A campy horror/sci-fi/sex pastiche became a 30+-year midnight cult movie, and the first eminent “meta” cultural artifact, aping film clichés while attracting loving mockery and the audience’s character-imitation
A hash of images, gags, tropes, and attitudes has the theme of loss of innocence as its beating heart
If you want something visual / that’s not too abysmal / we could take in an old Steve Reeves moo-veah.
—Tim Curry’s character Dr. Frank-N-Furter
in the song “Sweet Tranvestite,” in this film
Subsections below:
A casual start for an ultimate cornucopia of ideas
Well-received stage mountings predate the film’s elaborating production
The audience participation mania sets itself up
Seeing the film in more sheltered circumstances allows more appreciative responses, but also coincides with—in the outer world—the weird longevity of the “cult”
Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter—a glorious arrival, and yet perhaps his last great role
The film foreshadowed Internet-style boundary-busting
[Edits done 5/10/13.]
On one level, this film separates generations the way certain other cultural measures do: for instance, you ask people what was the last great Rolling Stones album, and it depends on age of the fan whether they say Exile on Main St.
Well, people always vary, and some post–baby boomers have gone for Rocky Horror, but you realize you’re talking to younger generations (starting with Gen Y?) when specific members tell you their favorite parody/camp/meta movie isn’t Rocky Horror but the Austin Powers series (1997, 1999, 2002). And yet there are still midnight showings of Rocky Horror today, according to the film’s Wikipedia article, making it the record-holder as a major-studio film in continuous theater release; and as the 2000 DVD conveys, original fans of the 1970s showings have turned their children on to it.
If you are interested in this film, I strongly suggest you see it first (on DVD) without an audience, because it isn’t too bad in itself, if you understand and accept the terms by which it was created. Then you can appreciate how the audience reactions—a cult-type, fairly ritualized “live performance” around it—complements and goes beyond the original movie’s aims.
A casual start for an ultimate cornucopia of ideas
The film started as a stage play, written (mostly or entirely) by Richard O’Brien, an actor who plays the hunchback/handyman Riff Raff in the film. He says (on the DVD) he started writing the play, with its songs, as a sort of time-killer during winters between spates of stage work. The songs, many have noted, are pretty strong—a record album of the soundtrack was released in the ’70s, and isn’t too bad to listen to on its own. In fact, the film could be called a good set of songs in search of a stronger movie (in terms of story), and some songs are so sophisticated that, when O’Brien plays some on acoustic guitar on a DVD extra, you may be surprised he didn’t become yet another British rock musician. (He, actually, came from New Zealand
The play, a musical with a movie-parody storyline, was developed for stage (under the title The Rocky Horror Show) with help from director Jim Sharman, who also directed the film. It is both campy and yet apt to warmly parody stock-element genre movies—combining, in a gloriously fun mishmash, tried-and-true features of horror films, corny sci-fi, and sexual themes, the last being the more modern aspects. (You could say the film, mostly ironically, cross-breeds 1940s-through-early-1960s cultural innocence with late-’60s/early-’70s “decadence” and newly “acceptable” sexual hedonism.) Rock ’n’ roll music of a semi-nostalgic sort is the style of the busy soundtrack, easing us through the story and also bolstering the thematic/esthetic aspect of “letting go.”
The story—skimpy in some ways—is about a set of aliens who have set up a home and laboratory on Earth, and their involving two innocent young Americans (who have accidentally stopped by to get help for their car) in the aliens’ monster-making deeds…and also involving them into sexual awakenings, and corrupting/disillusionment of a kind. (Whether my account combines the film’s developments with the play’s original, more limited aspects, I don’t know.)
The play turned out, surprisingly to its makers, a hit in London (starting in a 63-seat venue, the "Upstairs Theatre" at the Royal Court Theatre), and moved on to other locations, first in Los Angeles, where it was a hit (and another venue in Australia). Many of the players of the stage show remained with the project through the film production, including (I believe) all of Patricia Quinn as Magenta, Little Nell (Nell Campbell) as Columbia, Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, and Marvin Lee Aday, whose stage name is Meat Loaf (the rock star), as Eddie (he also played, in the stage version, Dr. Everett Scott). [I am not sure if Meat Loaf was only in the L.A. version and not also in the earlier London version.] O’Brien, of course, played Riff Raff.
(This is truly a Commonwealth-plus-U.S. production; while O’Brien was born in New Zealand , Quinn is originally from Northern Ireland , Curry of course is English, Campbell Paradise by the Dashboard Light” exemplifies his combination of American rock ’n’ roll raw-boned-ness crossed with a sort of British staginess that apparently is what endears him to Brits.)
Well-received stage mountings predate the film’s elaborating production
The play ran from about 1972 to 1974 in different locations, and it was decided to make a movie of it, with production in fall 1974, and release in September 1975. Barry Bostwick, who plays Brad Majors, the male American naif, in the film, says on the DVD the idea seemed to be to get the film done to capitalize on the glam/glitter rock fad before it disappeared. Indeed, the music, with its strong whiffs of ’50s/early ’60s rock, has glam elements of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, T-Rex, Elton John a la “Crocodile Rock,” and Queen. According to DVD comments, for their parts the stage actors (as I named above) performed their roles in the film to give the project it a last shot before they got completely tired of the work. As an inadvertent result, they lend a dyed-in-the-wool aspect to their characters, especially Curry in his “sweet tranvestite”/mad doctor role. Bostwick as Brad and Susan Sarandon as his comely, innocent girlfriend Janet Weiss, and newcomer Jonathan Adams as Dr. Scott, along with Charles Gray as the narrator, fill out the cast.
The production design tarted things up a lot, including Hammer Films–style stock horror elements (like the creepy big house, which is the real Oakley Court
Sidebar: Comparing Rocky with Young Frankenstein. It’s interesting to compare this film with Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, which was released the previous year (1974). This, considered probably the best of Brooks’ many parodies of Hollywood genres, and with its humor and ideas helpfully modulated by actor/writer Gene Wilder, comes with a well-crafted 1930s black-and-white Universal horror-film look, conscientiously and respectfully done as a sort of non-taxing medium in which to present the story, where the real humor lay. The Brooks film includes its bawdy and boundary-testing moments, but it is basically an homage and consistent, thoroughgoing parody meant to cater to, with all else, the expectation of craft and accessibility that American audiences had. Rocky Horror, by contrast, is so busy with production details, embrace of camp, and a mixture of different genres that it first came to be regarded as a movie failure, but ended up adopted as the preeminent cult film—valued by the young, to be sure, but so richly dissected for the purposes of its cult that a second look by critics and contributors shows what a treasure trove of gathered-together ideas it is.
After an old Frankenstein cliché of building a monster—in this case, a stud who inadvertently “turns on” licentious, bisexual (? or trans?) Frank-N-Furter—the plot turns end up having Riff Raff kill his master Frank, and then he has the house lift off like a rocket to return to the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania . As you can see, there are a lot of cliches, familiar tropes, and cultural ephemera (some, at first blush, incongruous when joined as they are here) wedged together in one dense, lively package, with the whole thing not afraid to careen into occasional campiness and/or amateurishness at times (notice, now and then, clumsy blocking and oddly framed shots). Lovers of the play were generally satisfied with the film’s burnishing of their for-special-tastes-but-successful theater experience….
And the film bombed at the box office as a new release.
Executive producer Lou Adler (who worked for Twentieth Century Fox on this project), who is low-key but interesting in DVD comments, says the next trick was to figure out a distribution method (to recoup the film’s cost, presumably, which was only about $1.6 million anyway). It hit the midnight circuit; as Tim Curry comments in one interview, the only midnight cult film prior to it (virtually) was Tod Browning’s less pointedly campy Freaks (see my late April review). As Adler notes, “The fact that it [Rocky] failed [at the box office,] and [then] we had to find an alternative way of exhibiting [?] it[,] added to the phenomenon.”
What happened next is what started to make this film part of a true—and sui generis—cultural movement-of-sorts, and why—if you haven’t seen it yet—you need to see it alone, to appreciate what I just said, lest (if you were swamped by a noisy audience doing the ritual catcalls) you couldn’t figure out what the film was about.
The audience participation mania sets itself up
It was in about 1977, per the DVD, that audience catcalls, as fun part of watching it, started to gel. (I think this had its genesis, as such things often do, among city audiences before the “derivative” suburbanites caught on. Designer Thomson talks of seeing the audience phenomenon at the Waverly theater in New York City
I used to go to Rocky with my friend Joe Coles and usually a few others (probably from the “Stage Tech” clique, but the makeup of the group could vary), and the whole participation thing, among (at Rockaway) a wide array of people we could hardly be expected to know, was still (as a general matter) new, but wasn’t hard to get the drift and spirit of. And in terms of the audience participation techniques, pretty quickly we gathered that there was a certain virtue in not only catching on to what the more group-mentality comments tended to be, but with subsequent viewings, presenting our own occasional new jokes in the catcalls (as you got the movie under your skin, though I found there was a limit to how much of the story and lines I understood).
And the overall attitude of the catcallers seemed to be that this film was such a bomb, we willingly poured on the mockery; and yet (almost as if showing respect to the whole thing) we could still have a blast calling out about it, with plans for specific moves devised on our own time before we went—with the process enabled all the more for high school mentalities if enough beer were drunk beforehand. (This goes to the kind of retrospective blog entry you could do years later when, at age 50, you decry the desolate limitations on what high school kids could do for wholesome fun in 1980; but on the other hand, in looking back, you see there was a fair amount to be warmly remembering about with this stuff.)
The bulk of our viewings were in 1980, and also included an increasing number of kids from our school, not just within our little group. One concept among the “argot” of the culture among some of us nerds-and-others who attended (at least Joe and a few of our friends used the following term) was that new viewers were “virgins” to the Rocky experience. It was an experimental, larky thing to bring someone new from school one Friday or Saturday night to see it, and initiate them into the “rationalized mayhem.”
And mayhem it was. I saw the film eight times, I believe, in those years, though you could hear of someone who’d gone 15 times, or up to 30 times…and yet, at that time, I didn’t know a great deal of the film’s story of dialogue. (My sister didn’t get the phenom at the time; she thought I went because I liked the movie. Actually, at the time I couldn’t follow the whole movie well at all, so I didn’t know whether I liked it; but among us high schoolers, you—as many of us did—learned the catcalls and went along with them religiously, and inserted creative new ones when you could. In any event, this made as much sense as going to a bar where some weird ritual doings took place, or going to an edgy kind of sporting event.)
New kids from Joe’s and my HS class who were brought were rather turned on, I think, by the energy of the audience mania, but understandably naïvely, they seemed to think part of the point was to follow the movie, and they couldn’t really do it with all the noise (nor could they easily learn how to do the catcalls when they couldn’t follow the movie easily). Such was the rudely avant garde aspect—and mild absurdity—of the phenomenon then.
So the surging fun was also mixed with an almost anarchic, vaguely arrogant quality. In part this arose, I think, from the fact that in those days, movie viewers could be particular about movies in an especially sharp way, and here was an item—like the more typical bombs that would later turn up on Mystery Science Theater 3000—that seemed to just scream for fun-loving mockery.
The fact that the catcalling and, later, dressing up became so elaborate and “established” might have paralleled the advent of generations who were nicer and less apt to virulently criticize movies, and had more of a frame of reference of being very expert in media products. That is, with earlier Rocky fans, in the late 1970s, the “ethos” was in good part to mock an “eminently bad” movie, but with younger (later 1980s, 1990s) viewers—and to the extent I think the logic of this kind of cult is a little hard to pin down—the “ethos” was to be a little more respectful, and more baroque in imitating the film.
But seemingly in line with the fact that every generation of teens has its irreverence that needs to blow off steam, I think on its own feet, Rocky has managed to deliver the goods as an “eminently mockable movie” that has catered to each crop of teens, whatever their specific difference from earlier generations. (From another angle, one could easily argue that, far from being a merely bad movie, Rocky was a “tasty mash-up,” or a version of what are now called “meta” cultural works.)
(The DVD shows an audience, maybe from the late 1980s, that not only inserted the fairly routine mocking comments—it’s interesting how universal the shouted-out “Asshole!” for Brad Majors had become—but even parroted the entire movie dialogue while it went on. This certainly must have given exercise to their mouth muscles.)
Props were also used (as they were later) in the early (1980) days:
* In the wedding scene, people threw rice in the theater; whole big bags of rice were avidly picked up at the supermarket for this purpose.
* Toilet paper (home closets could be ransacked for this) was flung when the sequence in the pink-tiled laboratory began. A whole roll could go sailing through the air like a meteorite.
* At the dinner scene, when Frank proposes “A toast!,” real sliced-bread toast, conscientiously prepared, was flung in the theater.
* Playing cards were chucked near the end when a song references “cards for sorrow, cards for pain.”
(Could you accidentally get rice down your shirt, or have toast hit your head? You sure could.)
Yes, the theater was an unholy mess by the time the cultists and the movie were done, and some assiduous theater worker had to come along with push broom to ritually clean up the debris. Which I think was especially necessary because I think there were two, back-to-back showings of Rocky one or more weekend nights.
Seeing the film in more sheltered circumstances allows more appreciative responses, but also coincides with—in the outer world—the weird longevity of the “cult”
It wasn’t until many years later, about 1995, when I visited Joe Coles at a New England home of his, that we saw Rocky at his home on video, for old times’ sake. Then I could appreciate more of the content of the movie, as I couldn’t in 1979-80. And I think I was surprised to find that it wasn’t quite so bad a film as the noisy, confident audience of 15 years before seemed so readily to assume.
Of course, I’ve seen it more times in recent years on DVD—a format that has interesting extras, which I recommend—and I watch it for the fun the campy thing still conveys (per its original intent), and most recently, at times (at least with the surprisingly sentimental “I’m Going Home” song near the end), it even stirs some weird, pre-choking-up nostalgia in me—for what, I don’t quite know. (Susan Sarandon comments that maybe the film is like love; you shouldn’t try to dissect it, just enjoy it for what it is.)
And it isn’t just the odd camp-revue smothered in audience catcalls from 1980, or the thing watched “anew,” rather quietly, for old times’ sake (with friends on hand who were Rocky “virgins,” who when in 1995 Joe or I tentatively inserted some of the old typical catcalls, were amused but a little disoriented by this aspect). Nor is it the artifact we can watch however we want to today on DVD (or, I’m sure, streamed/downloaded from Netflix or something else online). It still is shown in theaters at midnight somewhere around the world, with audiences doing the ritual catcalls.
So if the phenomenon was new, and rather puzzling and avant garde and disruptive in 1980, it’s amazingly an institution today.
By the way, in 1980, I think it was rare that people dressed up as one of the characters. When you see on the DVD footage of audience members so lavishly done up as a character, especially the flamboyant Frank-N-Furter, that shows the cult’s “rituals” mutated over the years into an even richer riot than it had been in the early 1980s.
The participation aspect even took on such a weird life of its own that, in 1980, Joe and I went to see a stage production at Rutgers University
Much more recently (10 years ago?), in New York
Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter—a glorious arrival, and yet perhaps his last great role
Possibly what remains today the most intriguing draw of the film is Tim Curry’s performance. According to DVD comments (by Quinn?), Curry originally, for the play version, had to work hard (out of his own potential to interpret, I imagine, and not simply in “translating” O’Brien’s original idea) to get what the character of Frank-N-Furter was supposed to be like. I think I read that at one point he tried him like a Nazi martinet of sorts. Eventually, the starchy-yet-self-dramatizing, effeminate “transvestite” was born, with, as Quinn says, a “Kate Kensington” speech quality.
Not only does Curry have the female movements, face gestures, and occasional histrionics down, but his accent…. Just notice how, with his projecting baritone, he pronounces some vowel combinations, as with pounds or sound—it’s not like any variations on British accents you’ve ever heard. It’s like a breakfast compote—“plummy fruit,” that is; he adds little creative word-molding twists, arch flourishes….
Curry has never been in another performance we remember him for that stands out like this one. Sometimes, through the years, he has turned up in movies or TV, and we recognize him (“He’s the one who played Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror!” we whisper enthusiastically to whoever surprisingly doesn’t know, as if sharing a slightly forbidden code). Meanwhile, Curry’s has tried to live down the Frank character (I read that for years he refused to discuss it with media); but it seems as if he can never outrun Frank’s shadow, as if the role turned into a monster that haunts him forever.
Curry had a singing career for a while, including putting out an album, Read My Lips, in about 1980 that included such singles as “I Do the Rock”…and he still sounded like Frank was peeking through the operatic baritone. (Amusingly, in the early 1990s or so, New York Times columnist William Safire once went to an odd length to “get the skinny” on the expression “Read my lips, ” in view of, supposedly, President George H.W. Bush’s having made it famous. Safire consulted with none other than Tim Curry, as if Curry’s album title suggested he’d originated the phrase. Which of course he hadn’t, but I don’t think Safire understood this.)
The film foreshadowed Internet-style boundary-busting
I was going to elaborate on my theory that the Internet’s prodigious ability to allow rank-and-file Shmoes to insert their snotty-nosed comments into presentations of cultural treasures in chat rooms and in comments features of various media outlets—resembles nothing so much as the obstreperous yet creative phenom of the Rocky audience participation that started 35 years ago. But I just recalled that in the comments part of a YouTube video of Curry’s “I Do the Rock,” some unappreciative upstart had commented “As gay as a row of little pink houses” or some such thing. Commenting that Curry is gay is no more original or appropriate than barking that Paul Lynde or Liberace was gay. (And whether Curry really is, I don’t know.) It’s beside the point.
Curry is a unique performer…and probably if it wasn’t for him, the Rocky movie and audience phenom would have sunken into history some time ago.
I see you’ve tasted blood and you want more. Wait for Part 2.
