Throughout the history of cinema there are a few films that were completed but never released. And by that I don’t mean a first production that needed a lot of work as happened in the case of ‘Batgirl’, but that everything was ready for a premiere that finally never took place. That is what happened in 1997 with ‘The Good Life’ and the main person responsible for the fact that we could never see it was Sylvester Stallone.
‘The Good Life’ told the story of three men who moved from New Jersey to Miami, where two of them ended up killing the third. It was a tight-budget production -barely 5 million dollars- that it was shot in just a week.
A favor gone wrong
A priori, ‘The Good Life’ seemed destined to become one of those 90s movies more thought to be one of those titles that you caught in the video store because what you really wanted to see was rented. For this he had the hook of also having in his cast with Dennis Hopperwho just a few years before had been the great villain of ‘Speed (Maximum power)’.
Nevertheless, Sylvester Stallone was not the protagonist of ‘The Good Life’, since that responsibility fell on his brother Frank. In fact, Sylvester only agreed to take part in the shoot one day as a personal favor to his brother, understanding that his presence was not going to play an important role in the promotional campaign. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
The producers of ‘The Good Life’ did not hesitate to try to make the most of the presence of the protagonist of ‘Demolition Man’, who did not exactly take his attitude well. Her response from him? File a lawsuit worth $20 millionthe salary that he used to receive at that time after the revolution that meant that Jim Carrey I won them for ‘A crazy at home. His argument was that there was a breach of contract and an unauthorized use of both his name and his image.
The producers Alan and Diane Mahrez They went on to counterattack with a $50 million lawsuit against the actor, with Alan going so far as to tell CNN that “the Stallone brothers have joined forces to destroy me, destroy my sister and destroy our company“.
The Stallones did not hesitate to respond harshly. Frank argued that the contract stipulated that his brother Sylvester was going to be filming “between six and eight minutes. He did more than six minutes. She was there 12 hours and she didn’t complainFor his part, Sylvester complained that the Mahrezes had fired the film’s director the day after he shot their scenes and that they “basically used the film in a different way than we had talked about.”
‘Bloodsport 2’
Here it is worth clarifying that Alan Mahrez He is also credited as a director, but the truth is that he ended up substituting at the last minute for barry samson. According to Sylvester Stallone, Alan was not qualified for that responsibility, but the truth is that he was previously the person in charge of the first two sequels of ‘Bloody contact’.
We were left without seeing her
The point is that the Mahrez and the Stallones did not ultimately take the case to court and it was settled with an out-of-court settlement already in 1999 whose details are still unknown today.
The only sure thing is that the film never came to be released -the only thing we have of it is the video above with a lamentable quality-, but at the time it could be said that both sides lost. For example, Mahrez did not return to direct any film after 1998, the year of release of ‘Sinbad: The great battle’, while the worst years of Sylvester Stallone’s career took place during that time, to the point of being little less that a stink of Hollywood for several years. Of course, he was able to recover -soon we will be able to see him in ‘The Expendables 4’- and Mahrez was never heard from again
In Espinof: