'Rocky Horror Picture Show' turns 50: Why this cult movie has endured

Michael Russo recalls his first time seeing a midnight showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" at Uniondale’s Mini-Cinema as a teenager in late 1978. The story of a pansexual space alien who lures Earthlings into orgies, the film was a little out-there. But the real shocker, Russo says, was the audience.

"There were all different kinds of ethnicities, shapes, sizes, backgrounds," he recalls, describing a mix of cross-dressers, pot-smokers, openly gay people, a woman with dwarfism and one fellow who weighed roughly 500 pounds. Some came dressed like the campy characters in the film, and many became his friends. For a closeted Italian American kid from Rockville Centre, "Rocky Horror" was a much-needed push, Russo says: He came out as gay several months later and wound up seeing the movie more than 300 times. He also made satirical short films that screened before "Rocky Horror" at the Mini-Cinema and would go on to work in film and television production.

"I always felt like an outsider, and the people who went there didn’t fit the norms of society," Russo, 64, says of those early screenings. "It was a meeting place for all these people. It was like one big family."

Talk about a time warp: Fifty years since its release in 1975, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is still spreading its message of out-loud individuality. The definitive midnight movie, it can still be found playing regularly at roughly 100 venues around the U.S, according to one estimate, and is considered the longest-running film in history. Not one but two documentaries on the "Rocky Horror" phenomenon are coming out this year. And Disney, the film’s owner since acquiring 20th Century Fox’s assets in 2019, will re-release the film into theaters on Saturday.

LONG ISLAND'S 'ROCKY HORROR' ROOTS

There are also plans to celebrate on Long Island, said to be the birthplace of the first-ever "Rocky Horror" convention and certainly home to an early fan base at the long-gone Mini-Cinema. Cast member Nell Campbell, who played the tap-dancing groupie Columbia, will come to The Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts for a screening of the unedited film on Oct. 30. Also starting next month, The Zen Room, a local "Rocky Horror" troupe, will hold several shadowcasts — that is, live performances staged in tandem with the film — at various venues including the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington (Oct. 11), The Suffolk theater in Riverhead (two shows on Oct. 25), and The Bellmore Movies & Showplace (Nov. 1).

"I’ve been involved in ‘Rocky’ one way or another for 30 years," says Jordana Dlugacz, 49, a Ronkonkoma-based career coach who first saw the movie as a SUNY Binghamton student and now manages The Zen Room with her fiance. "We’re neck deep in ‘Rocky.’"

"Rocky Horror" began life as a stage musical written entirely by Richard O’Brien, a New Zealand-raised actor living in London during the early 1970s. Unemployed after a couple of roles in rock musicals ("Hair," "Jesus Christ Superstar"), O’Brien decided to write one. His inspiration: an unlikely mix of classic monster movies, 1950s rock, London’s nascent glam scene and his own not-yet-labeled identity. (He would later call himself "about 70% male and 30% female.")

The result was "The Rocky Horror Show" — not yet a picture — in which a pair of young lovers, Brad and Janet stumble upon a gloomy castle one rainy night. There, they find Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a mad scientist from the planet Transsexual, who has created Rocky, the perfect muscle man. As the night progresses, Frank kills his former lover, Eddie, a sax-playing biker; sleeps with both Brad and Janet (who also sleeps with Rocky); and is finally killed by his assistant, Riff Raff. The musical numbers ranged from boogie-woogie ("Time Warp") to burlesque ("Sweet Transvestite") to classic Broadway ballad ("I’m Going Home").

Directed by Jim Sharman, "The Rocky Horror Show" premiered on June 19, 1973, in a roughly 60-seat room above the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square.

INSTANT SENSATION IN ENGLAND

Featuring a spotlight-hogging Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter, O’Brien himself as Riff Raff and Campbell (billed as Little Nell) as Columbia, "Rocky Horror" became an instant sensation and a critical darling, eventually winning the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical. A trashy, transgressive spectacle, the show also resonated with an emerging glam-punk zeitgeist that was being defined by Alice Cooper’s theatrical shock-rock, David Bowie’s androgynous Ziggy Stardust persona and the cross-dressing firebrands The New York Dolls.

"Rocky Horror" helped create that zeitgeist, according to Andreas Zerr, the German director of "Sane Inside Insanity: The Phenomenon of Rocky Horror," a documentary planned for a streaming release in October. "The punk movement is more or less loosely based on the costume design of Sue Blane," Zerr says of the show’s designer. The early punks of 1976 and 1977, he adds, wore essentially what "the people on stage of ‘Rocky Horror’ were wearing — ripped fishnets, pins all over and that stuff."

The London cast decamped to the Roxy nightclub on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, becoming a hot ticket yet again. Inexplicably, a Broadway production fizzled. Still, hopes remained high for the film adaptation, which reunited nearly the entire original London cast under Sharman’s direction. Relatively unknown actors Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon played Brad and Janet, while the rising rocker Meat Loaf, part of the L.A. cast, reprised his role as the biker Eddie.

"I wanted to take the audience into a different world where ambiguity was the norm, not the exception," Sharman says in Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror," a documentary directed by O’Brien’s son Linus that hits theaters on Friday.  Citing the movie’s Gothic undertones and Weimar-cabaret atmosphere, Sharman also describes his film as "a 1917 version of ‘The Wizard of Oz.’"

'CAMPY TRASH'

The film opened on Sept. 26, 1975, to little fanfare. American audiences seemed utterly nonplussed; Time magazine dismissed it as "campy trash." The film performed so poorly that 20th Century Fox quickly withdrew the prints and canceled the New York City opening that had been scheduled for Halloween night, according to Variety.

"Naturally, going from such an enormously successful opening of the show, it didn't occur to me that it would be totally quiet," Campbell, 72, says today of the movie’s reception. "Like, absolutely nothing."

It was Tim Deegan, a young executive at 20th Century-Fox, who came up with the idea to hold midnight showings, which were already drawing repeat audiences for bizarre films like the surrealist Western "El Topo" and John Waters’ gleefully repellent "Pink Flamingos."

"I had personal experience going to midnight movies with my friends and instinctively felt that ‘Rocky Horror’ could find a home in the late night darkness," Deegan wrote in his book "Saving Rocky Horror — From Orphan to Icon."

MIDNIGHT MANIA BEGINS

Deegan's idea struck a chord. According to the fan website RockyHorrorWiki, the film opened at Manhattan’s Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village at midnight on Saturday, April 3, 1976 (though other sources say April 1, a Thursday) and played there for nearly two years before moving to the nearby 8th Street Playhouse, where it would run for another 14 years. Along the way, the movie’s "audience participation" format began to take shape.

Repeat viewers began speaking with and to the characters on screen. Fans brought in props, such as rice to throw during Brad and Janet’s wedding and squirt guns to mimic the rain. Eventually, patrons began dressing in costume and acting out the film as it ran. Theaters around the country were also getting in on the act. By 1980, the "Rocky Horror" cult was so well known that it showed up in the movie "Fame."

"It felt like we were at our own universe," says Roy Rossi, 67, who first saw "Rocky Horror" just out of college and now runs RKO Con, a Rhode Island-based yearly convention dedicated to the film. "It was midnight," he says of those early screenings, "and it was totally separate from the rest of the world."

LI HOSTS FIRST 'ROCKY' CONVENTION

The first-ever "Rocky Horror" convention was held Feb. 20, 1978, at the Calderone Concert Hall in Hempstead, according to the RockyHorrorWiki. At the time, Campbell says, she and the other London-based stars had only heard stories about their newfound fan base and eagerly flew to Long Island to see for themselves.

"We were like, ‘What the hell is this?’" Campbell recalls. "Suddenly there were dozens of Frank-N-Furters, Columbias, Magentas, Riff Raffs, Brads, Janets, the whole gamut. It was just all so jaw dropping."

In "Strange Journey," O’Brien recalls visiting Long Island, attending his first-ever audience participation screening with a crowd of roughly 1,000 and being entranced by a Frank-N-Furter performer named Dori Hartley. "She looked exactly like him, the makeup was perfect," O’Brien says. "This is a spontaneous moment where live theater, a live audience and cinema have come together like that, in a way I’ve never seen before. It was quite remarkable."

FROM UNDERGROUND HIT TO HOUSEHOLD NAME

Over the years, O’Brien’s creation went from underground hit to household name. Sarandon reenacted a portion of it on "Sesame Street" in 1989 (alongside The Count, of course), Fox’s "Glee" devoted an entire episode to it in 2010 and transgender actress Laverne Cox played Frank-N-Furter in a 2016 television remake. (Curry, who uses a wheelchair since his 2012 stroke, played the film’s narrator.) Last month, Sabrina Carpenter released her video for "Tears," an homage to the movie that features Colman Domingo as a Curryesque figure in drag.

"Fifty years later, I'm talking to three generations of fans who began by going to one of those screenings," Campbell says. "What is so great about this little movie is that it has helped so many people accept themselves. I’m so very, very lucky to be a part of that."