By the time cameras rolled, Parton was deep in what she called a very dark period: an endometriosis diagnosis, big weight gain, and a career reset that had just put her longtime band on indefinite hiatus. Then Sylvester Stallone showed up, and his manic energy on set gave her something to laugh through it.
Rhinestone bombed. It cost $28 million, grossed about $21.4 million, drew eight Razzie nominations and two wins (Worst Actor for Stallone, Worst Original Song for “Drinkenstein”), and still gets cited as one of the great “how did this get made” disasters.
None of that is the part Parton held onto. She came into the 1984 film in the middle of a long health crisis, an endometriosis diagnosis, roughly 50 pounds of weight gain, and depression that ran for the better part of two years, and she’s said Stallone’s energy on set “got me back on track.”
Parton called him “nuts, sick, crazy, a scream,” laughing so hard between takes that some of her real laughter made the final cut. She credited his health-consciousness as an inspiration, though she pushed back in 1984 on the idea that he’d gotten her fit: “Stallone, who most definitely has a beautiful body, has been getting a lot of credit for something he has nothing to do with.” She also clocked him fast: “Both he and Burt [Reynolds] are egomaniacs, but Sly is the perfect balance of total ego and total insecurity.”
Stallone regretted the finished movie. He’d wanted a darker, weirder version and said director Bob Clark took it somewhere else: “The film went in a direction that literally shattered my internal corn meter into smithereens.” He also called it the most fun he’d ever had on a set.
One night in New York, on a freezing shoot, Parton draped her shawl over a shivering man near the garbage. Stallone yanked it off: “Don’t you put that good shawl over that scum. He could have made something of himself. We did.” Parton grabbed it back and got in his face: “That could have been you, you ungrateful son of a b*tch! Except by the grace of God.” A crew member told her the next day that Stallone had gone back and bought the man a blanket.
The movie’s one real winner was the soundtrack. Parton wrote 13 of the 14 songs, and “Tennessee Homesick Blues” hit No. 1 on the country chart and earned a Grammy nomination. Stallone’s own singing got roasted, and Parton took the blame for writing songs that didn’t fit his voice.
They got their Hollywood Walk of Fame stars together on June 14, 1984, eight days before the film opened, and stayed friends for the next four decades. On June 23, 2026, two months before her death, Parton’s official account posted: “In June 1984, ‘Rhinestone’ with Sylvester Stallone was released. It was one of the best times I’ve had making a movie.”
Stallone posted a tribute after she died, and told a story from a break in filming about the two of them climbing onto a gray Tennessee Walking Horse that tripped and rolled, sending them both to the ground. “Dolly’s going, ‘Are we falling?’ I go, ‘We are falling.’” He said she stood up laughing and wanted to do it again. He called her “an American icon and a brilliant woman.”
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