Great Scene: “Rocky”

How budget issues helped to create the memorable ice rink scene.

A while back, I was talking with a friend Kevin Wild and asked him for a Great Scene suggestion. He said, “Hey, you should do some that came about because of budget issues.” And he immediately thought of the ice-skating scene in the movie Rocky (1976).

As Kevin remembered it, the scene as written in the original script was supposed to include a bunch of skaters on the ice rink for Rocky (screenwriter, director and leading man Sylvester Stallone) and Adrian (Talia Shire) to circumnavigate. But Kevin said, “I think they had to cut the other skaters because they couldn’t afford the extras.” So I Googled “rocky ice skating scene budget extras,” and sure enough, Kevin was right. In this article from 2001, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the movie’s release, there’s this:

It was like the independent movies of today — it was about taking a risk,” Shire said. “It wasn’t about having so much money at stake, where you tend to forfeit your ideas and solve your problems in a more formulaic way. In ‘Rocky,’ there wasn’t that much money. And because the risk factors were changed, little eccentricities were allowed to happen.

One of those eccentricities, Shire said, was the memorable scene in which Rocky took her ice skating. The scene called for a crowd of people, but there…