According to Sylvester Stallone in the DVD commentary, Rocky's trademark outfit of the black snap-brim fedora and the leather coat came from a local hand-me-down store in the neighborhood where they were filming
The movie's line "Adrian!" was voted as the #9 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere in 2007
Marie's classic line "screw you creepo" was "fuck you creepo" in the original script. Obviously, the line had to be changed for the film to get a PG rating.
Rocky is not the character's actual name. His real name is Robert Balboa - this was seen in a rough script from the second film. He took the nickname from real-life boxer Rocky Marciano.
Parts of the scene where Rocky runs up the stairs in training are played backwards. Originally the shot zooms out but was reversed to zooming in in order to better match the musical score and for dramatic effect. This has been confirmed in interviews with by Bill Conti, who wrote the score.
The photos on Rocky's mirror are actual photos of Sylvester Stallone as a young boy.
Ranked #4 on the American Film Institute. 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time (2006).
Prior to shooting the fight between Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers, director John G. Avildsen decided that the scenes needed to be shot in a unique way so as to make the boxing more realistic than in other boxing movies of the period. He, Weathers and Stallone all went to a ring and began to block out the moves, but it wasn't working, and the fight was coming across as staged and not very energetic. Avildsen then told Stallone to go home and literally write out the fight; 'Rocky throws a left, Creed moves back, Creed goes right, Rocky goes right Creed jabs low etc'. The next day, Stallone returned with 32 pages of specific directions for the fight, which he and Weathers learned off like a ballet over a period of weeks. In total, Stallone and Weathers rehearsed for over 35 hours.
Most of the scenes of Rocky jogging through Philadelphia were shot guerrilla-style, with no permits, no equipment and no extras. The shot were he runs past the moored boat for example; the crew were simply driving by the docks and director John G. Avildsen saw the boat and thought it would make a good visual, so he had Sylvester Stallone simply get out of the van and run along the quays whilst Avildsen himself filmed from the side door. A similar story concerns the famous shot of Rocky jogging through the food market. As he runs, the stall keepers and the people on the sidewalks can clearly be seen looking at him in bemusement. Whilst this works in the context of the film to suggest they're looking at Rocky, in reality, they had no idea why this man was running up and down the road being filmed from a van. During this scene, the famous shot where the stall-owner throws Rocky an orange was completely improvised by the stall owner-himself, who had no idea that a movie was being filmed and that he would be in it.
The iconic shot of Rocky running up the steps of Philadelphia Art Museum came about because of Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown. Brown, who was from Philadelphia, was getting ready to fly to LA to try to sell his newly invented Steadicam device. He had shot some test footage following people around corridors and from room to room, but he wanted to be able to shoot something that even the most experienced filmmakers would look at and wonder how he did it. He came up with the idea for his girlfriend to run up and down the museum steps, whilst he followed close behind her. Using this footage, Brown sold the camera on his first day in LA, and several months later, John G. Avildsen, who was prepping Rocky, saw the footage and felt that a similar type of shot would be perfect for the film. As such, Avildsen hired Brown and the Steadicam, and as Brown explains, several months after he had run up the steps filming his girlfriend, he was running back up the steps filming Sylvester Stallone.
