At the recent press conference for the forthcoming Rambo, multi-hyphenate Sylvester Stallone was asked if he ever imagined having shot the original ending of the
book First Blood, which would have robbed him of one of his career franchise cornerstones. Says Stallone: “Yeah, I think about it all the time. I had that
debate with Quentin Tarantino, who thought I made a mistake. I said, ‘You
know, on an artistic level, you’re probably right.’ But at the time, I had
spent a lot of time doing research with veterans and it seemed like this
terrible, nihilistic ending that just reveled in complete despair. At that
time, we had almost a quarter of a million Vietnam
suicides. So I thought, do I want to just end it on that note? Or make him more
of a victim who has been created to do a job, does the job, comes home, and gets
[told], ‘You know what? You no longer fit in.’ It’s like you train a pit
bull, take this dog, turn him into a killer — now what do you do? You’ve got to put
him down. What happens if that pit bull gets loose? And you realize it’s not as
bad as you think. You can somehow redeem him. I thought that was more of an
interesting story. Again, as Kirk Douglas says, ‘Not artistic, but
commercial.'” For another blurb on Stallone and Rambo, which opens nationwide on January 25, click here.