Meatloaf rolled his wheelchair to the very edge of the stage. "We've got to get out of this trap before this decadence saps our wills!" he moaned.
Astonished, I watched in helpless silence as the beefy singer stopped just short of plunging over the multicolored footlights and into my lap. His voice suddenly rising to an unearthly howl, Meatloaf pulled back a fringed plaid robe to reveal his huge, flabby legs done up in black fishnet stockings, pert red ankle socks and high-heeled patent pumps. I gasped in amazement as the corpulent Meat lasciviously caressed one of his own hefty gams, raising it high into the air directly above my head as fellow cast members writhed in simulated orgiastic abandon on the floor nearby.
It was the summer of 1974. A new rock operetta from London called The Rocky Horror Show had just opened in Los Angeles at the famed Roxy Theatre. Mr. Loaf, a former gospel shouter who'd achieve icon stature in the 1975 film version of the play (and a second measure of fame for his anthemic rock album Bat Out of Hell), was an unknown.
Equally unknown was The Rocky Horror Show's star, a British stage actor named Tim Curry, who'd appeared in the London cast of Hair. I knew just that much about the play when, at the urging of an in-the-know L.A. friend, I'd decided to fly over and check it out. When it was over, I was barely able to absorb--even believe--what I had witnessed.
In the years since--thanks mostly to the megapopular 1975 movie version, which has become a cult classic and a virtual religion among its millions of fans worldwide--many of Rocky Horror's then-unconventional conventions have become commonplace. But back in 1974, we were all "virgins"--that's fan talk for the uninitiated--and we couldn't believe our eyes.
Valley audiences will get a chance to experience the impact of the stage version tomorrow night when Tempe's Mill Avenue Theatre celebrates its first year of operation with a professional presentation of the original Rocky Horror Show for a seven-week run. And if you've only ever seen the movie, you're in for a rare treat. (See related story on page 32.)
Thirty-year-old British actor Richard O'Brien conceived the play in 1973. He was inspired, he's said, by old horror movies like King Kong, Frankenstein, and Dracula; Fifties sci-fi flicks like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet; grade-Z cheapies like Plan 9 From Outer Space; and early rock music. The show is a hodgepodged send-up of all those sources--no doubt O'Brien also perused a few Frederick's of Hollywood catalogues as well.
Interviewed in a 1979 Rocky fan magazine--the show was so popular, such things were born--performer-turned-playwright O'Brien demurely characterized The Rocky Horror Show as "just some rock 'n' roll music, a little foot tapping, a few jokes, a bit of sex." Working from several songs he'd already written, O'Brien admitted that assembling it was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. "I didn't start at the beginning and work from there. I started at both ends and then filled in the middle."
The play's working title had been They Came From Denton High, and O'Brien experimented with The Rock Horroar Show before settling on The Rocky Horror Show when the play first opened in the London Royal Court's sixty-seat Theatre Upstairs in 1973. The kinky play, an instant smash hit during its three-week run in that tiny room, was extended another two weeks there while producers searched for a bigger venue. The show then moved to the 500-seat King's Road Theatre, where it continued for years.
Though the "in" crowds went wild, Rocky Horror didn't please the more conservative critics. But that's hardly surprising: Besides rampant transvestism, the play includes multisexual shenanigans--the least of which is implicit incest. It's true that only a single, somewhat buffered obscenity is uttered, blurring past in the rapid-fire song "Planet Schmanet Janet": "A mental mind-fuck can be nice . . . ." But there's plenty of murder and suggestions of dismemberment--even a hint of cannibalism ("Superheroes come to feast/To taste the flesh not yet deceased . . . ").
And, there are many blatant references to drugs. "Flow, morphia, slow, let the sun and light come streaming into my life," sings one creepy character in the song "Over at the Frankenstein Place."
A frantic, high-kicking chorus
chants, "I'm a bee with a deadly
sting/Get a hit and your mind goes `ping'/Your heart'll
thump and your blood will sing . . . ."
The plot is intentionally
ludicrous, its references to
trashy movies clearly more important
than any thematic development. Even
to a "virgin," parts of the offbeat,
convoluted story may sound familiar:
One dark and stormy night, Brad and Janet, a naive young couple, go out for a drive. Stranded in the rain by a flat tire, the two seek help at a nearby castle and become unwilling participants in pansexual debauches, bizarre life-and-death experiments and a superkinky "floor show" conducted by a demented transvestite scientist from another planet.
The story revolves around the laboratory experiment of that swaggering, leering madman, Dr. Frank N. Furter. Assisted by his manic manservant Riff Raff, his spacy maid Magenta, and a pixie-faced, tap-dancing groupie named Columbia, Frank N. Furter--like Frankenstein before him--has created a man. Dr. Furter's, however, has blond hair and a tan, and is named Rocky. (The joke of Rocky's being a hunk rather than a monster was especially beloved by gay audiences, who quickly took the show to their hearts.)
The stage play is presented without intermission as a breakneck barrage of outrageous sight gags and frenetic dance numbers set to up-tempo, Fifties-style rock 'n' roll music. And it's gussied up in skimpy, bodacious costumes straight out of Better Hose & Garters magazine.
The Roxy had been totally transformed for its 1974 Rocky Horror stint. The lobby of that Sunset Strip landmark had been draped in black crepe and festooned with fake cobwebs. Sinister, black-framed portraits of Curry, Meatloaf, narrator Graham Jarvis (who'd later gain modest fame in TV's Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) and other cast members lined a dark, narrow corridor leading into the theatre.
Within, the entire room had become the set, with a bulb-lined runway slicing across multilevel audience platforms and jagged bolts of fluorescent lightning zigzagging across the blackened ceiling and up into the dizzying heights of a phony skylight. Giant chunks of scenery--the whole neon-filled laboratory set and even the band--were precariously perched on high shelves that jutted from walls shrouded with demolition tarps. Bloodied mannequin limbs and truncated dummies dangled crazily from overhead ropes.
Cabaret tables replaced the theatre seats, and artfully disheveled cocktail waitresses served drinks before--and during--the performance. As curtain time approached, mysteriously cloaked and masked figures directing flashlights on their faces circled ominously through the crowd, randomly selecting unsuspecting patrons to terrorize.
An usherette bearing a concession tray marked "HI, I'M TRIXIE" strolled through the room, tossing wrapped candy to the crowd. The lights dimmed, and Trixie took the stage and wistfully began singing the play's signature song, "Science Fiction Double Feature": "Michael Rennie was ill The Day the Earth Stood Still, but he told us where we stand/Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear/Claude Rains was the Invisible Man . . . "
Dr. Frank N. Furter, who took the stage like a hallucination, was shocking in 1974. "I'm just a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania!" bellowed the magnificent Tim Curry. Decked out in ripped mesh hose, spangled platform shoes, a tightly laced corset and a ratty fur piece, he tossed off his cape and strode up and down the runway, shaking clouds of colored glitter from his luxuriant, jet-black mane. Nothing like that had ever been seen on-stage before--at least not in the legitimate theatre.
According to play creator O'Brien, Curry's character Frank was intended as a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Cruella DeVille from 101 Dalmations; critics have also compared him to Basil Rathbone, Joan Crawford, Mick Jagger, Auntie Mame, Bela Lugosi, Alice Cooper, and Vincent Price. Wherever he came from, he betokened a whole new sensibility.
Outrageous in his own way was Rocky. The longhaired Kim Milford, his tightly muscled surfer's frame slicked and sparkling with oil and bronze glitter, played Frank N. Furter's creation as a sort of naive, blond Tarzan. During his solo number, "The Sword of Damocles," the amazingly athletic Milford scrambled up a ladder and swung like a monkey across a series of handgrips set into the ceiling some twenty feet above the stage.
The total effect was like nothing I'd ever seen. Two weeks later, I jetted back to L.A. to see it again. Almost more amazing than the play itself was a Roxy program note teasing a movie version then in pre-production. "No!" declared a companion after the performance. "There's just no way it could ever be made into a movie!"
Needless to say, we were filled with antici . . . "SAY IT! SAY IT!" shrieked feverish hordes of costumed celebrants at the flickering image that loomed large over them. " . . . pation!" smirked the forty-foot wide, garishly made-up mug of Tim Curry from the movie screen. The crowd squealed with glee.
We've flashed forward. It's Halloween night 1978, at the Sombrero Playhouse, Phoenix's late, great midtown art-film venue. The stage play that I thought could never be made into a movie had somehow been transformed--and now its rabid fans couldn't believe it had ever been a play!
Looking around at the motley audience--hundreds of high school and college students, gays, drag queens, motorcycle types, comic-book collectors, sci-fi fans, stoners, art-film aficionados, nerds and middle-aged couples, many garbed in eclectic get-ups culled from thrift-store lingerie and foundation-garment bins, most carrying shopping bags filled with tossable props--it was hard for me to believe that the Rocky Horror Picture Show, as the film version had been titled, had bombed disastrously when it was first released.
As a fan of the play, I had been eager to catch the movie when it opened in Phoenix one night three years earlier, in the summer of 1975. To my utter amazement, four friends and I--three of whom had seen the Roxy stage version--were nearly alone in the deserted Chris-Town cinema. I counted six other patrons scattered around the room as the lights dimmed. A huge pair of disembodied, ruby-red lips floating in a black void suddenly appeared on the screen. They began to sing "Science Fiction Double Feature" in a reedy falsetto. My friends and I chuckled, then howled. We looked around. The others glared silently, a few shaking their heads in confusion. Two weeks later, the film closed.
"The strange thing is that Rocky is a parody of the cinema for the stage, so actually putting it on film was a bit disorienting," O'Brien recalled in a fanzine interview. "Were we reverting to the original, the thing that was being parodied? Or was it a comment upon a comment upon a comment?" Whatever it was, it took some time for the movie to sink in.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show didn't start to make money anywhere until it was revived as a midnight movie at the Waverly Theatre in New York's Greenwich Village, April 1, 1976. Because of an initial torrent of critical disapproval and disappointing box-office turnout, distributors couldn't get regular bookings. Desperate, they tested the midnight-movie circuit. The rest is history.
Made in England for a paltry $1.5 million, The Rocky Horror Picture Show went on to become the most popular and highest-grossing cult film of all time. By peak year 1979 it was playing nonstop at more than 200 cinemas across the nation (including the Sombrero and Tempe's Valley Art), consistently netting distributor 20th Century Fox a cool $250,000 per weekend. Many fans had seen the flick hundreds of times by then. If the film's cult popularity continues to prove durable, Picture Show could become the biggest moneymaker in history. And it still has yet to come out (at least officially!) on videotape.
That 1978 Halloween at the Sombrero, I was sporting a line of ugly sutures down the center of my face, thanks to a nasty tumble from a motorbike into a rock pile a few days before. But with the skillful addition of a few extra fake stitches, some cat-eye sunglasses and a ripped up tee shirt, I knew I'd fit right in at the midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. (I'd be seeing it for the sixteenth time.)
A pal had dressed up as Frank N. Furter. Around us strolled assorted teen-age Magentas, Columbias, Riff Raffs, and Rockys. The Rocky Horror Picture Show had redefined the whole idea of going to the movies. For the first time in history, the cinema had been transformed from a spectator medium to interactive art in its purest form. The inspiration had been the play itself. During a reprise of the energetic "Time Warp" dance number, a flurry of leaflets bearing printed dance-step instructions was released from somewhere high above. Perhaps missing the live action that's impossible to simulate on film, creative movie fans took it upon themselves to add it. During the showing, audience members (like millions of fellow Rocky revelers nationwide) sang along, danced in the aisles, talked back to the screen, and launched appropriate props at key points in the dialogue. "Great Scott!" shouted a character at Dr. Scott's on-screen entrance. Instantly, countless rolls of Scott toilet tissue soared overhead, filling the air and crisscrossing delighted spectators with fluffy streamers of white.
When bride "Betty Munroe" tossed her bouquet on the screen, I proudly stood and hurled mine--the only one that night--toward the front rows. Fans huddled under newspapers during the rain scene, furtively firing squirt guns into the air to simulate the downpour. And when Brad and Janet sang, "There's a light . . . ," hundreds of Bic lighters, flashlights and candles twinkled in the auditorium.
Too much was not enough. That night at the Sombrero, a six-foot flame leaped abruptly from a front-row fanatic's gas torch. A pair of burly bouncers hustled the overzealous patron out a side door.
"At least we never have to buy toilet paper for the theatre," one exhibitor quipped in an interview appearing in The Rocky Horror Picture Show Book (1979, by Bill Henkin). Another cinema operator, quoted in the Rocky Horror Picture Show Official Magazine (1979), admitted that his cleaning crew typically retrieved forty or fifty rolls of toilet paper each week--and they used most of it. "This is good stuff--real Scott tissue, not generic. These people spend money."
And spend they did. On tee shirts, albums, buttons, bumper stickers, posters, picture discs, an array of fan magazines--even a frame-by-frame, word-for-word adaptation of the movie, entitled The Official Rocky Horror Picture Show Movie Novel (1980, edited by film historian Richard J. Anobile).
Producers scrambled to duplicate their success, and exhibitors searched greedily for a second cult film like Rocky. But it never happened.
A quasi-sequel called Shock Treatment (1981) was a dismally unsuccessful attempt by O'Brien and director Jim Sharman to make the magic happen again. But the new opus was minus Tim Curry and his character Frank, and featured Cliff DeYoung and Jessica Harper assuming the roles of Brad and Janet--who'd been played in the earlier film by rising stars Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon. Hard-core fans shrugged it off. The Rocky Horror Picture Show still stands alone.
THE ROCKY HORROR STORY CONTINUES--SEE "HORROR2.OUT"
MDBOTHE ROCKY HORROR STORY, PART 2
And the stage play? The show that had been inspired by old movies ended up riding on the coattails of its own cinematic offspring, and having to deal with patrons who related to it the same way.
In 1975, hoping to capitalize on the forthcoming Picture Show, O'Brien, Curry, Meatloaf and other members of the Roxy cast took the original show to New York's Belasco Theatre on Broadway. "Bit of a drag," sniffed Time critic T.E. Kalem, who characterized the stage show as "a mindless spoof" of old horror movies.
"It is not easy to see why this campy trash was a long-running play in London and a smash success in Los Angeles, except that transvestism has always fascinated the British and the L.A. scene is almost as kinky." Other critics shared Kalem's disdain, and the show, just as the movie would at first, flopped. It closed on Broadway after 45 performances.
In time, however, spurred by the movie's eventual runaway success, the original stage musical of The Rocky Horror Show was revived in March 1981 at the spacious Aquarius Theatre in Los Angeles. Because it was the first major presentation of the play to be done after the film's success, I had to see how that would affect the performance and the audiences.
Frank Gregory starred as an unabashedly Curryesque Frank N. Furter. In a brazen bow to the film, shills had been planted in the Aquarius audience to shout out a few selected moviegoer's quips (and other carefully rehearsed "heckles") in spots deemed appropriate by the producers. "Eat your heart out, Tim Curry!" screamed one such plant at the performance I attended during one of Frank Gregory's more florid speeches. Arching an exquisitely penciled eyebrow at the audience, Gregory coolly cracked back "Tim who?" in a fairly convincing "ad lib" that brought down the house.
The Aquarius production also brought back the original Rocky, Kim Milford, who considerably toned down his gymnastic antics and sported a much shorter haircut (perhaps to more closely resemble Peter Hinwood, who'd played Rocky with close-cropped locks in the film).
By this time the movie--then at the height of its popularity--had become such a universal audience-participation phenomenon that the Aquarius producers were forced to cope with costumed, sometimes crazed playgoers who tried to behave as though they were still at the midnight cinema. Battalions of security guards routinely frisked arriving ticketholders for potential projectiles, confiscating huge piles of toast, toilet paper, playing cards, squirt guns, hot dogs and bridal bouquets nightly--even occasional butane flame throwers and twenty-pound sacks of rice.
Since the unholy spawning of Rocky Horror in that tiny London theatre back in 1973, its influence has been felt everywhere.
It's true that Jesus Christ, Superstar and Tommy had proven that amplified rock music can work on an operatic scale. Scholarly wags have pointed to movies such as Roman Polanski's offbeat horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967, with Sharon Tate), Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Mick Jagger's Performance (1970) as possible Rocky antecedents.
Before Rocky, there had been shows that traded on transvestism, goofy satire and cheerful exaggeration. A company in San Francisco had produced that city's famous, daffy musical revue Beach Blanket Babylon, with its crazily overblown costumes and sky-high headdresses. There had been the late disco-drag diva Sylvester, female impersonators Charles Pierce and Jim Bailey, and pioneer bondage beauty Betty Page, whose fame grew from naughty pictures circulated underground. In the movies, there had been the rather shocking and campy underground features by the notorious, cross-dressing Cockettes: Tricia's Wedding and Elevator Girls in Bondage. There had been "male actress" Divine in John Waters' Pink Flamingos. But it took Rocky to bring all those things out of the underground and into the mainstream of American society. Only after Rocky was it possible to tolerate the dainty androgyny of Boy George and Michael Jackson, to accept the smirky Levi-and-leather pseudomachismo of the Village People. Rocky made possible the oops-you-caught-me-in-my-scanties fashion coyness of Madonna and Cher and the cheap but effective laugh-getting ploy of dressing up television's Mr. Belvedere in a dress and wig. Of course, men have been donning women's clothing in the name of entertainment since ancient times, and Fifties boob-tube star Milton Berle had given a whole new twist to the abbreviation "TV." But it took Rocky to add kinky new angles to the fine art of gender-bending.
Brian DePalma's spoof Phantom of the Paradise, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, Andy Warhol's Dracula, and Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, all released in 1974, utilized many of the same cult-pleasing themes and techniques as Rocky Horror. Clearly, a cinema trend had been established, and a stage play called The Rocky Horror Show was its bellwether.
Boldy cornball musical stage parodies such as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Angry Housewives, Suds, Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know, and most of all Little Shop of Horrors might never have been possible had not The Rocky Horror Show blazed the trail. Nor may we ever have seen provocative Broadway blockbusters like La Cage aux Folles and Torch Song Trilogy.
In a way, The Rocky Horror Show pointed toward much of what came to characterize art of the Eighties. It was hip. It was self-parodying. It was in love with the worst aspects of popular culture. And it stole every twist of its plot--thievery that today is known as "appropriation."
But it did more than point to the future. The winter 1990 edition of the mopester mag Propaganda poses the provocative query, "Is The Rocky Horror Picture Show a religion?"
"It could very well be," the magazine says of Rocky. "It has a deity (Frank N. Furter), a sabbath (every Friday and Saturday at midnight), a devout following, and a ritualistic system of worship." It also has its own church--the late-night movie house.
Long before TV twerp Pee-wee Herman dared to suggest publicly that it's okay to be different, Rocky had set the stage. As Richard O'Brien has wistfully put it, "Thanks to Rocky Horror, a guy can put on fishnets and strut his stuff and feel okay." Quoted in a 1985 Time interview upon the occasion of the movie's tenth anniversary, O'Brien sagely quipped, "It's very hard sometimes to separate fantasy from reality. Let's keep it that way!"
The Rocky Horror Show opens Thursday, February 1, at the Mill Avenue Theatre, 520 South Mill. See PIC HITS for details.
When it was over, I was barely able to absorb--even believe--what I had witnessed.
Besides rampant transvestism, the play includes multisexual shenanigans--the least of which is implicit incest.
"I'm just a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania!" bellowed the magnificent Tim Curry.
"At least we never have to buy toilet paper for the theatre," one exhibitor quipped.
Only after Rocky was it possible to tolerate the dainty androgyny of Boy George and Michael Jackson.
As its author has wistfully put it, "Thanks to Rocky Horror, a guy can put on fishnets and strut his stuff and feel okay."
