The this-should-be-made-into-a-movie life of Joey Eye began in 1969 in Palermo, Sicily, when his 14-year-old mother and 35-year-old father gave him up for adoption. He was sent to Philadelphia. He grew up as “a little curly-haired Italian kid” in a rough Irish-German neighborhood in North Philadelphia (“that built character”) and later found comfort among the paesani in South Philadelphia (“growing up Italian meant everything to me”).

“I got beaten up a lot, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with fighting,” he said in the premiere episode of “Eye on the Prize,” his podcast and multimedia effort on the boxing and movie businesses. But then in 1978, he was cast in “Rocky II,” playing one of the first kids to accompany the legendary boxer up the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 72 steps.