Philly Sports by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

In Celluloid and Bronze

In spite of the strong identification between Rocky and the city of Philadelphia, one would be remiss to assume that all Philadelphians relate to the film in the same way. An indication their differences came during the 1981 production of Rocky III, in which a grateful city dedicates a bronze likeness of Rocky on top of the steps leading to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This memorial,” proclaims the filmic mayor, “will stand always as a celebration to the indomitable spirit of man.” After shooting wrapped, Stallone offered the statue to the museum but the Philadelphia Art Commission declined, finding it to be of “insufficiently artistic to merit such a prominent site.”49 Stallone, reportedly irritated by the rebuff, took the statue back to California, where it remained in his backyard, chained to a tree for the next eight months until a grassroots campaign returned it to the East Coast.

Created by Denver artist A. Thomas Schomberg, the statue was to stand, as it did in Rocky III, atop the museum stairs to commemorate Balboa’s iconic ascent of the first film. Since 1976, countless fans have visited the site to re-enact the inspiring moment and, by the late 1970s, the steps had become “nearly as popular a tourist attraction as the Liberty Bell. Some say more popular.”50 Time has only augmented the site’s appeal. “Virtually everyone who lives here or comes here,” claims Edward Rendell, the former mayor and one-time governor of Pennsylvania, “wants to say that they ran up the Rocky Steps.”51 Characters in film, television shows, and commercial endorsements recreate the moment of cinematic magic. Basketball star Dawn Staley took the Olympic torch up the steps in the 1996 relay. Politicians use them as a backdrop for their campaigns. The steps are a secular holy place in popular culture.

As with the movie itself, the particular scene (“No scene in Rocky is more symbolic, more powerful, or more enduring than the one at the art museum steps.”52) took on representational qualities, as film historian Jeanine Basinger assessed. “When the guy comes up to the Philadelphia art museum, a bastion of establishment, of money, history, authority, and runs up to the top, and makes that physical expression, it totally encapsulizes [sic] in that image and with that action the meaning of the film and the meaning of his character, the metaphor for the story.”53 His run from the narrow, desolate warren of south Philadelphia, along the waterfront, and into space identified with affluence and high culture shows the possibilities of both physical and social mobility. Stallone reminisced that he chose the location to film because “the steps felt like a magical area. It was like this intellectual bastion that I would only look at from afar.” Motely agrees: “Rocky’s triumphant post over the city’s business district represents the renewal of America itself.”54

To revere the steps as a pop culture mecca is one thing, but to stake a populist claim on that spot with an eight-foot, six-inch, two-thousand-pound bronze statue is quite another.

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