Production
J. P. Davis was inspired to write the script after observing an older trainer working with a young boxer in a Brooklyn gym: "I watched the guy spar. You could tell he wasn't going anywhere, but you could never convince the trainer. He's almost a caretaker. He's watching out for you completely. You could see the devotion involved." Drawing upon material originally created for his critically acclaimed one-man off-Broadway show "Dreamer Awakens," Davis completed the script in 1999 and moved to Los Angeles.
Unrepresented by management, Davis sent his script out unsolicited to agents and studios over the course of the next three years. Davis secured representation through his efforts and received a number of studio offers, but, in a story reminiscent of Sylvester Stallone's experience with Rocky, he refused to sell the script unless he was signed to play the title role. He also resisted demands that Marty be made heterosexual. While Davis and director O'Flaherty honed the script, Davis trained as a boxer to add to the film's authenticity. The film was shot in Los Angeles on high-definition digital video on a budget of $200,000 and was O'Flaherty's feature debut.
The part of Marty was originally to be played by Rod Steiger, but Steiger died in 2002, before filming could begin.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)