“So come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab.”
It was 1975. Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa goes missing. South Vietnam falls. The Superdome opens in New Orleans. Elizabeth Seton becomes the first American saint. Patty Hearst ends her fugitive run. George Carlin hosts the first episode of Saturday Night Live. Phil Collins replaces Peter Gabriel as the lead in Genesis. And The Rocky Horror Picture Show opens to absolutely terrible box office numbers. Under normal circumstances the Rocky Horror story should have ended there. Thirty-five years later, it should have been just one of thousands of films that came and went with hardly a whimper or notice. Today, that most assuredly would have been the case. But things were just a little bit different in 1975. When a film finished its first run, there were plenty of theaters that ran dollar matinees and midnight showings of these movies. There wasn’t a home-video industry at the time. The next step for these films, particularly the big losers, was a run in these “second run” venues where the studios provided them inexpensively in an attempt to recoup some of their money. It was no different for Rocky Horror. It appeared all over the nation at midnight screens. But something rather extraordinary happened at these screenings. People began to turn these screenings into events. They started to bring props and costumes. Eventually entire amateur troupes were performing shadowcasts of the film during the screenings. Theaters began to take advantage of the growing trend, and Rocky Horror events began to spread like wildfire. Before long the rituals became somewhat standardized, and an entirely new form of entertainment was born. Now this box office failure of a movie is the longest-running film in box office history, and not by a little bit. It’s been 50 years, and the film is still playing at movie houses all over the world. Shadowcast groups have turned into generational organizations as the traditions have been handed down and passed along. It was 1975. A cultural phenomenon was born. So let’s do The Time Warp … thanks to the release of Strange Journey: The Story Of Rocky Horror now out on Blu-ray from Magenta Light Studios.
It all started as a stage production in London in the early 1970’s. Richard O’Brien was working in a local theater company when he began to write the songs that would collectively become Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was intended mostly as a fun exercise to fill some time in the theater. No one really expected the idea to last very long. It was all just for fun. The play began to catch on, attracting rather famous theatergoers and the eye of Hollywood. The inevitable film used many of the stage performers, including O’Brien himself, who played the character Riff Raff. The play’s original director became the director and screenwriter for the film. It was all kept pretty much in the family. The movie was made on a very small budget and released to less than enthusiastic crowds.
Likely the same things that eventually led to the film’s success are the very things that made it such a failure initially. The material was quite controversial. The combination of camp, science fiction, and, of course, transvestite aliens was a little too much for the ordinary theater crowd. It seems that the real connoisseurs came out at night … after midnight, to be exact.
Now all of these years later O’Brien’s son returns to the scene of the crime with his documentary Strange Journey. He interviews his dad, and Richard waxes nostalgic. We also reconnect with so many of the surviving members of the cast, and a lot of them are still around. Tim Curry had a stroke in 2012, and while he’s physically unable to do much, his mind is all there, and he can still talk about those experiences. We meet many of the people whose lives were changed by the play and the film, and there are quite a few of them. Some of the best parts of this Blu-ray release have Richard O’Brien playing some of the songs acoustically. Sadly, none of them are allowed to run completely, but I’d love to have heard more of that.
Richard O’Brien looks completely energized by the whole thing, and throughout all I kept thinking was, “Good for you”. In a vintage interview he was asked about the film finding life the way it did, and he joked it was a smart pension plan. I’m not sure what his cut is. But the showings are still going strong, and I think they’ll continue to grow even more for a long long time. Both the filmmakers and the audience kind of discovered something together, and that’s a rare kind of a thing for any entertainment model. New lives are still being touched by the film, and that just can’t be a bad thing. There’s never been a better model of failing upward. For Linus O’Brien this was a passion project, and the survivors still keep in touch and love each other’s company. I wonder what it will look like in another 50 years.
I went to my first and only screening of Rocky Horror some time in the summer of 1978. By then the participation element was in full swing, and the screenings had already captured the world’s attention. I have to admit I didn’t enjoy myself as much as the people around me. I was dragged there by my fellow band members, who were quite alarmed that I had not yet been exposed to the hoopla of the event. They loaded the car with a few thousand pounds of rice, and off we went. Why didn’t I enjoy the show? It’s hard to say. I think I found the spectacle of the thing to be a bit intimidating. I was 15 and wasn’t used to my movies being so interactive. By then everyone was pretty much in the groove, and it was easy to feel like an outsider throughout it all. I could hardly remember what I might have seen on the screen with all of the theatrics. I never went back. Thirty-five years later Fox gave me a chance to look at the movie, really for the first time, when it was released on Blu-ray. What I saw still didn’t impress me for what it was on the screen. But there’s no denying that Rocky Horror captured the imaginations of moviegoers in a way that has not been reproduced since. Many have tried. There was even a horrible sequel called Shock Treatment. It ended in the failure that Rocky Horror was born out of.
The truth is, you can’t plan spontaneity. There have been books and college papers written about the movie and the movement it created. To this day, I’m not sure that anyone knows for certain what it is that fostered the kind of reaction the film still gets today.
The music of Rocky Horror really captures the mood. From the opening lines of Science Fiction Double Feature we are told that O’Brien loves the kind of films we all grew up on. The movie pays many a loving homage to such films as King Kong and The Day The Earth Stands Still. The Time Warp is still very prevalent today. It has been for as long as I’ve been going. It was Tim Curry’s first film. Meatloaf was not yet the noted musician he later became. I don’t think it is much of a coincidence that his own style of rock ‘n’ roll bears a strong resemblance to the style of Rocky Horror. The film remains as a living time capsule, and this look back on it all was more fun for me than the film itself. The creative process of this kind of thing always interests me more than the result. “I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey.”
