Of all of President-Elect Donald Trump’s choices for the roles in his administration, perhaps none has been so odd as Trump’s asking action film star Sylvester Stallone to chair the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
The NEA post in the past has been given to artists and actors, so the fact that Trump offered it to Stallone is not so unusual in itself, but most of the former chairpersons had more of a philanthropy and fundraising background. However, what most people may not realize is that Stallone, who’s most famous for his roles in the Rocky and Rambo series of movies (he’s played the two characters in a total of 11 films) is also a talented writer, movie director and a painter.
Rocky was the movie that put Stallone on the map as far as Hollywood was concerned. Up until he made Rocky, Stallone was a struggling actor best known as an extra in other famous productions of the era such as Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford, and Woody Allen’s Bananas.
Stallone wrote the first Rocky movie himself in three days, and shopped it around Hollywood, refusing to sell the script to any producers if he himself did not play the title role of Rocky Balboa. Originally the production company that bought Rocky wanted Robert Redford for the title role, but agreed to let Stallone play the part if the budget was reduced.
The finished film was a huge success; it was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor (Stallone) and won Best Picture and Best Director for 1976. So famous was the movie that a number of the props from it now reside in the Smithsonian Museum.
Stallone went on to star in a film called F.I.S.T., loosely based on the life of union leader Jimmy Hoffa and in a production about wrestling, called Paradise Alley, which Stallone wrote and directed. The sequel to Rocky, Rocky II, was also directed by Stallone and was another large success, earning $200 million worldwide. These movies established Stallone as a major star of the time and gave him tremendous earning power at the box office.
Stallone’s next film Nighthawks was an eerily prescient movie about terrorism in New York City. Co-starring Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, the villain from the sci-fi cult favorite Blade Runner, it was shot on location in New York City. Stallone did most of his own stunts, including hanging dangerously from a cable car over New York City’s East River. At the time of its release, Nighthawks was panned as being unrealistic, but in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, it may have just been ahead of its time.
Stallone went on to famously portray Vietnam veteran John Rambo in the movie First Blood in 1982. Like Rocky, the movie was both a commercial and a critical success. Three more Rambo sequels followed as well as a total of five Rocky sequels and one spinoff.
Stallone directed Rocky III, Rocky IV and the sixth installment in the franchise, Rocky Balboa. In between, he was asked to direct the sequel to the 1977 smash hit Saturday Night Fever, called Staying Alive, starring John Travolta. The sequel was also a huge success, becoming one of the top ten movies of 1983.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Stallone would go on to make many action and stunt-based movies such as Cobra, Demolition Man, Judge Dredd and Daylight. His movies have earned a total box-office gross in excess of several billion dollars.
Stallone co-starred with Academy Award-winning actor Robert Deniro in the critically-acclaimed movie Cop Land, which saw Stallone being taken more seriously as an actor. Stallone was nominated for a second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the Rocky series spinoff Creed in 2015.
In addition to his moviemaking, Stallone is also a talented painter who’s represented by a highly-regarded art gallery in Switzerland. Stallone began painting in the 1970s. He’s had a solo exhibition at the Museé d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, France.
Says Stallone about his artwork, “Some paintings have taken on such grand history. I don’t think you can hold in anything that’s artistic. You can’t freeze it in time. The [incomplete] frame is symbolic of just letting it grow. As Anselm Kiefer said, the art is in transition.”
Looking at Stallone’s art, one can see that complexity is evident in his work. There’s also the element of time. “Early on in my life, I realized that man is totally pressed upon by the sense of time racing. Everything is timed. So I started to put clocks on my images, usually the ones of actors — Marilyn Monroe, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn,” said the actor.
“Now, if you imagine their lives lasted 12 hours, I would paint them at 10, as opposed to what they looked like at four. At four they’d be youthful, vibrant, optimistic. But then you move ahead to the 10th or 11th hour, and reality has set in. Life is not everything you thought it was going to be. The colors have become darker, the eyes more sunken.”
Stallone and Donald Trump have been friends since at least the 1980s, possibly having met at New York City disco Studio 54, where Trump was the first patron through the doors. In a recent interview, Stallone had admiration for Trump. “I love Donald Trump,” Stallone told Variety. “There are certain people like Arnold [Schwarzenegger], Babe Ruth, that are bigger than life.”
Stallone has admitted that his fellow action star’s terms as the governor of California made an impression on him and possibly endowed him with political ambitions.
Stallone has been a staunch supporter of the Republican Party in the past and has donated to the presidential campaigns of candidates John McCain and Rick Santorum. Since making the Rambo series of films, he’s become passionate about veterans’ affairs.
The National Endowment for the Arts is a federal agency that supports and promotes many cultural institutions from museums to performance series. It has an annual budget of $146 million and has perennially been a target of Republican funding cuts and conservative moral criticisms of artists the agency has given money to.
Since 1965, the NEA has given out more than $5 billion in artistic grants. Until a few years ago, the agency was housed in Washington, D.C.’s Old Post Office Building, which Donald Trump bought from the government and converted to a hotel.
Some critics may believe the offer to Stallone is Donald Trump’s way of thumbing his nose at cultural elites, but an anonymous source told the New York Post recently that “Mr. Trump feels this sort of A-list appointment is precisely the shot in the arm that the [arts] industry needs.”
Nonetheless, Stallone would have to be confirmed for the position by Congress, something that’s not necessarily guaranteed, even with Republican majorities in both houses. Whether Stallone would take the job is also an open question, and the actor is said to be giving it careful consideration.
~ American Liberty Report
