Plan to turn Hartford boxing legend Willie Pep’s life into a movie has been revived

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When she noticed James Madio for the first time Thursday night, wearing a name tag that read “Willie Pep,” Barbara Papaleo practically did a double-take.

Madio will portray Pep, the legendary Hartford boxer, in a movie that producers hope to shoot this fall, and Pep’s widow thoroughly approved of the casting.

“I can see the resemblance,” Papaleo said with a wide smile.

Twelve and a half years after his death, the Middletown-born Pep remains an icon for boxing fans in Hartford and beyond. The 5-foot-5-inch, 125-pound featherweight won 229 professional fights over a 26-year career, setting a record that will almost certainly never be broken. He twice earned the world featherweight title and once won a round without throwing a single punch. He ranks near the top of any list of all-time boxing greats (No. 5, according to ESPN, No. 3 per Bleacher Report) and in 2005 was named the best featherweight fighter of all-time by the International Boxing Research Organization.

And he did it all while based in the Hartford area, where he grew up, fought and lived his entire life.

The film, tentatively titled “Pep,” has a script, a director, several pedigreed actors, shooting locations across the city of Hartford, and more than $300,000 in tax breaks from the state of Connecticut. If the project can raise the rest of their $1.6 million budget in time, producer Steve Loff said, it will shoot over 21 days in October and November and be submitted to major film festivals in 2020, for a potential 2021 release.

“I’m pretty confident right now,” Loff said Thursday at a fundraising event in Farmington. “I’d say I’m up to 85, 90 percent thinking we’re going to get this done.”

Using an unconventional (and cost efficient) docu-drama format, “Pep” will be set in the fall and winter of 1965, as its eponymous character pursues an unlikely comeback at age 43. The film will be directed by Robert Kolodny and executive produced by Oscar-nominee Steve James.

Loff said filmmakers have been exploring the possibility of a Pep movie since 1949, when Pep defeated Sandy Saddler in 15 rounds at Madison Square Garden. One project in the 1970s supposedly had Al Pacino attached. HBO Sports grew interested in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But for one reason or another, no film ever got made.

“I like to say Pep is as elusive outside of the ring as he was inside the ring,” Loff said. “But I think we finally have him cornered.”

Loff and Madio’s movie itself has been a long time coming — since the day more than a decade ago when Madio came across a photo of Pep, noted the resemblance and began to research the boxer’s life. It was February 2008 when Loff noticed the photo on Madio’s bulletin board and became interested in developing a film.

The project has suffered numerous setbacks in the years since, with its budget dropping from $20-30 million to $5 million to the current $1.6 million as directors and producers came and went. Calling the film a “passion project,” Madio said Pep’s spirit, and one slogan in particular, has helped keep him from walking away.

“Pep always wrote, always put in his autographs, always said to people when he said goodbye — ‘keep punching,’” Madio said. “That resonated with me, and I’m like, ‘Just keep punching, dude.’”

But after years of work to make “Pep” a reality, both Loff and Madio admit that the film is in the "12th round.”

“If we don’t get the knockout now, we’re throwing in the towel," Loff said. "This is it.”

Loff and Madio have received several significant investments (including from Manon Cox, former CEO of the Meriden-based Protein Sciences) but need an additional $1 million, preferably by Aug. 1, before they can begin filming.

Barbara Papaleo, who married Pep in 1987 when the boxer was 65 years old, said she hopes the movie will call attention to Pep’s legacy. Pep wasn’t the type to seek praise or adulation, she said, but told her late in his life that he hoped he would be remembered after he was gone.

“Nobody in Hartford or in the boxing arena could ever forget him because of his record and everything," Papaleo said. “But this is different.”

“If this happens for him, he deserves it.”