Sylvester Stallone says his and Richard Gere’s decades-long feud began with a tense audition for The Lords of Flatbush.
Actor Sylvester Stallone
Their tensions escalated into a physical altercation, ultimately resulting in Richard, now 77, being fired from the 1974 coming-of-age film, in which Sylvester plays Stanley Rosiello, one of four members of the 1950s Brooklyn greaser gang, The Lords.
In his new memoir The Steps, Sylvester, now 80, recalled “everything went pretty well initially” with Robert De Niro, now 83, during the audition process.
He added: “We were trying to outtalk each other. I enjoyed improvisation and the process of ad-libbing.”
However, tensions arose when working with Richard.
Sylvester shared: “Then the improvs with Richard Gere went bad, when Gere grabbed my T-shirt and his fingernails dug into my skin. I told him to back off, but he did it again on the second take. He couldn’t have known, but Gere had begun to stir the emotional cauldron inside me.”
The three-time Oscar nominee asked late director Stephen Verona if he could realistically react to Richard’s actions.
But Sylvester was told not to after admitting he would have “knocked his teeth out”.
He remembered: “I turned to Stephen Verona and asked him, ‘Is it OK if I ad-lib here and react the way I would actually react if someone did that to me in real life?’ ‘What would you do?’ ‘Do? I’d knock his teeth out.’ ‘Please don’t.'”
Tensions between Sylvester and Richard reached boiling point when chicken grease spilled on the Rocky legend’s leg as they ate lunch in a car parked on the set of The Lords of Flatbush.
Sylvester penned: “A stream of chicken grease spilled off the foil paper onto my leg. I elbowed him across the chest, got out of the car, came around to his side, and pulled him out of the back seat. ‘Hey, man, I don’t want to get physical,’ Gere said in a thin voice. ‘Too late …’ Stephen Verona put himself in front of Gere. It was clear to everyone that this wasn’t working. One of us had to go.”
According to Sylvester, Stephen ultimately decided to keep him and give Richard the boot, with Robert leaving The Lords of Flatbush to do another project.
Perry King, now 78, and Henry Winkler, now 80, joined the movie as David ‘Chico’ Tyrell and Butchey Weinstein, respectively, alongside Sylvester and the late Paul Mace, who played Wimpy Murgalo.
The Lords of Flatbush follows the four Brooklyn teenagers growing up in the 1950s and navigating romance, friendship, and rebellion.
