by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I was looking for a relatively light movie that my husband Charles and I could watch to get our minds off the dreadful political news surrounding the 2022 midterm elections and preferably one with a Hallowe’en theme. I found it in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 film of Richard O’Brien’s musical The Rocky Horror Show, a Queer-themed spoof of Frankenstein that premiered in London in 1973 and then played Broadway before 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights. They assigned it to director Jim Sharman and told him to recruit a cast of major American rock-music stars for the roles, but Sharman insisted that at least for the (more or less) British principals he wanted to use the players from the British stage version: Tim Curry as mad scientist Dr. Frank N. Furter (well, it’s a better name for a Frankenstein spoof than “Frankenweenie”!, Richard O’Brien himself as his servant Riff Raff (who actually turns out to be the master, not the servant, at the end in a twist O’Brien might have borrowed from Harry Bates’ “Farewell to the Master,” the basis of The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which at the end the robot Gnut explains to the people he’s leaving behind that instead of the humanoid Klaatu being Gnut’s master, “I am the Master”), Patricia Quinn as the maid Magenta, “Little Nell” (true name: Nell Campbell) as the groupie Columbia, Jonathan Adams as rival scientist Dr. Everett Scott, and Peter Hinwood as Rocky Horror, the bionic stud muffin Dr. Frank N. Furter created to be his animate boy toy. To get the cast he wanted, Sharman had to agree to a lower production budget and to cast American actors as the juvenile leads: Barry Bostwick (who’s quite cute in a sort of nerd-chic way) as Brad Majors and Susan Sarandon as his fiancée, Janet Weiss. (According to director Sharman, Bostwick and Sarandon were actually dating when the movie was shot, though eventually she entered a long-term relationship with actor Tim Robbins.)
The Rocky Horror Show premiered in London in 1973 at the height of the so-called “glitter-rock” craze, in which androgynous artists like David Bowie and Marc Bolan became major stars and their success spawned the usual crop of imitators, including David Essex and Gary Glitter. The film actually flopped on its initial release – it was promoted with a poster spoofing the then-current hit Jaws, with the flaming red “Lips” logo and the slogan, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show – a different set of jaws” – but it became a huge and ongoing hit later in the 1970’s, when a bizarre cult built up around it. Theatres would screen the film at midnight on Saturday after the regular Friday night screening of something else, and audience members would come dressed as the movie’s characters, repeat lines from the film as it ran, and make humorous interjections and out-loud comments during the action. They would also throw things, including rice at the scene early on when Brad’s and Janet’s best friends get married (which inspires Brad to propose to Janet) and toast during the banquet scene when Dr. Frank says, “Let’s toast,” to celebrate the successful vivification of Rocky Horror. I first saw The Rocky Horror P:icture Show in the 1980’s at the late, lamented Ken Cinema in Kensington, in an ordinarily non-midnight showing because I wanted to experience the movie at least once before I saw a version with the audience participation. Later, when the film first aired on TV, the Fox network simultaneously showed the film and hired a theatre to film the audience reaction and alternate between the two on screen (and apparently the DVD I have includes an option to watch the 1993 TV version, though Charles and I didn’t watch it that way last night).
I could have seen it even earlier than that – when my then-girlfriend Cat and I lived together in San Francisco in the late 1970’s a theatre that showed it was within walking distance, but just as we were about to take the plunge someone was murdered coming out of a screening and we decided to pass. Eventually, long after we broke up as a couple (but have remained friends to this day), Cat started going on her own to the midnight showings at the Guild Theatre in San Diego’s Hillcrest (which also, alas, no longer exists)/ Charles sister Kat also became a Rocky Horror devotée, and this morning Charles told me that their mother Edi went to see the film herself to see if it was something she should let her daughter watch. It’s to her credit tiat it passed muster with her. Charles went a few times with her but never became part of the cult, and the first time we watched it together was when I got the DVD and double-billed it with the 1935 horror masterpiece The Bride of Frankenstein (made by more or less openly Gay director James Whale) as the two Gayest films ever based on the Frankenstein mythos. I’ve also been to a live production of The Rocky Horror Show at the San Diego Repertory Theatre – whose management had to warn audiences not to yell things at the actors the way they did during film screenings because that would throw off the actors’ timings – and whoever was in charge of the production made a great decision that energized the production a lot. Instead of having the opening song, “Science Fiction (Double Feature),” sung by the onscreen pair of lips with their owner in shadow (according to the imdb.com page on the film the vocal was done by Richard O’Brien himself, singing in falsetto), they hired a Black woman with a great soul voice to belt it out à la Aretha Franklin.
This time around The Rocky Horror Picture Show came off as a moderately entertaining movie instead of a great one – it’s really one movie that needs to be seen live with the audience joining in – and as mid-1970’s spoofs of Frankenstein go it’s hardly in the same league as Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, made the same year in the same country (Great Britain) for the same studio but a much more loving lampoon of the monster tale. Also in 2016 there was a made-for-TV remake called The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again (which I reviewed on my moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-rocky-horror-picture-show-lets-do.html) which had the innovation of having real-life Transwoman actress Laverne Cox play Dr. Frank N. Furter, which certainly put quite a different “spin” on the role. But overall I found the cast in 2016 inferior to the one from 1975, and though part of me wonders what the late David Bowie might have done with the role in 1975, Tim Curry is so absolutely right for the part I applauded his name in the credits at the end even though Charles and I were the only ones present. In its celebration of polymorphous perversity and sexual experimentation this is very much a pre-AIDS film as well as a movie dating back well before the political ambitions of Queer people shifted from an overall assault on sex and gender norms to a desire to show that we could live the same dull, boring lives as straight people, including getting married and having children. For all its crudity and the obviousness of some of its jokes, The Rocky Horror Picture Show holds up as a real period piece – and I mean that as a compliment. It represents a Queer community very much in its adolescence, still feeling its wild oats, and it’s indicative of how well the movie mirrored the Zeitgeist of the time that slogans from the film, like “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure” and “Don’t dream it, be it,” became familiar slogans in the Queer community in the early 1980’s before the long, dark night of AIDS fell.
