Flashback: Sylvester Stallone Stars in 1970 Softcore Porn Film
Six years before he broke big with Rocky, Sylvester Stallone was a struggling 24-year-old actor desperate for work of any kind, which explains why he agreed to star in a low-budget skin flick called Party at Kitty and Stud’s. The legend of the movie has grown over the years – many have become convinced that it’s a hardcore sex film – but the truth is far less interesting: It’s merely a supremely boring and inept softcore affair.
Though it went mainstream when Deep Throat came out, pornography was really a fringe art form in 1969, confined largely to underground 8mm films. The people behind Party at Kitty and Stud’s could have never gotten any sort of distribution with a legit hardcore movie, so they created a film about a bickering young couple that throws a light S&M party. No scene is remotely erotic, especially when the characters are having sex.
Stallone hated the script and initially wanted nothing to do with it, but he was sleeping in a bus station at the time and couldn’t justify turning down work. “It was either do that movie or rob someone because I was at the end – at the very end – of my rope,” he told Playboy in 1978. “Instead of doing something desperate, I worked two days for $200 and got myself out of the bus station.”
The movie came and went from theaters in the blink of an eye and was widely forgotten until Stallone became one of the biggest stars on the planet. The fine folks behind The Party at Kitty and Stud’s thought they had a goldmine on their hands, so they re-released the movie as Italian Stallion, which was Rocky’s nickname. It still failed to find much of audience, and over the years it has surfaced again and again – sometimes with inserted hardcore sex scenes featuring actors that appear to be Stallone.
Here’s a trailer for the re-release of the movie, featuring 1970s porn director Gail Palmer. She assures the viewer that “everything you ever wanted to see of Sylvester Stallone can be seen in this new X-rated movie.”