The Rocky Horror Picture Show

“I hate Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's boil-in-the-bag perversion for sexually repressed accountants and first-year drama students with too many posters of Betty Blue, The Blues Brothers, Big Blue and Blue Velvet on their blue bloody walls.”

-Simon Pegg, Spaced-

Well... yes. But it’s still kind of fun isn’t it?

I’ve been to The Rocky Horrror Picture Show from between a dozen to fifteen times since my first encounter at seventeen...

(On the couch with the cancer stick and bad Crow makeup)

At the great Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland (The best revival Theater to not have anyone paying attention to it). And I’d say scarcely half of them have been in actual theaters.

I’ve seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Rec Rooms, High School Multipurpose rooms, Outdoors, College Lecture Halls, Gymnasiums, Theaters (The Non movie kind with the film projected on a screen propped awkwardly on the stage).

Wherever there two or more gather in Franken Furter’s name there is Rocky. Save AA meetings, I don’t know of another social institution with the same sort of versatility of habitat. The same staggering indifference to its surroundings.

And the two are not so different institutions from one another. Both act primarily, if not solely as a place for those who feel afflicted to have somewhere to go and confide in others who are like them.

There are many things to wonder at the whole phenomenon. What strange Alchemy is it that has kept The Rocky Horror Picture Show going? Why did it strike a chord? Why are there not weekly screenings of Pink Flamingo’s or El Topo, or some other seventies relic? Why has it not fallen the way of Earth Shoes and Billy Beer? Whatever it is, here lies a movie that for all the bitching we cinephiles like to do about older films surviving in the cultural lexicon, has needed no aid from us. No, The Rocky Horror Picture Show continues serenely on like some unfathomable perpetual motion machine. Drawing crowds to remark “That only assholes draw on church doors.” for the 156,000th weekend in a Goddamn row.

The show I went to wasn’t the best. That doesn’t matter. It’ll be better next time. The theater does it every week and as the MC (whose Pre Show Spiel was easily the best part of the show) remarked “Its E_____! It’s Friday!! What the fuck else you gonna do!?!?!” It wasn’t that the cast weren’t game far from it. But they perform on a stage that’s on the level of the screen, meaning their lights bleach out the screen and the sound mix seemed off, meaning that they’re choreographed catcalls ended up drowning out the actual movie, to the point where the set ups for the punch lines couldn’t be heard. Most damningly they skipped “Late Night Double Feature Picture Show.” The films opener, in favor of an overly choreographed burlesque act set to unfathomable reasons Rob Zombie’s “Pussy Liquor”. And that’s just not done man. You don’t skip “Late Night Double Feature Picture Show” It’s the fucking heart and soul of it all.

But perhaps more so then any other work, the particulars are not important when it comes to Rocky Horror, the spirit is. At the show I was at, I watched as The Virgins got their pre show initiation, and as one of the cast celebrated his thousandth show (To which the MC replied, “That is Soooo Sad”) and a married couple in the cast celebrated their five hundreth performance, as well as their anniversary (“That is so sad.”).

So yes, perhaps the audience was filled with sexually repressed accountants, and first year drama students. Yes perhaps most of the cast and the audience was about fifty pounds above actually pulling off their costumes. Yes perhaps they cut off “The Late Night Double Feature Picture Show.”

It doesn’t matter. It was still a great time. Say what you will about Rocky Horror, but as long as it gives lonely people a place to go and feel good for awhile, I’m all for it. There's just something about going out to the late night (early morning) picture show. And then finding some people to go to Denny's with afterwards.