An Evening with ‘Arnold’ and ‘Sly’

‘Arnold” and “Sly’, documentaries tracing the lives of action film icons and enduring late 20th Century cultural touchstones Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone are now streaming on Netflix.

It’s good we live in an era of bingeing because it’s best to view these two documentaries  in quick succession. All the better to compare and contrast two fascinating lives that parallel each other in sometimes astonishing fashion.

As always, the most riveting part of any megastar biography is not so much the examination of their somewhat familiar time in the spotlight but the inside scoop on how they got there. How they scaled those slippery, coveted pop-culture peaks, what motivated their ascent, and how they stayed there.

On these fronts and others these clearly subject-controlled, dueling, understandably jam-packed documentaries deliver.

So just how does one end up with an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Sylvester Stallone? Well, exposing them around the age of 15 to celluloid depictions of Hercules seems an important step.

For both then emotionally-at-sea adolescents Arnold and Sly the clouds parted in their quest for the ideal male role model upon encountering actors portraying the son of Zeus on the big screen.

Sitting in an ornate theatre in Austria, Arnold saw his future in the person of body builder Reg Park in ‘Hercules and the Captive Women’ (1961). While a world away in a run-down Hell’s Kitchen cinema, a struggling Sly gazed in awe upon former Mr. Universe Steve Reeves’s iteration of the same character. These “perfect” men in the hormonally addled minds of the two teens provided models of what they could become. Sly said with Reeves he finally had “a role model he idolised.” While Arnold in Park and the American sport of bodybuilding found his “blueprint” for escaping Austria.

These cinematic encounters coincided with an almost religious adoption by the two of the concept of visualisation. The belief, in the words of Arnold, that, “If I can see it. It is achievable.” First they would master their bodies. Then they would master their minds.

The two boys desperately sought these heroic masculine role models and escape in the theatre because life was so dismal at home. UK people’s poet Phil Larkin’s observation “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” doesn’t just apply to Brits. Born within a year of each other right after WWII, both boys grew up in the shadow of broken, bitter, son sabotaging sires. Schwarzenegger’s “tyrant” was a WWII vet come County Police Chief living just outside Gratz, Austria. Gustav Schwarzenegger made young Arnold and his more fragile older brother “earn” their breakfast by doing pushups. He also had them constantly compete to earn his praise and ironically instilled in Arnold a lifelong contempt for “losers”. The boys lived in fear of the nights Gustav came home drunk and their hearts “pounded” when he did.

Sly’s father, like Arnold’s, was a WWII vet from the winning side. But this did little to improve his disposition. A barber/cosmetologist, with an interest in polo that developed during his stint in the US cavalry, Frank Stallone had aspirations for better things and moved his family constantly in search of them. His mother Jackie, a beautiful and “unpredictable” cigarette girl at New York’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub, sometimes came with them. Sometimes she didn’t. Sly spent much of his childhood “pawned off” into boarding houses where neither of his “self absorbed” volatile parents were present.

Sly may well have appreciated these breaks. One of his strongest memories of his father is Frank madly criticising him in the midst of a crowd then leaping up to grab him by the throat and tear him violently off a horse. Sly was thirteen years old.

Present day Arnold and Sly candidly acknowledge the lack of proper nurturing they received resulted in an “insatiable” need for the “love and respect of strangers.”

In fact, the two men’s views on life and career progression are so similar their pronouncements on these subjects are basically interchangeable.

Both credit these rough early years as crucibles that only made them stronger. To this end Arnold quotes Nietzsche and touts always having “a goal or a mission” as a cure for all life’s woes. Meanwhile, a grudgingly like minded Sly tells us he could endure anything because, whatever it was humiliation or pain. It was never as bad as what he came from. “I am not going to break.”

Sly did get positive feedback for his acting. He arrived in New York ready to take on the world in the early 1970s and one of the pleasures of Sly is its generous use of Kodachrome bleached archival footage of the gritty New York of that era. In NYC, Sly lived the life of a struggling, hard-to-cast actor. Like Arnold, the agencies didn’t want him. He’d slide his photo under the door. They would slide it back.

Sly started to write because he couldn’t get the roles he wanted. He got a job as an usher and took along a cheap tape recorder to record dialogue from whatever movie was showing. At the end of each shift he took the tape home to study it. Writing and working was all he did. Like Arnold, Sly saw no possibility of failure. He saw his success waiting for him. For Arnold and Sly, rejection only strengthened their resolve.

Fortunately for the two hard cases, rejection and humiliation was in plentiful supply. Neither were leading-man material. Arnold’s earlier successes in the bodybuilding world guaranteed nothing in Hollywood.

They both realised if left to outside forces the best they could hope for were the oaf and thug roles that characterised their early careers.

All credit to Schwarzenegger for including clips from early appearances in a 1974 Lucille Ball made for TV movie and an episode of the television series “Streets of San Francisco”. They are difficult to watch. The programs’ writers–no doubt “girly men”– went out of their way to humiliate young Arnold through weak double entendres and dialogue intended to degrade. Particularly cringeworthy is an exchange between a 63 year old Lucille Ball playing Norma, and a young over muscled, marble mouthed Arnold playing a home service masseuse named Rico.

Rico: (Grunting) “I am Rico. Where we gonna do it?”

Norma: (Shrieking) “Do it?!!”

(People got paid good money to write this stuff in the 1970s.)

Sly suffered in similar fashion. There is, unsurprisingly, no mention of his participation in the now notorious soft core porn film “The Party At Kitty and Studs”(1970) for which he received $200. There are, however, clips from his brief appearance in Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971). Sly plays a hulking subway hooligan terrorising a frightened, eyes averted, Allen desperately trying to disappear behind an edition of Commentary.

A common theme in both docs is Arnold and Sly’s capacity to eat this bitter rice and keep moving forward.

Arnold the entrepreneur emerged around this time. Under the tutelage of early fitness entrepreneur Joe Weider, he began engaging in money-making endeavours including real-estate investment. These lucrative sidelines insulated Arnold from additional humiliations, allowing him to wait out Hollywood till the proper roles came to him. They did.

First, there was Stay Hungry (1976) for which director Bob Rafelson demanded Arnold spend months working with a voice and acting coach before approving him for the role. Arnold played a bodybuilder. He won a Golden Globe for Best Newcomer. Next came the documentary Pumping Iron (1977).

Then came Conan the Barbarian (1982) directed by the volatile John Milius, famous for going to meetings with studio executives and placing a loaded .45 on the table. Arnold, a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life, was a natural for the part. The film’s success established him as an international star.

The last stage of Arnold’s ascent to superstardom, The Terminator, arrived in 1984. Originally, they cast O.J. Simpson to play the murderous cyborg. But after a dinner with Arnold and an examination of how the light played off that square-jawed 37-year-old visage, James Cameron said he found his Terminator.

Meanwhile Sly, a year older and always a few steps ahead, had already leveraged his experience in Lords of Flatbush (1974) to conceive of the lovable loser thug (who wins) character that would culminate in his writing, starring and directing the Oscar-winning Rocky (1976).  Following which, for a brief heady time, the world touted Sly  as some sort of combination of Orson Welles and Marlon Brando. Then F.I.S.T. (1978) came out, and all that ended.

Their respective documentaries then follow the two emerging megastars through their 1980s to 1990s peak. At that time, the two first took real notice of each other. An increasingly frantic rivalry ensued. Who had the biggest knives, biggest guns and most importantly biggest box office? Arnold, long time master of psychological manipulation of his rivals (ask Lou Ferrigno), even reveals how he tricked Sly into making Stop or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)  by pretending he was interested in the woeful project. Both now look back on the no-holds-barred rivalry as ridiculous. A grizzled Arnold chuckles “Sly and I were at war.”

For his part, present day Sly provides an incisive analysis of the film persona Arnold developed over this period in comparison to his own. “He was superior. He just had all the answers. He had the body. He had the strength. That was his character. I would try to be the guy who was not overly gifted. I have to get my ass kicked constantly. Whereas, Arnold, he never got hurt much.”

After all this it was only fitting then that Sly in 2010, upon learning his late career success “The Expendables” finished first at the box office, celebrated over cigars and a fine lunch with the one man who understood how Sly felt and was happy to celebrate with him, his old rival, now friend, Arnold.

For fans of cinema history, pop culture, and earnest late life reflections it doesn’t get better than an evening with Arnold and Sly. As a smiling cigar chomping Arnold says it may all be “smäh”(bullshit). But it sure is entertaining.