I’d just like to take this moment to say that I saw “The Rocky Horror Show” at the Roxy on Sunset in 1973, I believe.
Note the missing word.
Yes, you may touch my garment.
Just a little before my time (I was born in 1974). As soon as I figure out what the hell happened to Dynamite Video, I’m going to rent it just for the curiosity value. I’m well past the stage of getting squeamish over insane costumes or implied homosexualtiy, so it’s cool.
What I never understood was how this movie got the “audience participation” tag, and also why it never caught on. You’d think that it’d have blossomed into an entire genre long before now.
At Broadway on Broadway 1999 (I think) Terrace Mann did “Time Warp.” They had passed out Cat-in-the-Suessical Hats earlier, and a bunch of us wearing the hats did the time warp.
Surrealist moment of my life.
Mmmmm, Tim Curry in a corset! The sight of him did some very strange things to my tender, young, 16 yr. old mind! Actually, it still does some interesting things to my jaded, 35 yr. old mind—now where did I put that DVD?!
I first became acquainted with the RHPS back in the 1970s, when it was shown every Friday night at a local cinema. Never was one of the characters, but I could dance the Time Warp, I knew all the responses, when to throw the confetti, cards, and toast; and when to light my lighter and squirt my squirtgun, and so on. Now, when it watch RHPS at home, it’s hard not to do that stuff.
A friend of mine–a big (and I mean big) guy–made a special arrangement with the theatre management once. Thus it was that when the scene in the the lab came on and Meatloaf made his appearance, so did my friend–in costume, on a motorcycle, with a sax around his neck, roaring up the aisle to the stage. Unreal.
I wanna go…to the late-night double-feature picture show…in the back row…
Well I’ve been to Frank’s castle (which is now a posh restaurant near Windsor (UK) ) unfortunately I couldn’t go there dressed as Frank’n’Furter. The insides are recognisable though obviously much changed from the film.
“Come up to the lab, and see whats on the slab.”
I was a cast member for almost a year. That’s where I met my husband! Our theater was “closed for renovations.” Then we saw the “FOR SALE” sign out front a month later. 
Not sure I understand the question here. How did RHPS end up as an audience participation film? It happened organically. At theatres showing the film, the same groups of people would show up for every screening. Individuals within those groups started making costumes and the like. According to legend, a teacher named Louis Farese tossed out the first line, just before “Over At The Frankenstein Place,” when he yelled at Janet to “buy and umbrella, you cheap bitch!” And it took off from there. As to why it hasn’t happened with other movies, well, it has to a much smaller extent and with much less elaborateness. People do call things out to screens at other movies (FWIW I’ve been told this is particularly concentrated at theatres with large black audiences, along the lines of telling the heroine of a horror flick “girl, do not open that door!”) and there are sing-along versions of The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz. And of course MST3K is built on the premise of audience participation/calling responses to the screen. The key is that it can’t be forced. It either happens or it doesn’t and it probably will never happen again to the level that RHPS has. For one thing, any such movie would inevtably be compared to the RHPS phenomenon and would probably come up short and for another, there is just something ineffably special about RHPS. Story, music, performers, audience and timing all came together in this weird alchemical mix and those ingredients would be difficult if not impossible to replicate.
My friends and I got into Rocky a few years ago, when we were about 15, and we’ve been to see the live show twice. The second time the tickets for the theatre nearest us sold out before we got ours. Not to be thwarted, we ended up travelling halfway across the country by train, in our costumes, and it was great. I dress as Magenta and tickle unsuspecting Virgins with my feather duster.
Buy an umbrella. Sorry Louis!
Many good memeories.
“What ever happened to fay Wray?”
SHE GOT FUCKED BY A GIANT APE!
I saw it the first time (on my last night in NYC) in Greenwich Village at the 8th st. Playhouse the night it came back for the infamous midnight runs, summer 1978.
Got hooked.
Played everybody and made almost every costume, and prop.
Performed and started casts in Kent, OH. Las Vegas, San Deigo, Montclair, Ca.
Guest starred as Riff-Raff at the Roxy in Los Angeles. Met Lou Adler.
Mentioned in this book written by Sal Piro.
This website cannot find me.
Performed twice a week for over six years.
Richard O’Brien sent me a video greeting when I co-chaired a convention.
I am the “tank-burner”.
I quit in 1987.
Every day and in every way I am getting better and better…
Brad (asshole)
Janet (sssslut)
…funny stuff!
When I was a senior in high school I saw Rocky Horror Picture Show with a girl from class about a dozen times, just to get laid.
It wasn’t worth it.
She must have been an awful lay. Did she have fangs in her kooch?
Maybe she just looked like a girl.
rmbnxs I hope your plans were adaptable.
Any movie that make it possible for me to see female members of the audience in their underware is deeply appreciated.
I went in HS every weekend for about a year. I wasn’t going to kill myself but going to the show and the fun and acceptance I got there was very important to me and helped me get through the week
(the May theatre in OKC)
Later when I owned and operated the Hollywood theatre in Norman I ran Rocky and was the MC every week. I would also fill in for Rocky or Brad occasionally. One night I had to fill in for Rocky when we also had a substitute Janet. This young woman was in HS. I was very nervous during Touch me but she took my hands and mashed them against her breasts. Hell I may have been the first person to feel her up.
Good times, good times.
Oooooooooooooooh baby.
The Cherry Hill Mall’s Cinema. Midnight shows. AND, and, the much beloved T.L.A. in Philadelphia.
It was THE perfect release for 17 year olds. It was fun, communal, bawdy, showed just a hint of nipple ( VERY important to a 17 year old…:p), involved toast, rice and water and was all-around a completely fun safe hilarious time.
Meatloaf rocks. The set is brilliant. The music is tasty and rollicking and yes, I used to Time Warp a LOT with my friends before and after that movie. Ahhhh, to be young again.
Cartooniverse
I was a cast member for a while when I was in college. I mostly played Meatloaf’s part, but I did it on a unicycle!
At times I played Brad too. Strangely, it was a big confidence builder to stand in front of 500 people in my underwear…
OK, as long as all these old “cast members” are coming out of the woodwork to tell their tales, here’s my story… for the benefit of all you youngsters posting in this thread. Pardon me while I reminisce about the “good old days…” (Warning: long old-geezer remembrances follow)
I was back home in Miami during a college winter break in the late 70’s, and was catching up with a high school buddy on the phone around 11 pm one Friday or Saturday night. He asked me if I had ever heard of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I never had. He ran over and drove me down to The Grove Theatre in Coconut Grove. Wow! What an experience. I felt as if I was the only one in that oversold theater who hadn’t seen the film before. The singing along, the yelled out lines, the props… it was pretty amazing.
Back in school several weeks later at The University of Florida, the movie began playing at a local theater weekend midnights. Of course I dragged my friends to see it, bringing some of the requisite props along. Soon we were going to every show. Never being one to accept moderation in anything, I would soon go “overboard” with audience participation, as well. In addition to the newspapers, water guns, rice and lighter that many others would bring, I started to add to my props bag. My friends and I (or just me) were the first ones to start throwing toast, and playing cards. I brought a battery-operated telephone bell (for a “bell ring” lyric in one of Frankie’s songs) and even a mannequin arm (which I would proudly hold up for Columbia’s “some people would give their right arm” speech). I also starting bringing pink latex gloves, and (still just from my seat) would put them on, and perfectly mimic Frankenfurter’s hand gestures during the creation scene.
Then one week a friend of mine gave me a blue bathrobe he had that he said looked like the one Brad wore. Some people would come to the screenings in various weird-looking attire (not really accurate costumes per se, but sort of close enough), so I started coming as Brad (just in the blue bathrobe, white socks, and my normal glasses). Within a couple of weeks my girlfriend got a hold of two lab coats, and we started coming as Brad and Janet. The theater played the soundtrack before the movie, and we started acting out the Dammit Janet scene in the front of the theater before the film started while the soundtrack played, just in the lab coats, but we had the moves down! Meanwhile, another friend of mine who was with us every week had been the first of us to come in costume as a Transylvanian. After I got the blue bathrobe thing, I guess he wanted to up the ante, or just get to be his own major character, and he put together a perfect Riff Raff outfit, including a bald-cap with glued on blonde hair. This was Hollywood-worthy makeup and costuming! He was an exact duplicate. During the movie, he starting going down to the side of the screen during the “There’s a Light” number, and shining a flashlight up on his face as he sang along with Riff-Raff during his solo in that song. Always got an applause.
Then someone approached us who told us about a “cast” that he was a part of in Orlando, and wouldn’t it be great to start our own cast? We had never heard of such a thing, but it wasn’t that much a stretch from what we were already doing, and it sure sounded like fun. As interesting as it would be to go over the details of getting our cast together, and all the costumes, and the bunch of other stuff that would make a great book someday, suffice it to say that we did start a cast, and we were pretty darn good. We “performed” most of the film, and while most of the musical numbers would be a darn close perfect imitation of what was happening on the screen, we also “spruced up” other bits with various comedy routines. For example, as Riff-Raff was lunging at Rocky with the candelabra on the screen, down the aisles our Riff would chase our rocky with a loaded fire extinguisher, or a whip, or something. Brad would sometimes strip down to his underwear… and a Superman T-Shirt (does the audience still yell out “Superman” during that scene?). Once Rocky was in full Hulk makeup the whole show. Once we did it on rollerskates. Etc. etc.
We started getting a reputation, and requests to perform in other cities. We “performed” (without any pay, of course, except usually free admission) in Tampa, Jacksonville, Miami (who never had their own cast), Atlanta for their year anniversary, and probably a couple of others. We called ourselves “The Original Gainesville Cast.” We even drove up to New York one time, as a spur of the moment road trip, to see the legendary New York 8th Street Playhouse production, where we met Sal Piro. We did not perform there, of course, but their own Brad was very nice and let me roll Dr. Scott around the aisles of the theater during the “Planet Shmanet” number, so I guess I could say that I performed there.
I, too, got to meet Richard O’Brian. We got a phone call one night from our cast Dr. Frank’N’Furter, who was in Orlando for some reason. She (yes, our cast Dr. F. was played by a girl, who was our Janet’s roommate) had been to a screening of RHPS in Orlando, and stayed to talk to a bald gentleman who was in the audience with his son. She had recognized him as Richard O’Brien, who was taking his kid to Disneyworld. She found out that he was heading down to Miami the next day, and he gave her his hotel info. We all jumped in the car (or most of us, enough to make a “cast” good enough to perform) and raced down to Miami the following day. During the 6-hour drive we put on costumes and makeup. We hooked up with Richard O’Brien at a Holiday Inn (he was wearing tight fitting snakeskin pants) and we drove him with us to The Coconut Grove Theater. While we did our cast thing, Richard O’Brien ended up talking to the owner of the theater, one of The Flying Fendelman Brothers, as they referred to themselves, and made a deal to come to the Miami Second Year RHPS anniversary show. We went out with Richard O’Brien afterwards, but unfortunately it was during that second gas crisis the country had in the late 70’s, and as we could not get gas anywhere we couldn’t really go anyplace. The whole time we were driving around, though, Richard O’Brien kept doing these shtick comedy routines, usually in funny voices.
At the Grove Anniversary show several months later, which was held in a rollerskating rink and had Richard O’Brien, Little Nell and Patricia Quinn there, during the costume contest which none of our cast entered, Richard O’Brien came out into the “audience” to find me and bring me up to win the Best Brad costume.
After that Miami 2nd Anniversary show, our Riff-Raff left to go to seek his fortunes in Hollywood, and our cast never performed again. He went on to join two different casts (at different times) in Southern California (I still think he had the best Riff Raff costume of anybody in any city ever) and even started a Shock Treatment cast. But we move on, grow up, go on with our lives. Our Rocky went on to be a computer programmer at NASA, and aside from him telling me once he did the Time Warp on the shuttle launching pad, I don’t think the rest of us continued with the RHPS thing at all. Leave it for the younger generation!
Years later, I had moved out to LA myself, and my wife and I went to the “official” 20th Century Fox 25 year RHPS Anniversary Party held at the Roxy Theater in 2000. She, by the way, was also a huge RHPS fan, but hated the audience participation part, as she felt it “ruined” the movie. She had seen it in high school when it was first released as a feature film in 1975, and saw it a good 20 or 30 times in regular theaters. There was no audience participation then (which is perhaps why it was not successful until it became a midnight cult film a few years later). Anyways, although we had nothing to do with this party except buying tickets to attend, I walked backstage during the screening of the film (I guess being in costume as Brad made it look as if I belonged there, even though with my lack of teen or early 20s hair I could no longer win any Brad look-alike contests) and went up to Richard O’Brien who was there as part of the 20th Century Fox festivities. I asked him if he remembered me from our Miami adventures, and he said he did. He does seem like a nice guy.
A couple of years ago my wife and I went to a midnight screening of RHPS at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles, just for old times sake. It was still fun, and the cast was pretty good, but it just wasn’t the same thing (and they weren’t as good as we were). I guess we all move on. But damn if those weren’t good times!
Watching the film on DVD is just not the same thing. Go see a midnight show, preferably one that has a local “cast.”