twentieth miracle it flattens the real luck and labour into destiny.
• The dialogue is too perfect. Conversations from the early 1970s arrive word for word, phone calls included, though Stallone admits elsewhere he has no total recall. Treat them as reconstructions.
• It stops dead. The narrative ends at the 1977 ceremony and the epilogue leaps half a century to a celebration on the Rocky Steps, where a wife and three daughters appear who have never been introduced. Readers wanting Rambo, the divorces or later grief will find a single line, or nothing.
• The film history is his version. Stallone insists that Chuck Wepner was not the inspiration. Wepner sued over that question and the case was settled, which goes unmentioned.

About Sylvester Stallone

Stallone was born in Hell’s Kitchen in 1946 and spent his early twenties exactly as this book describes: ushering, slicing fish and writing screenplays nobody wanted. He went on to reshape John Rambo into a wounded veteran rather than a killing machine and to anchor two long franchises. The Steps by Sylvester Stallone is his first full memoir, and you will find more filmmakers’ lives in our round-up of memoirs by Hollywood filmmakers.

• Rocky earned him nominations for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay in the same year, a double previously managed only by Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles.
• The film was the highest-grossing release of 1976, took ten Academy Award nominations and won three, Best Picture among them.
• The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2006.
• He won a Golden Globe for playing Rocky again in Creed, which also brought a supporting-actor Oscar nomination forty years after his first.
• William Morrow acquired the memoir in 2024 after a multi-publisher auction.

Read These Next

1. Sonny Boy by Al Pacino, another poor New York kid who found his way into 1970s cinema, told with more doubt and less destiny.
2. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls for a child raised amid chaotic, magnetic and dangerous parents.
3. Just Kids by Patti Smith, for two broke artists making a life in New York in exactly these years.
4. Open by Andre Agassi, a sports memoir about a domineering father and the cost of becoming a champion.

The Last Word

The fortune teller, the omens and the homilies are the frame Stallone wants. The book underneath is stronger and stranger: a stubborn young man refusing life-changing money because he knew which part was his, and a father who never stopped testing him. Read The Steps by Sylvester Stallone for the bidding war and the bell, and let the sermons wash past.

He bet everything on one role. Fifty years on, he is still collecting.