Imagine it’s 1976. Rocky Balboa is pounding through the streets of Philly in a gray sweatsuit, Converse high-tops slapping pavement. He hauls up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, chest heaving, arms pumping — and the camera? What camera? You don’t even notice it’s there. It floats with him, invisible. You’re not watching a scene. You’re in it.
That’s the version of Rocky we never got – thanks to Garrett Brown’s Steadicam.
Before Brown’s invention, capturing smooth motion shots meant hauling in a full dolly rig — tracks, cranes, a whole circus. It was complicated, expensive, and painfully slow.
As a result, there was no clean way to follow an actor through uneven terrain or up stairs without turning the camera into a nausea machine. The idea of chasing a boxer up 72 stone steps, handheld, in real time? Not possible — at least, not without turning the frame into a war zone of jitter and shake.
But instead of accepting that limitation, one Philly-born inventor had other plans.
The Problem That Sparked a Revolution
Garrett Brown didn’t start out as an engineer. “I thought of myself first of all as a folk singer,” he once said. But after a short-lived music career, Brown pivoted into filmmaking, eventually creating short pieces for Sesame Street. What bugged him was how limited the camera was. “We had to pick this dolly up and get it in a pickup truck and lay our rusty rails… to move the lens 10 feet.”
He loved handheld shooting — but at the same time, he hated how it looked. The camera jitter destroyed the illusion. “That frame… is a window. I don’t like my window frame moving.”
So Brown began obsessing over how to let the camera glide while still being carried by a person. He holed up in a motel for a week, forcing himself to brainstorm a better way. He sketched. He experimented with lamp arms. He ran around the room with vacuum cleaners and broomsticks. Finally — after days of nonstop trial and error — he cracked it.
The secret sauce? A four-part system: a gimbal, spread mass, a spring-powered arm, and a monitor for viewing. With that, the Steadicam was born — and it worked.
From Philly Streets to the Big Screen
Brown took his new rig out on the streets of Philadelphia with his girlfriend Ellen and shot what he called “30 impossible shots.” No tracks. No cranes. Just Garrett and his homemade rig chasing Ellen through train yards, over sidewalks — and eventually, down the stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“We parked up top… Ellen ran down… and then she ran back up again from the bottom and I followed her almost all the way back up,” Brown recalled. “Pretty grateful I hadn’t fallen down.”
That footage went into a demo reel Brown shopped around Hollywood. Director John G. Avildsen — gearing up to shoot a low-budget boxing film called Rocky — saw it. He recognized the camera. And he had one question: “Where are those steps, and how did you do that?”
That’s how the most iconic shot in Rocky was born — not from storyboards or studio execs, but from a test reel by a guy running after his girlfriend with a prototype rig.
Shooting Rocky with the Steadicam
Once production on Rocky kicked off, Garrett Brown strapped in and got to work. The Steadicam allowed the crew to follow Stallone through scenes that would’ve been borderline impossible with standard 1970s tech.
“We had shot moving shots all over Philly,” Brown said. “Chasing him through the railroad yards and under the arcades near Independence Hall and up Broad Street at the very first light.”
One of the wildest moments? A run through the Italian Market, captured from the back of a van bouncing along a brutal cobblestone road. “Here’s this terrible road… and we’re doing like a ghost just smoothly up the road.” A vendor spontaneously tossed Stallone an orange — completely unscripted, and it stayed in the movie.
In the meat locker, Brown squeezed between hanging sides of beef, steadying the camera with one hand and pushing greasy carcasses out of the way with the other. “I love that stuff,” he said. “I love to move the camera… it tells you things about a set when you move.”
Even the in-ring shots broke ground. Brown, wearing his rig, circled the fighters to simulate a referee’s view — capturing punches with immersive fluidity. “We shot each round with me in the ring… then we cleared me out so the other cameras could work,” he said. And if you look closely at the final fight footage, you’ll actually spot him — tall, striped shirt, hovering near the ropes like a rogue referee. That’s Garrett Brown, Steadicam strapped on, capturing the action in real time. The result? Movie punches that didn’t just look good — they felt real.
The Aftershock – Changing Hollywood Forever
Rocky wasn’t just a knockout success — it became a turning point in filmmaking. Brown’s Steadicam immediately landed on three major films that same year: Bound for Glory, Marathon Man, and Rocky.
That one-two-three punch made Hollywood sit up. Bound for Glory took home the Oscar for Best Cinematography. Rocky won Best Picture. Marathon Man showed how the rig could handle slick, fast-paced action. And Brown? He worked on all three.
From there, the Steadicam exploded. It was used in The Shining to trail Danny Torrance’s trike. It raced through the forests of Return of the Jedi. It became the go-to tool for directors wanting smooth motion without rails or cranes. And Brown didn’t stop. He went on to invent the Skycam (used in football broadcasts), the Mobycam (underwater camera for Olympic swimming), and the Zine, a mobility device inspired by his father’s aging process.
But Garrett Brown didn’t just invent the Steadicam and walk away — he stayed in the fight. He operated the camera on the original Rocky, chasing Stallone up the art museum steps and through Philly’s Italian Market. He returned again for Rocky II, capturing Balboa’s dash through the cheering kids of Kensington. And years later, he strapped in for Rocky V, once again lacing up for another run at the steps. “That was the fourth time I’ve run up the stairs in earnest,” Brown said.
Rocky’s Steadicam Shot Wasn’t Just Iconic — It Was a Turning Point
Garrett Brown’s Steadicam didn’t just fix a technical problem — it changed the language of film. It let the camera move like a human — not a robot, not a machine on rails. And honestly, there’s no sharper proof of its impact than in Rocky itself — a movie that, much like Brown, came out of nowhere to change everything.
Without the Steadicam, Rocky’s run might’ve been a clunky, awkward jog trapped in shaky handheld footage. Instead, thanks to Brown’s invention, it became the moment — fluid, powerful, mythic. Brown chased Stallone up those steps the same way he chased innovation: with grit, speed, and zero guarantees it would work.
Good thing it did.
