The only part of Rocky that Burgess Meredith filmed in Philadelphia was Rocky hurrying after him down Tusculum St and shaking hands under thr street light as the El train passes by overhead.
Everything else -- gym interior, Rocky's apartment interior, the Apollo fight-- was filmed in LA.
All Carl Weathers scenes were filmed in LA, so he wasn't in Philly at all.
Growing up in New York and later in Philly, the Stallone boys were quite familiar with Horn and Hardart's.
Their mother Jackie was not a cook dinner for the kids kind of mom.
The scene in Rocky where he says the last time he had turkey for Thanksgiving was for $2 at Horn and Hardart was one of the real life stories that made it into the final script as a line of dialog.
Sure enough, a mid-1960s menu from H&H shows that turkey cost $1.95. Closest thing to a "luxury " item in the automat.
This was either the first or second tv talk show appearance Sly did in 1976 to promote Rocky after its release.
In this appearance, he tells a slightly different version of the famous story about how to turned down considerable money to sell the screenplay if he couldn't star in it. He tells Dinah Shore that he made sure first his then-wife Sasha was on board with him holding out to star in the lead role before he turned down all offers unless his one condition was met.
1982 interview. The interviewer is dry but it's an unhurried discussion right after Rocky 3 came out. Near the end, Sly also talks about the not-yet-released First Blood.
Thirty-five years before Rocky, Burgess Meredith (and actress Olivia de Havilland) met with heavyweight champ Joe Louis.
I like to imagine that a recently retired Mickey Goldmill is talking shop with the Brown Bomber about how he beat Max Schmeling ("that Goiman").
"Never mind the dame. Yer fightin' Billy Conn in two weeks... a very dangerous poisen. Gotta slip the jab, see."
Then Mickey tells Joe he needs a manager.
Paulie has never really seen his easy-going old buddy Rocky get mad before until he asks him a very inappropriate question about his relationship with his sister.
Rocky takes it out on the hanging slab of beef, thus starting his new training technique.
But you can see a realization come over Paulie that he pushed it too far. He also realizes that Rocky is not someone you want to make angry.
Instead of apologizing -- because that's just not what Paulie does -- he weakly tells a joke.
Rocky is still not in the mood to speak to Paulie that day but waves a goodbye to "I'll see you tomorrow, OK?"
Burt Young makes this whole scene what it is. This is one of two moments where you see how volatile -- but also vulnerable-- Paulie is without him ever being one to say he's sorry.
Bill Conti is brilliant and doesn't realize how rare his gifts really are.
One of the nice small touches to Rocky is the use of old photos to add backstory to its characters.
This is no dialog about Paulie formerly being in the US Navy. There is just a photo in the house, hinting at a different life once upon a time.
The actual photo is of Burt Young in the movie Cinderella Liberty, in which he played the role of a Navy officer. (In real life, Burt served a few years with the US Marines).
So much about the backdrop of Rocky is about unfulfilled lives that once had potential. Before life beat him down and he became a bitter, cynical and deeply unhappy person who is stuck in a dead end job at a meat packing plant -- hoping to become a loan shark collector instead-- we subtly see that Paulie once had potential for a successful military career.
He never mentions it. He's never asked about it. But it's there.
As a writer, Sylvester Stallone has a talent for picking up on the nuances of how people talk, and rewriting dialog accordingly.
For example, the real-life Burt Young had a tendency to phrase sentences in a unique way. Almost Yoda-like before a Yoda character even existed .
An example from Rocky: when Paulie, Adrian and Rocky are watching the press conference about the fight. Paulie gets irritated at how Apollo (and the media people) treat Rocky like a joke.
Paulie says, "Do me a favor. His lungs, punch out."
That line was only in the final version of the script. It was a late rewrite from Sly, geared especially to how Burt (in character as Paulie) would phrase it.
A great example of A) how well the film was cast for its roles and B) how Sly adjusted dialog to fit the actors playing the parts. Part of why everything seemed so natural in the end product.
One of Carl's first roles when making acting a full-time career after pro football was this guest appearance on Good Times. The episode was about a year before he was cast as Apollo Creed in Rocky.
Imagine it's 1976. You are seeing Rocky for the first time. As you first meet Rocky, he's engaged in a brutal and artless club fight in front of a blood thirsty crowd. The fight only goes two rounds-- and he's losing until Spider enrages him with a deliberate headbutt that opens a cut over his eye. The crowd throws rubbish and jeers him, even an old woman.
First thing Rocky does when he leaves the ring: bums a cigarette. He's exhausted and still bleeding. For all that he went through, he gets nickel and dimed for a $40.55 purse.
Then he walks home through Kensington (even back in the 1970s, a tough neighborhood although not the nightmare it descended into later). He passes by a (legit real life) pet shop. He stops to play with puppies through the glass. Finally, he crosses the street past a boxing gym, bouncing a rubber ball as he goes.
Think about all the information this gives us with a minimum of dialog: what an interesting character is being set up. He's a brute in the ring when angered. He's dressed like a thug. But he's whistling a little tune and playing with puppies.
From there, he heads to his home street. He greets a bunch of street corner singers -- characters with a larger part in earlier versions of the screenplay -- and takes a swig of cheap swill from the bottle they share. He spits it out and bounces the ball as he trots down the street.
He's not even home yet but from the very first seemingly inconcongruous image of a Jesus mural overlooking a squalid fight in a seedy club through his return home on a graffiti blighted street, you are curious who this guy really is.
We can tell he doesn't take his fighting conditioning as seriously as he should. We can tell he's basically friendly and loves animals. We can also tell his boxing career, such as it is, is going nowhere fast.
This is even before we see his squalid apartment with knives stuck in the walls as a hat and coat rack, his turtles and goldfish and him practicing a bad joke in the mirror (torturing himself over whether the turtle food having more moths or more flies is a better set up) or seeing his unhappiness over what's become of his life.
You are already hooked... it was a fascinating introduction to this "Rocky Balboa" guy.
Sly once wrote of the real life Burt, "Burt Young is a puzzle of a human being; a walking dichotomy. He's a brute of a man, capable of inflicting incredible punishment because of his natural strength and skill as a professional fighter who remained undefeated. Yet the flip side of Burt Young is that he possesses a sensitivity and gentleness that stagger me whenever I meet him. He has a humbleness, a quiet side and great intelligence, for he also has a writer's mind."