Bill Conti - Gonna Fly Now

Beware the Man on a Montage

For Matt Cook

1. It’s 2006 and I’m sitting in a crowded movie theater with my friend Bull. It’s a Friday matinee and there are exactly no women in the crowd. We’re 75 or 80 minutes into the movie, and the audience is about to get exactly what it’s here in the theater for. We collectively knew it was going to happen. Each person here knows, and I mean KNOWS, in the core of their very being, that this next moment is going to arrive in due course and it’s almost upon us. There is a palpable anticipation in the crowd, a buzzing hum that’s building to a crescendo. It’s almost here. My legs are bouncing. Bull is tensing his forearms. We are nodding in unison getting ready to reach that peak only cinema can provide with its giant silver screens and rumbling sound. That sound is the crucial ingredient at this precise moment. On the screen, our heroes have decamped to a musty gym to consult an aging boxing trainer/corner man/oracle named Duke. America has known Duke since 1976 when he was training the Count of Monte Fisto Apollo Creed. Duke has training advice for our hero, a former two-time heavyweight boxing champion from Philadelphia:

   So, what we'll be calling on is good old-fashioned blunt-force trauma. Horsepower. Heavy-duty, cast-iron, piledriving punches that will have to hurt so much they'll rattle his ancestors. Every time you hit him with a shot, it's gotta feel like he tried kissing the express train. Yeah! Let's start building some hurtin' bombs!

   Just as that last S rolls off Duke’s tongue, the audio booms. The film editors and audio engineers wasted not one-quarter of a second. It’s training montage time. It’s time for Rocky to work and that means it’s time for Bill Conti’s Gonna Fly Now and that means we start with those huge horns. The corny pageantry of it, the pomp and circumstance of it, is coursing through every emotional vein in the crowd. Grown men are pounding their sons on the back. There are raucous cheers. We are all leaning forward. Rocky is banging tires. We pump our fists. The horns get louder. The singers come in.

   Getting strong now
   Won't be long now
   Getting strong now

   Paulie opens up the doors to the meat-packing factory and Rocky is brutalizing frozen sides of beef like he did 30 years prior. Now he’s running up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and we are clapping, pumping our fists, and wholeheartedly indulging in the cheesy inspiration.

2. There is nothing more powerful in film than a man on a montage. Look at me. NOTHING. Not love (though it frequently factors into why a man is in a montage), not an enemy combatant, not Mother Nature. Nothing is safe, and in the ‘80s, the montage ruled supreme. Maverick, Goose, Iceman, and Slider cemented their rivalry by coating themselves in baby oil while ‘80s legend Kenny Loggins’ Playing With the Boys blasted out over the beach volleyball courts in Miramar, California. Cobra Kai would still be kicking Daniel LaRusso’s ass all over the San Fernando Valley if it weren’t for Joe Esposito’s You’re the Best. Baby would still be in the goddamned corner if Johnny Castle and Eric Carmen’s Hungry Eyes didn’t teach her to dance. The Breakfast Club realized they had more in common than not thanks to Karla DeVito's We Are Not Alone and Emilio Estevez’s impromptu gymnastics routine. The Ghostbusters battled an increase in supernatural activity thanks to Ray Parker Jr. And of course, Rocky regained the heavyweight championship of the world thanks to Apollo’s tutelage and the beautiful cornball motivation behind Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. As an encore, Rocky singlehandedly won the Cold War by knocking out Ivan Drago in Moscow on Christmas Day thanks to the divine power of John Cafferty’s Hearts on Fire. I can only draw one substantial conclusion from all this: montage music is the most potent force in the known universe.

3. Motivation is a fickle thing. It arrives when the Muses decide to send it. No, that’s horseshit. You can wait for motivation to arrive and in the meantime what? Do you sit idle? Rubbish. Motivation will arrive when it does, and it shall find you working. It. Shall. Find. You. Working. The day Tchaikovsky debuted the 1812 Overture in Vienna in 1882 he was working on new music. Prince wrote and recorded a song every damn day. Stephen King goes a thousand words a day. It’s a job. You get up and go to work. Creativity is fucking work, don’t kid yourself. You work and sometimes it’s boiled shit. Sometimes it’s mediocre. Sometimes, sometimes… it’s something you want to put your name on. Motivation will find you, but when it does you better be working. There IS a cheat code though, and it’s a montage song. You got one. You know you do. Your entrance music. Your training jam. The track you keep in reserve for those moments, those moments when you need to circumvent the humdrum, day-to-day monotony, and get in touch with your inner gladiator who wants to be in the arena getting busy. This is why Rocky and everything contextually related to the film hangs in the ether. It’s about the fight itself. Rocky is about the challenge we all must impose on ourselves. Rocky taps into a primal thing that has nothing to do with fighting. It’s bigger than that. Fighting is the easiest metaphor, and boxing was simply the most easily accessible comparison in 1976. Conflict drives us. It could arrive within ourselves. It could present itself in another person. It could be a metaphysical fight as you seek inner peace, or it could be the conflict at a molecular level as a gardener digs into the Earth. Conflict. Every flight is a fight with gravity. Electricians will tell you about resistance. It’s about the fight. If you’ve seen the film then you know Rocky’s aim wasn’t to win. He simply wanted to go the distance. He wanted to take Apollo Creed to a judges’ decision because no one had done that before, and that would be a win for the Italian Stallion. By going the distance, he would do something no one had done before. We reserve our highest accolades for such endeavors. We make television shows about it: to boldly go where no one has gone before.

   At some point, the Wright Brothers looked at each other and said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “We’re gonna attach THOSE wings to THAT body with THAT engine and dammit, we’re gonna fly now.”

   And they did.