It would be an impossible mess if all the dogsleds lined up at a long starting line and took off at the same time. To avoid tangled leads and snarling dogs, racers leave at two-minute intervals in the order that they drew at the welcome dinner. To balance out the staggered starts, officials adjust the leaving times from the first 24-hour mandatory layover. Any penalties—up to two hours per infraction—are also added during the mandatory layovers.
AND THEY’RE OFF!
In even-numbered years, the race takes a northern branch of the Iditarod Trail for a distance of 1,112 miles; in odd years, a southern branch measuring 1,131 miles.
Who has the right of way if one sled overtakes another? Surprisingly, the one behind. The one in front must stop the dogs for up to one minute and let the other pass. More rules: Mushers—and dogs—are subject to random drug testing throughout the race. Also, a musher blood-alcohol level above .04% is grounds for disciplinary action.
And yes, dog drivers really do say “Mush!” (That’s why they’re called mushers.) The command, the equivalent of “Giddyup!”, came from a misunderstanding. French fur trappers riding on dogsleds across the Canadian snow shouted Marchons! (“Let’s go!”). Obscured by the ever-present sound of barking dogs, English speakers heard “Mush on!” When they trained their own dogs, they shortened the command to “Mush!”
EQUIPMENT
A good dogsled, tricked out with a harness, gang lines (the leashes that hold the dogs together), and a snow hook (the Arctic equivalent of an anchor), can cost $600 or more. Cold-weather dog booties cost $1–2 per paw. They’re designed to protect paws from cold and “ice balling” between the toes while still allowing dogs to feel the terrain as they run. Made of cloth, they tend to need replacing every 100 miles.
Mushers aren’t allowed to use any navigational or communication device beyond 19th-century technology. A watch, magnetic compass, pencil, map, and math skills are allowed; cell phones, GPS devices, night goggles, and speed/distance calculators are not. One exception: Mushers are allowed to carry emergency devices that broadcast a signal if they need help; however, it is their last resort, because at the moment they push the signal button, they are disqualified from the race.
THE RACERS
Iditarod racers represent a wide range of abilities and skill levels, which sometimes sparks conflict. At the top are the genuine contenders, the serious athletes, one of whom is almost certain to win. In the middle are the less experienced or less skillful contenders, who vie to place in the top 30 and win some money. At the bottom? The ones who just hope to finish: the inexperienced, the old-timers past their prime, and the amateurs, usually from the lower 48 states, who want the experience of running in the famous race and the bragging rights that come with it. The members of this last category are most likely to take unwise risks and get into life-threatening situations that require rescue by emergency snowmobile or airplane.
THE DOGS
About 1,000 dogs make the run each year. Siberian Huskies, Samoyeds, and Alaskan Malamutes have been bred over centuries for the job of pulling sleds. They are comfortable buried in snow, and they sleep with their tail over their nose for extra insulation. They are still the engines that power most dogsleds in the Iditarod.
An Iditarod dog team must consist of 12–16 dogs at the beginning of the race. Those dogs must be either on the towline or, if injured or exhausted, hauled in the sled until the next “dog-drop” site at a checkpoint. At least six of the original dogs must be pulling the sled’s towline at the finish of the race. What happens to the dogs that are dropped off at the drop sites? They’re transported by air to a prison in Eagle River, where inmates take care of them until their owners claim them.
At least one dog has died in almost every Iditarod race. The worst ever: 1985, when nine dogs died. To try to prevent that from happening again, organizers require certificates of dog health before the race, and rest stops and veterinary checkpoints during. However, in 2009’s run, six dogs died along the course as the weather turned unusually cold. This may be the beginning of a trend. Because winter weather has been warming in Alaska, some racers have begun gambling on dog breeds that are faster or stronger, but not quite as cold-resistant as the traditional breeds.
THE FINISH LINE
• The first 30 finishers get a share of the prize money. Total purse for for 2010: $610,000. Any finisher after the 30th gets a consolation award of $1,049 to help get them and their dogs home.
• The most finishers at the end of a single race: 77 in 2004.
• Fastest winning time: 8 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes, and 2 seconds, by Martin Buser in 2002.
• Slowest winning time: 20 days, 15 hours, 2 minutes, and 7 seconds, by Carl Huntington in 1974. (Delays from weather conditions can make a huge difference in the race.)
• First woman to win the race: Libby Riddles in 1985. (Susan Butcher won the race four times—in 1986, ’87, ’88, and ’90.)
• Often, the winner is hours ahead of the second-place competitor. That wasn’t true in 1978, when two men raced to the finish neck and neck. At the end, Dick Mackey finished first, one second ahead of Rick Swenson.
• Slowest competitor ever: John Schultz, who arrived at the end of the 1973 race after 32 days, 15 hours, 9 minutes, and 1 second.
• Organizers keep a red lantern burning at the finish line until the last competitor arrives. The lantern is then extinguished and presented to the last musher to finish.
THE MAKING OF ROCKY
The movie poster for the 1976 film Rocky had the tagline “His
whole life was a million-to-one shot.” It turns out that the
real million-to-one shots took place behind the scenes.
MAN OF THE HOUR
If you’re old enough to remember when the sleeper hit Rocky arrived in theaters in November 1976, you may also remember how quickly the film’s star, Sylvester Stallone, burst from obscurity to become a major Hollywood star. Before Rocky, not many people had heard his name; then, overnight, everyone was talking about his performance as Rocky Balboa. Suddenly the whole world knew who he was.
Though Stallone may have seemed like an instant success, he had struggled for years to make a name for himself as an actor, first in New York and then in Hollywood. But few casting directors had been able to see past his swarthy looks and muscular build to give him decent roles. On those rare occasions when he actually did land a part in a film, he was invariably cast as the heavy—in Woody Allen’s 1971 film Bananas, he plays a thug who attacks an old lady on the subway; in the 1975 film The Prisoner of Second Avenue, he plays a man that Jack Lemmon mistakes for a pickpocket. And when he finally got his first supporting role, in the 1974 film The Lords of Flatbush, he was cast as yet another thug.
EASY WRITER
As Stallone was turned down for good parts in one film after another, he came to believe that the only way for him to get a good movie role was to write it himself. He was particularly inspired by the 1969 cult film Easy Rider, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson. Stallone didn’t think much of the screenplay, which was written by Fonda, Hopper, and Terry Southern. But he figured that if something as flawed as the Easy Rider screenplay could find its way onto the screen, he could write something as good (or better) and it, too, would have a decent shot at getting made into a film.
Stallone quickly learned that screenwriting is a lot more difficult than it looks. His earliest scripts were so bad that he never tried to sell them. Cry Full and Whisper Empty in the Same Breath, for example, was about a rock musician whose career is destroyed by his insatiable craving for bananas.
As he gained experience, the quality of his work improved. Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, and other films of the period were dark and filled with doomed antiheroes—in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, there was a lot to be pessimistic about, and these films fit the public mood. Stallone did his best to produce a gloomy script that the major Hollywood studios would buy, but at some point he realized that
the only reason he was writing such negative stories was that they were popular, not because he was really interested in them. Besides, with every screenwriter in Hollywood producing these sad stories by the bushel, there was very little in Stallone’s screenplays that was unique, original, or interesting.
CORN BRED
Stallone’s own taste in films was more old-fashioned: He liked uplifting movies with heroes—films where the central character is a noble figure who, when challenged, struggles and wins in the end. Such films had been popular in the 1930s and ’40s. Director Frank Capra, for example, spent most of his career making feel-good films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and he had won six Academy Awards for his efforts. But by the mid-1970s, such films were decidedly out of fashion and dismissed as “Capra-corn.”
Stallone decided to write one anyway. He wanted to build a story around a theme that was close to his heart: a common man’s battle for recognition, dignity, and self-respect. But he didn’t think his own life story, that of an actor who has trouble landing parts, and a screenwriter who has trouble selling scripts, would make for a very compelling tale. He had to find a better angle.
Then in early 1975, Muhammad Ali, the reigning World Heavyweight Champion boxer, announced that he would be fighting an unknown fighter named Chuck Wepner, a.k.a. “The Bayonne Bleeder,” a nickname he earned from all the cuts (and more than 300 stitches) he’d received over the course of his 51-fight career. Wepner would be no match for Ali; both Wepner and the champ knew it. But Ali was looking for an easy fight (and a quick $1.5 million paycheck) between his more serious title challenges, and Wepner was happy to take the $100,000 he was offered, which was more than 10 times what he’d ever been paid for a fight. For the first time he could afford to train for a fight full-time, instead of just on weekends and before or after work.
Stallone paid $20 to see the fight, which was broadcast by closed-circuit TV to select movie theaters around the country. If Stallone knew anything about the 30–1 underdog Wepner, he must have expected him to lose early and lose big. But Wepner stunned the boxing world by lasting round after round. In the ninth round, he even managed to knock Ali down—the only fighter ever to do so while Ali was champ. Suddenly, the crowds that had been yelling “Ali! Ali! Ali!” started yelling “Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” And though Wepner got clobbered in the later rounds and lost in a TKO just seconds before the end of the 15th and final round, he was seen as the real winner that night, because he had nearly gone the distance with the best boxer in the world when nobody thought he could do it.
Stallone had his character. After a marathon four-day writing session—he wrote in pen on a legal pad, and his wife, Sasha, typed it up—he had the first draft of the script he titled simply Rocky.
STARRING BURT REYNOLDS AS ROCKY
When he wasn’t writing, Stallone was still auditioning for movie roles. His luck was as bad as ever, but as he was leaving yet another fruitless audition with a producer named Robert Chartoff, Stallone happened to mention that he was also a writer. Chartoff had liked Stallone’s work in Lords of Flatbush; he thought the young actor had the potential to be another Marlon Brando. He agreed to have a look at the Rocky script, and enjoyed it so much that he asked his partner, Irwin Winkler, to read it, too. Rocky was exactly the kind of script they were in the market for, one that could serve as a big-budget vehicle for an established star like Ryan O’Neal, Steve McQueen, or Burt Reynolds. The two producers decided to buy it. They offered Stallone $75,000 for the script—a small fortune in the mid-1970s.
Stallone said no. By now he’d been turned down for so many parts that he wasn’t about to let this one get away. And since he owned the script, for once he was in control of who got the part. He kept saying no, even as Chartoff and Winkler upped their offer to $125,000, then $200,000, and finally $255,000. Even if they offered him $1 million, Stallone told them, the script wasn’t for sale…unless he could play Rocky.
At the time, Stallone had barely $100 to his name, and Sasha was pregnant with their first child. He was in no position to turn down $255,000, but he did it anyway and held his ground. Rocky was about a million-to-one shot, about an ordinary man who goes the distance. Stallone was determined to go the distance, too—he wanted his own million-to-one shot. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life wondering “What if?” Sasha backed his decision—“Go for it,” she told him.
DOWNSIZING
Chartoff and Winkler didn’t want to let the Rocky script get away. They finally agreed to Stallone’s terms—he would play Rocky Balboa. But since he was an unknown actor with nonexistent boxoffice appeal, a big budget production was out of the question. Rocky would have to be a low-budget film instead. And to save on up-front expenses, Stallone let them have the script for nothing and agreed to act in the film for “scale”—the actor’s equivalent of minimum wage. In exchange for accepting so little money up front, Stallone would receive a percentage of the profits if the film ever made any money, which was doubtful.
YO, PERRY!
Chartoff and Winkler had a deal with United Artists that allowed them to approve almost any film they wanted to make, as long as the budget was kept under $1 million. But the studio could still kill a project if it really wanted to.
A movie about a past-his-prime fighter who falls in love with a wallflower who works at a pet store? Who gets a shot at the world championship and loses the big fight? Starring a nobody? The top brass at United Artists still needed convincing. Chartoff and Winkler sent them a copy of The Lords of Flatbush to familiarize them with Stallone’s work. The only problem: Though Stallone is identified by name in the film’s credits, it’s never completely clear which of the film’s four main actors he is. One of the other actors, a man named Perry King, had light brown hair and leading-man good looks. The studio heads concluded that he was Stallone. He didn’t look Italian—so he must be from northern Italy, they figured. Satisfied that Perry King had the star quality to carry the film, United Artists gave Rocky the green light. The executives didn’t realize who the real Sylvester Stallone was until they saw the finished film…and Perry King wasn’t in it.
PINCHING PENNIES
Making the film on such a limited budget was quite a challenge, but it is also one of the things that made the film unique.
• With no money to pay big stars, little-known actors like Talia Shire (Rocky’s girlfriend, Adrian), Burt Young (Adrian’s brother, Paulie), and former Oakland Raiders linebacker Carl Weathers (heavyweight champ Apollo Creed) were cast in the supporting roles. Shire was only cast after the first choice for Adrian, actress Carrie Snodgress, asked for too much money. Burgess Meredith, who played Rocky’s trainer and manager, Mickey, was the only well-known actor cast in the film. And at this late stage in his career, the 69-year-old Meredith was best known for playing the Penguin in the Batman TV series.
• Instead of hiring a top film composer, the producers had to settle for a young composer named Bill Conti. To show Conti what kind of music he wanted, director John Avildsen played a record of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony over some footage of Stallone and Weathers boxing. Conti came up with “Gonna Fly Now,” one of the most memorable movie themes of all time.
• The fight scenes were filmed in an entirely new way. To save money (and because director Avildsen thought the fight scenes in other boxing films looked fake), instead of just filming Stallone and Weathers boxing away at random until there was enough usable footage to edit into a fight sequence, Stallone choreographed every individual punch in the fight. Then he and Weathers rehearsed the punches for weeks on end before filming began. The result was one of the most realistic fight scenes ever filmed; boxing movies have been filmed that way ever since.
KNOCKOUT
The entire film was shot in 28 days for just over $1 million. It was finished on time and only a little over budget, which was a good thing, because United Artists had insisted that Chartoff and Winkler pay for
any cost overruns out of their own pockets, which they did by taking mortgages out on their homes. The studio also reserved the right to fire Stallone after 10 days if they didn’t like his work.
United Artists need not have worried—though even Chartoff and Winkler themselves had expected Rocky to be little more than a marginally successful “B movie,” the kind of film that got second-billing at drive-in theaters, it became one of the hottest films of 1976, earning both critical praise and a whopping $117 million at the box office. Nominated for 10 Academy awards, Rocky won Oscars for Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Picture—a surprise winner over the heavily favored All the President’s Men. The film made Sylvester Stallone a rich man and established him as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Together, Rocky and its five sequels have earned more than $1 billion at the box office, making it one of the most successful film franchises in Hollywood history.
STEP LIVELY
The most famous Rocky scene of all—Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—came about by chance after a cameraman named Garrett Brown invented something he called the “Brown Stabilizer.” The device, which held a camera steady even when the camera operator was moving, allowed for much smoother filming than was possible with traditional handheld techniques. To demonstrate the capabilities of his invention, now known as the Steadicam, Brown shot some test footage of his girlfriend running up and down the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps. When Rocky director John Avildsen saw the footage, he called Brown and asked him, “How did you shoot that footage, and where are those steps?” Rocky was one of the first films to include scenes filmed with a Steadicam, including footage of Stallone running up those same steps. More than 30 years later, the “Rocky Steps” remain the second most popular tourist destination in Philadelphia after the Liberty Bell.
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