![]() ![]() (There’s some intimations that time travel is involved as well.) The film’s masterful, lancing conceit is to make Frank-N-Furter a hugely likable, genially sex-crazy transvestite who preaches a mantra of “absolute pleasure.” His fateful project is to create a Frankenstein’s monster - a hunka-hunka burning bodybuilder named Rocky. They are aliens, we are given to understand, from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania. One of these is his Igor-like assistant, Riff Raff, played by Richard O’Brien, the show’s creator. Frank-N-Furter, who oversees, in sometimes sadistic fashion, a cast of supporting freaks. This turns out to be the domain of Curry’s character, who is a mad scientist, Dr. The story follows a hopelessly square couple, Brad and Janet, who get a flat in a rainstorm and end up at a mysterious mansion. It opens with a pair of luscious red lips singing the opening song, which name-checks some of the film’s beloved predecessors: Many of those old movies were black and white, but it’s one of the film’s charms that it’s filled with jarring colors and a goofy cast of characters. The story is a pastiche: a magnanimous spoof of old-time horror and sci-fi movies. The film, if you haven’t seen it, is a potent but gentle rock musical with a slate of irresistibly catchy songs. I was never beat up precisely for the way I dressed or the people I hung out with, but it was the kind of environment that could occasionally get you called “fag” and slammed into a locker for no reason by one of the sports guys, generally when there was a group of girls around.Īnd then we discovered The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We were, in a safe, suburban way, misfits, and to some extent outcasts. ![]() But with my puffy hair and Coke-bottle glasses, I just looked like Tootsie’s homely niece. (Today earrings are a frat-boy accouterment back then it was highly unusual to see one on a man, much less a male teen.)įor my graduation photo I wore makeup and eye shadow, and I wish I could say I matched the androgynous gorgeousness of David Bowie or Todd Rundgren. The earring I got my senior year nearly gave my father a stroke. ![]() We streaked our hair or wore eye makeup to school. It didn’t matter because we were all in it together. It was all innocent hardly anyone was having sex, much less gay sex, and I myself wasn’t gay, but even then we knew that the majority of the boys in our club in some way were or would be. And boy, did it irritate parents and some of the other kids. At the time, just about all of us, I think it’s fair to say, looked at the gay demimonde in a way that other white suburban kids would begin to look to the hip-hop underworld a decade or so later it was everything we thought was cool in the world. Since I was growing up in the cultural wasteland of Phoenix, Arizona, at the time, I can speak about this importance with some authority.Īt our high school, to which I walked each morning across a mile or so of scrub desert, the unusual kids clustered in the drama club. While this anniversary has been duly noted, the film’s real sociological significance has not been. The movie version, which was brought to America by producer and manager Lou Adler, became an unaccountable cult hit for years, and then decades, and now takes a place on the list of the most profitable films of all time. There’s Mick Jagger in Curry, sure, but there’s also, in his homoerotic pose, something of another epitome of screen masculinity, the gauzy first glimpse we get of John Wayne in Stagecoach.Īnyway, this summer marked the 40th anniversary of the release of the movie. I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show again recently and tried to parse its force. In the mid-to-late 1970s, as a high-school teen, I was one of those thousands who, Friday night after Friday night, would assemble at a local repertory theater to see, for the fifth, tenth, 20th, or 35th time, this stunning manifestation. He struts out, to the beat of a Stonesian guitar riff, and a few moments later he turns and rips off the cape: We can see he sports a glistening string of giant pearls and, not least, a silver-spangled ensemble of women’s lingerie. Everything below that striking visage is covered in a magnificent cape. His face is heavily mascaraed, the portrait of a commedia dell’arte drag queen. About 20 minutes into the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, an elevator door opens and the actor Tim Curry steps out. ![]()
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