It is hard to believe that ”The Rocky Horror Picture Show” – the most successful Midnight movie Ever done – could have been “incorrectly interpreted” by its devoted fanbase for decades. And yet, as the iconic glam rock musical approaches the 50th anniversary this year, that debate is raging. Like a storm of line dancer … knocking on hard thunder … over a crazy researcher … sloppy little castle.
“I might have to take some sign for it,” said screenwriter Richard O’Brien, who raised the question with New York Post Last week. The 83-year-old actor (who also plays Riff Raff) wrote “Rocky Horror” as a scene musical over a single winter in London 1973. Two years later, at the world premiere of film Adaptation at the Royal Court Theater on August 14, 1975, he may have confused an editor.
The guests started leaving before the final was finished and O’Brien wanted prevent That by cutting an instrumental section. “The next thing I see, they have cut both Brad and Janet’s songs,” he said. “It was so unfortunately for a very long time.”
The melancholy “Super Heroes” song, performed by a bloody Susan Sarandon and a muddy Barry Bostwick. What remained was the version that gained popularity in the United States and built the audience’s repertoire biographers still worth today. That cutting has a much more optimistic repetition of “The Time Warp” when the credits roll and feel almost evangelical in comparison.
Like O’Brien prefers “Rocky Horror” film creator Jim Sharman the original end better. Sharman staged the live musical and he wrote together the film’s script with O’Brien, but the director’s theory of why the mammothprint that occurred differs somewhat.
“(I think) There were some studiotine and” superheroes “was deleted,” Sharman said in An interview from 2010 with journalist Mike Gencarelli. “Probably through a desire to give it a more conventional film end, which is genuinely impossible with a movie like” RHPS. ”
Fox, which is owned by Disney (yes, the mouse’s house has its boots on the neck of “Rocky Horror”), has not taken a fixed posture in the two different versions. But Warner Bros. Drew a similar trick a decade later, when it gave Frank Oz’s remake from “Little Shop Horror” a happier ending to appease theaters. The revelation of Brad and Janet’s upcoming night with Dr. Frank-n furts (Tim Curry) should have ended with them even more broken sent less shock waves through the fan base.
Sharman shared his thoughts on the subject of the film’s 35th anniversary, when the original end was finally restored with a special edition Blu-ray edition. “The film begins and ends quietly, reflective and in the dark, and that’s how it should be,” he told Gencarelli.
Still, the orgiastic aperitif of queer liberation has not overcome the early confusion. The cult classic stumbled into limited American theaters on September 27, 1975 and even if you can’t really blame the end, the first distribution flopped impressive. Curry was generally considered to be a revelation of critics, but he could not whip the sharing and deceitable opaque musical in the winner’s circle alone.
“It was ignored by almost all, including the future fanatics who would eventually count the hundreds of times they had seen it,” wrote the late Roger Ebert I A retrospective essay. The most famous movie critic ever visited the longest Midnight movie in history when “Rocky Horror” came to VHS 1990. Deflowing, the controversial movement spurred Cinephiles to ask if a movie could still be “midnight” at home.
For Fox’s Broadcast premiere of “Rocky Horror” on October 25, 1993, TV Guide Writer and the Film’s Late Fan Club President Sal Piro Instructed the audience to get physical props – from rice and toast (for the wedding!) To water guns and magazines (for the rainstorm!) And play with. They would also have to learn the famous calls (“Where is your neck?” “Asshole!” “Slut!”) Which he helped pioneer almost two decades earlier at the Waverly Theater in New York.
“At home I have invited some 200 of my closest friends,” Piro wrote in TV guide. “There may be a small mess to clean up in the morning.”
Ebert concluded that “Rocky Horror” was more of a “long -lasting social phenomenon” than a movie, and watched it again, he wrote in his review, “It’s no better than it ever was. Without the midnight’s side show it’s happy and stupid and kind of sweet and forgetful.” Of course, he had the wrong end.
With the film’s golden anniversary this fall, several more opportunities for re -evaluation will be available. Tim Deegan – the CEO who is widely credited to convince Fox to bring “Rocky Horror” back to the United States as a Midnight movie – has a book coming out on September 1st. “Saving Rocky Horror: From Orphan to Icon” aims to illuminate Deegan’s story, map from the “serious opposition” he faces within the studio to Revolution Refertery Assure in April 19.
Also promotion A new 4K Blu-ray restorationthat includes ‘bonus content’ with both Versions, Disney takes “Rocky Horror” on tour in the United States and Canada 2025. Casted members Bostwick (Brad), Patricia Queen (Magenta) and Nell Campbell (Columbia) will visit 55 cities, after Kick-off events in Los Angeles on 23 September at Academy “Museum and The RoT Museum”
Even in Hollywood that weekend there will be a fank convention at UA Westwood. This celebration will partly host the film’s 91-year executive producer, Lou Adler. After Deegan’s great rescue in New York, “Rocky Horror” returned to the West Coast in the late 1970s, where ostentatious Angelenos formally established the film’s dress code and rituals as an extravagant weekly business.
Midnight movies was discovered in the 1970s. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “El Topo”, John Waters “Pink Flamingoes”, even David Lynch’s “Eraserhead”-some of them could have been transformed into cinematic pedestrian places that broke box office and span half a century. But more than the shock-jock artist, it was the continued dialogue with enthusiastic queer audience that made “rocky horror” a man.
Piro wrote in 1993 that he had seen the film more than 1500 times. Consistent presence is the key if you want to convert a cult girl to a proper midnight film, and later this year, “Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror” will be released in Piro’s memory.
Premiere at SXSW And in American theaters on September 26, the new documentary comes from filmmaker Linus O’Brien, who is Richard O’Brien’s son. Indiegees Wilson Chapman, who argued for “Meat-and-Potatis” documents, gave a lot of familiar territory, gave it a “B-” and wrote, “There is a version of” Strange Journey “which is perhaps more explicitly personal, a father-son story and a portrait of the artist rather than the work he created, and you created, and you could, and you created, and you created, and you could.
The deliberately flummary history that O’Brien wrote has not become easier to analyze for the uninitiated, and seen from the context, “Rocky Horror” has not aged gracefully – without Was it ever graceful?
You can find dozens of thinking and countless comments about social media from young movie critics, who take various issues with Cult Hit’s Legacy. From complaints about transphobic and sexist language, to problems with the policy of its aging artists, the routine reanimization of “rocky horror” rarely may sing the entire genre scene in harmony. What is worse, it is up against the footprint for its own success, canonized in everything from “The Simpsons” To “Glee” (which, wouldn’t you know, were both at Fox.)
That said, if you read this, you are probably already in the choir like “Rocky Horror” preaches. At a time when indie studios of all types are get in on the Midnight Movie GameAnd transgender people and queer people are facing a nasty increase in new attacks both legally and politically, “Rocky Horror” has never been in great need of worshipers with real faith.
More than any sequins you can put in a pool, this masterpiece has touched endless lives. It is also very much about a manipulative foreigner who uses slur “transvestite,” like to humiliate virgin conservativesAnd to this day, instrumental remains for the art of constructing zombie fucking.
Like “Rocky Horror” in itself, the dilution of that legacy – and the diminishing interest in complexity and camps from the young audience films that this recruit to save the Midnight movie that we know – must tragically.
A sultry type of birth, one that helped lots of queer kids are in fish nets and Meat bread Instead of shepherds and wise men, “Rocky Horror” comes into their next 50 years with an almost Christ -like burden. Yes, there are the boundless happy disciples who always defend their holy heart. (It is also worth noting that Disney surprised many people when they let shows, especially post-covid.)
But it is the threat that the picture shows that one day does not continue – neither because the “rocky horror” religion is misunderstood by too long, or because it becomes part of the racket violation artificial was found to mock – which makes every new time warp shaking with old
Indieviews’70s presented by Bleecker Street ”RELAY. “Riz Ahmed plays a” fixer “in world -class that specializes in brokers lucrative payments between corrupt companies and the individuals who threaten their ruin.RELAY“” Sharp, funny and smart entertaining from his first scene to his last twist, ‘Relay’ is a modern paranoid thriller as Harkens back to the genre’s 70s heyday. “From director David Mackenzie (” Hell or High Water “) and also in the lead role Lily James, in theaters August 22.
