How Henry Winkler Saved Sylvester Stallone on His First Day in Hollywood

In a new clip from Netflix’s upcoming documentary Sly, shared exclusively with Rolling Stone, Sylvester Stallone recalls his first day in Los Angeles. He admits that he had to call Happy Days star Henry Winkler to rescue him after a bout of car trouble.

When Stallone arrived in L.A., the only person he knew in town was Winkler, who at that point was on his third season playing Arthur ‘The Fonz’ Fonzarelli on the hit ABC sitcom. So when Stallone's car died on the 101 freeway, just off Hollywood and Vine, Stallone called Winkler for an extraction.

Winkler recalls rushing to retrieve the future action star and his traveling companions—first wife Sascha Czack and a slobbering bull mastiff.

“I went and got him and this mountain of a dog,” Winkler says in Sly. “All of his clothes, everything in the car somehow, [they were] sitting on suitcases.”

As Winkler ferried his guests to a hotel, he was preoccupied with Stallone’s pooch. “His dog is in the backseat, drooling,” Winkler said last year on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast. “Like inches thick. You need a bathing suit to go in that back seat with that dog.”

Stallone acknowledges in Sly what a site he and his family must’ve been.

“He obviously couldn’t take me to his house,” Stallone recalls. “I had a dog, [and] a wife…”

Winkler took the Stallones to a nice hotel, which they could only afford for a few nights. They moved to “some dump way in the [San Fernando] Valley,” which had a lower nightly rate. It was just blocks away from Balboa Boulevard, which inspired Stallone to pen Rocky, the film that rocketed him to fame.

Though Winkler admits to having not seen Stallone in over 30 years, he says the two are still “acquaintances” and share an inextricable bond even at a distance. “There is a wonderful warmth between us that I know exists, because I hear from people who do see him,” he told Mandel.