Tulsa King Storycraft

Although there have been some stinkers, about every fifth project Sylvester Stallone gets involved in has pretty stunning writing. He was twenty-eight when he started working on a script about a boxer that became “Rocky” and was released when he was thirty.

At the 49th Academy Awards, celebrating films made in 1976, the Bicentennial year for America, Stallone was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. He lost to Paddy Chayefsky for “Network.” 1976 was a very good year for film. “Rocky” won for Best Picture. A remarkable writer himself, Stallone is an excellent judge of writing, but sometimes he’s willing to take the money first. That’s why there are almost as many “Rocky” films as there are “Godzilla” films.

Tulsa King, Stallone’s latest project, has Taylor Sheridan from Sons of Anarchy and Terence Winter from Sopranos as showrunners and head writers. The son of an Italian immigrant, Stallone has refused to play characters in the Mafia for most of his career. Like Francis Ford Coppola, who only agreed to do “The Godfather” because he “had a child and a mortgage and no other opportunities,” Stallone was concerned about how playing that kind of stereotype might reflect back on his father’s people. At seventy-eight, Stallone was so attracted to the Tulsa King writing, that he was willing to change his mind on the subject.

Besides all the good action sequences and mafioso political intrigue in “Tulsa King,” it also highlights some very human themes. One of the most important is the sort of isolation and disconnection everyone feels as they get older.

It begins as a whisper you can barely hear when you’re twenty. At thirty, you can hear whole words but don’t know what they mean. At forty, the isolation is leaving you messages you don’t know how to answer. At fifty, we’re having conversations with our isolation. Your roles as parent, employee, and spouse start to function without you. At sixty, you’re often talking to your isolation more than your own family. At seventy, it’s your only real friend. We’re born alone, and we die alone. The lucky ones die instantly or in their sleep.

Before he became a plot device to connect Tulsa King with the pretty girl, there was a metaphor in the first several episodes of an old white horse who would occasionally break free of any attempt to keep him in a stall or pasture and freely roam the streets of Tulsa. At first, you don’t know if only Tulsa King can see it, and it quickly becomes a metaphor for his own life.

I’ve spent a good fifty years or more reading about masculinity. It’s a topic that’s often criticized—and it should be. Men’s insistence on being men and efforts to assert their maleness is responsible for a lot of pain in this world. In many species, the male dies and becomes food shortly after he delivers his genetic contribution to the next generation. Humans are social animals. Unlike elephants, where the males live their lives as outcasts, humans create a patriarchial society, where each man tries to identify and exemplify their silverback qualities as either alpha, lieutenant, or outcast.

In my quest to comprehend the appropriate role of masculinity in human society, I’ve read Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway wrote almost exclusively about masculinity. Sometimes, he made his best friends box him, and he ran with bulls in a remarkably ancient ritual. He also adopted so many oddly-toed cats that they became named for him. Papa couldn’t answer these questions, so he swallowed a shotgun. You’d be surprised how often questions about masculinity end that way.

Stallone has always pursued questions of masculinity as a writer, a man, and an actor. During the making of Rocky IV, he’d been lifting weights with Franco Columbu and thought he was in the greatest shape of his life. During filming, he asked the actor Dolph Lundgren to “take his best shot” just for fun in an effort to prove to the Sweedish Giant, ten years younger than himself, that he was still stronger and tougher. After one punch, Stallone spent more than a week in the hospital with a concussion. Sometimes, masculinity can get you in a lot of trouble.

There are some pretty remarkable stories of “toxic” masculinity in the Bible. Absalom was the strongest and most handsome son of David, but he died at war with his father. “Tulsa King” uses contrasts in familial relationships to both demonstrate and differentiate qualities of Masculinity.

“Tulsa King” contrasts four men. Domenick Lombardozzi plays the disconnected son of the Mafia Don, who sends Stallone to Oklahoma. Stallone plays a man who was so loyal to his Don that he spent twenty-five years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Michael Beach plays the father of a young black man who has misgivings when his young son falls into Tulsa King’s orbit. There are almost always strong black characters in Stallone’s projects. They often explore issues of fatherhood.

Ritchie Coster plays a character lifted from the pages of “Sons of Anarchy.” Although most of the actors in “Sons of Anarchy” were either Jewish or Hispanic, Charlie Hunnam was English and very Northern. You wouldn’t think that a story about American Bikers would include Irish Weapons dealers, but it’s part of history.

When a war is over, what happens to the men who use their masculinity to resolve the political struggles of other men? The Troubles in Ireland began three years before I was born and ended four years before I turned forty. I knew a man who spent his life studying Irish terrorists. Living in Jackson, Mississippi, and teaching at Millsaps College, he became a recognized expert on the longest-lasting armed conflict in the twentieth century. Both “Sons of Anarchy” and “Tulsa King” have characters who were warriors for the Green in The Troubles but find themselves disconnected and disaffected when peace comes. With no other prospects, they went from soldiers to criminals. You’d be surprised how often this happens in history. As much as I write about how violent the Scottish side of my family was, the other side was very Irish, very Green, and very violent. I don’t often write about the violence in my own life. There are reasons for that. Maybe, one day.

We’ve been talking about biker culture in America for so long that we’ve forgotten how it began. For centuries, the cavalry was the most respected and most feared part of any military. In the twentieth century, war became mechanized, and horses became obsolete.

The French word “chevalier” is where we get the words “calvary” and “chivalry.” It refers to the concept of a mounted warrior, what we call a “Knight” in English. What becomes of the Knight when there are no more horses? During World War II, what remained of the Calvary began experimenting with motorcycles made by an American company called Harley Davidson, with the idea of revitalizing the mounted warrior. It didn’t really work that well. In World War II, bikers mainly ended up acting as messengers. In the wars that followed in Asia, the Calvary discovered a new purpose with the introduction of Helicopters.

After World War II, there were all these surplus motorcycles and surplus soldiers. They were both discarded by the country they served, so they found each other, and biker culture was born.

Masculinity and chivalry are principal issues in “Tulsa King,” as evidenced by the number of motorcycles and flesh and blood horses. Just like he did with Rocky, Stallone plays a simple, loyal, and valiant man who lives beyond his usefulness and has to find new ways to “go the distance.”