Why Perry King Replaced Richard Gere In The Lords Of Flatbush

Two years before Sylvester Stallone walloped Hollywood with the sleeper smash “Rocky” (despite the film’s studio not wanting him to star in it), the struggling actor co-starred in the ensemble coming-of-age comedy “The Lords of Flatbush.” The film is about four best friends who revel in their greaser personae, gleefully getting into all kinds of trouble as they confront their looming passage into adulthood. It’s no “American Graffiti,” but it does give the viewer a gritty sense of what it must’ve been like to live by one’s wits and fists on the not-always-hospitable streets of Brooklyn in the late 1950s.

50 years later, Stallone is the biggest name in the cast, but at the time of the film’s release in 1974, he was overshadowed by newcomer Henry Winkler, who’d just made a splashy television debut as Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli on the ABC sitcom “Happy Days.” Other notable names in the ensemble are Perry King (a decade away from full-fledged television stardom on the NBC action series “Riptide”) and Susan Blakely, who’d receive a Primetime Emmy nomination in 1976 for her work in the hugely popular ABC miniseries “Rich Man, Poor Man.”

Had life broken a different way, King’s role would’ve served as the first film role for Richard Gere. Indeed, Gere was cast and shooting the movie, and likely would’ve stayed on had he not gotten into a food-related scrap with Stallone.

In a 2006 reader Q&A with Ain’t It Cool News (where I started my journalism career and served as the West Coast Editor from 2009 to 2015), Stallone got candid about several facets of his legendary career. Possibly the most surprising anecdote (certainly the most entertaining) was his recollection of briefly, unhappily working alongside Gere on “The Lords of Flatbush.”

“He would strut around in his oversized motorcycle jacket like he was the baddest knight at the round table,” wrote Stallone in his answer to a reader’s question about the film. “One day, during an improv, he grabbed me (we were simulating a fight scene) and got a little carried away. I told him in a gentle fashion to lighten up, but he was completely in character and impossible to deal with.”

This was just the beginning of their fraught professional relationship. The end came in the backseat of a Toyota, where Stallone had hunkered down to eat a hot dog at lunchtime. Suddenly, Gere burst in with, per Stallone, “half a chicken covered in mustard with grease nearly dripping out of the aluminum wrapper.” Stallone saw the potential for a messy situation, and when it came to fruition, he did something about it.

According to Sly:

“I said, ‘That thing is going to drip all over the place.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘If it gets on my pants you’re gonna know about it.’ He proceeds to bite into the chicken and a small, greasy river of mustard lands on my thigh. I elbowed him in the side of the head and basically pushed him out of the car.”

At this point, the director had to make a call as to which actor would stay on with the production. He chose Stallone. “Richard was given his walking papers and to this day seriously dislikes me. He even thinks I’m the individual responsible for the gerbil rumor. Not true … but that’s the rumor.”

“Gerbil rumor,” you ask? If you don’t know, well, you see, when a man gets really lonely … on second thought, I’ll let you Google this. You’ll never watch “Pretty Woman” the same way again.