Memmoli also played Philbin in Brian De Palma's 1973 Phantom of the Paradise and Jenkins in Scorsese collaborator Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (1978), and he had a small but memorable role in Rocky (1976) playing the ice rink worker who, while sporadically counting down, allows Rocky and Adrian their rushed first date, alone on the ice after closing. It was on the set of Blue Collar where co-star Richard Pryor, behaving erratically while under the influence of drugs, hit George Memmoli over the head with a chair and fractured his skull. As a result, Memmoli filed a $1 million lawsuit against Pryor.
