Porn Valley- I had a lengthy and very interesting chat with Ed Parry, www.stallionreleasing.com, the owner of the softcore Sylvester Stallone movie, The Italian Stallion http://adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=4785.
Before he can get into the heart of the batting order to hype the film this year, Parry tells me that he's waiting to see how the squabble over Stallone's TV reality show The Contender, which is due to air in November, is going to play out. Meanwhile, the DVD version of The Italian Stallion, aka Party at Kitty and Studs, a film for which Stallone was paid $200, is available from Arrow Productions, www.xxxdeepthroat.com.
Then if you're keeping track of the "I came up with the Reality TV show idea first" fisticuffs, there's three fights to keep your eye on, according to Parry. "One fight is over Fox with their The Champ and Oscar de La Hoya," Parry notes. "Then you've got Mark Burnett and Stallone and [Jeffrey] Katzenberg on the other side with The Contender for NBC." Not too mention Stallone's battle with MGM over the original Rocky. "Stallone is suing them," Parry notes. Even though he made a lot of money off of it, Stallone apparently doesn't own the rights to Rocky. MGM does.
"It was a spec script and Stallone got the Writers Guild minimum for it," Parry explains. "His first check was for $1 million and back in those days it was a lot of money. And then the money kept coming in and he got more powerful."
Putting things into perspective, The Italian Stallion came out before Stallone's first film which was The Lords of Flatbush [which also stars Henry Winkler playing a pre- Happy Days Fonz-type character].
For that reason, Parry's inclined to label The Italian Stallion a "public interest film" though there appeared to be little interest in Stallone at the time. "He didn't go anywhere for years. It was not until he did The Lords of Flatbush." According to Parry, Stallone was helping out a friend in acting class at the Herbert Berghof school. "Sly helped a friend with a scene from Death of a Salesman which he had down pat, but Sly wasn't actually a member of the school though he helped with the scene."
One of the producers of Lords of Flatbush happened to be in the audience and a few months later sent Stallone a telegram asking him to audition. "That's how he got his real film after that," chuckles Parry. "But The Party at Kitty and Studs is something he left off of the resume."
On another related noted, Rocky was originally going to be called The Italian Stallion. "That was his nickname prior to Rocky," Parry continues. "And there are some scenes in The Italian Stallion where he's on a climbing frame- and what immediately comes to mind is the scene from Rockey where he runs up the steps of Philadelphia Art Museum. It's an interesting movie when you pair the two of them together."
On the MGM front, Stallone is apparently suing the company and scuttlebutt is that Dreamworks may ultimately take the franchise "That's something not a lot of people are aware of," Parry says. According to Parry, Stallone has no such problems with The Italian Stallion. "But where it ran into problems in the past," Parry goes on to say. "Bootleggers intercut footage which wasn't him. That wasn't him. He didn't do it. Though he may have been a desperate man at the time, he looks like he was enjoying himself. He had two days on the set. Put it this way. He wasn't forced into anything."
I asked Parry how Arrow Productions and Ray Pistol, www.xxxdeepthroat.com, got into the DVD deal. "Ray has got a great reputation in the business," Parry observes. "He's the owner of some incredibly classic movies. He has huge knowledge of the business and I approached him to see- as far as the adult side- if this would be of interest. Obviously it can't compare to the adult films of today. It's not a porno movie, but it's a novelty piece. And a lot of people of today don't even know that movie existed. I found when I've talked with people, that a lot of them under 30 don't know about this film. They're amazed that it exists. It's just letting people know about it, and we'll do that once The Contender gets going."
Parry said during a run of an E! Channel 101 Best Kept Hollywood Secrets show in which The Italian Stallion was ranked 8th on the list, there was a generous spike in sales. "Since that time we've been relatively quiet, but we're selling a lot of units and they're going to the Mom & Pop stores on the regular side. We just got it into some mainstream stores, too. It's selling pretty well."
Parry is quick to assess the adult business as a strange one. "It's got a lot of product. A lot of it is very good- it's a very innovative business and there's change going on all the time. But this is something that people might find amusing. It's an interesting movie and, in a way, it's got its innocence, too."
