Rocky Balboa says he's still #1.

Stallone hasn't had a starring role in a hit movie in ten years. During that long dry spell, he busied himself with trivial interests, all of which had to do with his body, which was always more his currency than his acting. He wrote a fitness book. He came out with a line of vitamin and dietary supplements called Instone. He hosted The Contender, a reality boxing series. He published a lifestyle magazine titled Sly for men between the ages of 35 and 55, with the help of American Media Inc., the tabloid publisher of The National Enquirer and Star. A spokesman for AMI said at the time, "Sly approached us, and we thought it was cool. He's the ultimate guy. He wasn't afraid to talk about his mistakes. He financed part of it and AMI the rest. We'll publish three to six issues at least."

Sly, the magazine, lasted three issues.

Such ventures were a sad comedown for an actor whose five Rocky and three Rambo movies, all written or cowritten by Sly, grossed almost $2 billion worldwide and made him, at $25 million a picture, the highest paid actor of his day. And then, in the '90s, people stopped coming to his movies, and Hollywood stopped asking him to make movies. He says he has nobody to blame but himself. "I became arrogant," he says.

Sly was on the first cover of his magazine, showing his good side, his muscular and vascular right arm, not his smaller, smoother left. Inside, there were a lot of buff male models hawking hair, skin, diet, testosterone, and sex enhancement products along with articles about slowing down "Father Time" and "growing old gracefully," and maintaining better erections. The subject of sex figured prominently in Sly. There was advice on how to get women in bed ("Make her feel beautiful") and how to catch a cheating wife (Buy a semen detection kit).

Stallone also included in the first issue excerpts from his Rocky Balboa script, which, he said then, even the actors hadn't seen. The script is revelatory about Stallone, as all his movies have been. It opens with Rocky and his friend and brother-in-law, Paulie, at Adrian's grave. Paulie tells Rocky, "Rememberin' stuff don't feel so good," and "Ya can't change nuthin'." Another character tells his fighter about respect, "You ain't gonna get it, 'cause once people have made up their minds about who a man is, it really ain't ever changin' much," which is why "self-respect . . . that's the only kinda respect that means a damn thing." His fighter responds, "Ya'll put a label on, an' when that label's on, it don't come off — no matter what the hell I do."'

Stallone in Rocky Balboa.

The excerpt ends with Rocky telling a woman, "One second they like ya, next second you're a bum." (Joe Roth, the producer of Rocky Balboa, along with MGM and Sony, says he was drawn to the film because the aging Rocky was a man "desperate to not make a third act of his life go in anonymity." Talia Shire, who played Rocky's wife, Adrian, in the previous Rocky movies, and whose character appears in flashbacks in the new movie, has said, "Sylvester was always putting issues from his own life in his movies.")

Sprinkled throughout Sly were Stallone's aphorisms on how to live an ideal life. Be the predator, not the food source. Follow your passion, not money. Be a champion of your dreams. Stallone, as an actor and a person, has always been about dreams. The dreams of the inadequate, underappreciated, sensitive victim, who, against all odds, becomes a champion.