50 years ago this month, The Rocky Horror Picture Show had its first midnight screening at New York’s Waverly Theatre (now the IFC Center) in the West Village, marking the beginning of an extraordinary turnaround for a film that had been a box office flop the previous year, and leading to exuberant shadow cast performances and audience callbacks from dedicated fans. The Picture Show is now the longest-running theatrical release in movie history.
Roundabout Theatre Company’s riotous revival of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show directed by Sam Pinkleton officially opened on Broadway this week. It is only the third production of the cult show to be staged on Broadway, including the short-lived original run which closed after just four previews and 45 performances in 1975, despite having been a major hit in London and Los Angeles. The new production has already been extended through July 19th.
The lively and lovingly-crafted documentary, Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, directed by Richard’s son Linus O’Brien, chronicles this fascinating rise, fall, and resurrection, tracking Rocky’s origins from London fringe theatre show to international cult phenomenon. It also delivers a heartfelt tribute to Rocky’s fans that explores its enduring appeal, especially for queer folks. Featuring interviews with those who were there from the begining including Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell, Peter Hinwood, Richard Hartley, Jim Sharman, Lou Adler, and Sue Blane, as well as Rocky admirers such Jack Black, Trixie Mattel, and the late Sal Piro, the founder and president of the official Picture Show fan club, who appears in archive footage. Read our full ★★★★ review of the documentary here.
With Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror now back in select theaters in the United States, Richard O’Brien and Linus O’Brien speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about the conversation between father and son that runs throughout the documentary, the safe space that Rocky continues to provide for LGBTQ+ fans, and the show returning to Broadway.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Strange Journey isn’t only a love letter to Rocky Horror the show and the film, but also to its fans and what it has meant to people over more than 50 years. How intentional was that dual tribute as you set about making this documentary?
Linus O’Brien: “That was the idea right from the beginning. It was actually the comments underneath a YouTube clip of Tim Curry singing “I’m going Home” which inspired the whole thing. I couldn’t believe how touching and heartfelt they all were. We always knew how important Rocky was to the fans, but we thought that it was just a bit of fun. It turns out that it’s so much more than that. It was important to me to include what it means to people so that the shadow cast members and fans could see themselves up there and hear stories about their first time going to see it and how those experiences mirrored other people’s first times.”
“When Strange Journey was first released last year, one of the nice things was that you had 70 year old shadow cast members going to see the documentary who were meeting teenage shadow cast members who’d only been doing it for a year. They were sharing exactly the same stories. Hopefully that will happen again with this re-release.”
There is something pretty powerful and affirming about hearing someone else’s experiences, especially if it’s from a completely different time, when they chime with our own, isn’t there?
Linus: “Exactly. Those feelings of loneliness and feeling outside and not being a part of society don’t really change. They’re timeless, unfortunately. But Rocky has been able to bring these people together and I’m very happy to contribute to that.”
Richard, from watching the documentary, there seems to be almost a direct correlation between the story that you share about being six and a half years old when you said out loud that you wanted to be the fairy princess and gauged the reaction from your family—when “the shutters came down”, as you put it—and the idea of “don’t dream it, be it” in Rocky Horror. What does it mean to you to have liberated people and helped them to find themselves through Rocky?
Richard O’Brien: “It’s a wonderful extra bit of wonderment because writing a musical that was on stage in the first place and then winning Best Musical of that year was already more than I could ever have imagined, really truthfully. So that it has a life is astonishing, but to have this life is especially wonderful.”
“Isn’t it tragic that 50 years later we are still in the same position? The tragedy of humankind is that we’ve abandoned rationality. We all know that being gay is as natural as being blue eyed or brown eyed. It’s just a fact of life. It’s time to wake up from this abandonment of rationality. We are a wise species, a clever species and yet most of us believe that the Abrahamic creation myth fantasy is preferable to reality and all the nastiness and unkindness and the disapproval comes from them. These people who can’t even get together and say that they worship the same God and become united with that thought. We’re at a crisis point with Trump in the White House and the way the world is going.”
“Rocky is lovely because to be in a live theatre watching it now you know that you’re in a theatre full of rainbow people and that’s delightful. We know that we’re safe, but isn’t it tragic that 50 years later we still have to have these places of safety? Thankfully we have Rocky anyway, that’s one thing, and Pride as well. Although, I wish we could turn Pride day into rainbow day because the rainbow flag is inclusive. I like that. I find Pride a little bit exclusive. I don’t like the word ‘pride’, it comes before a fall. I really wouldn’t want to see a group of men walking down the street saying, ‘proud to be straight’ or ‘proud to be white’. That wouldn’t sit well. So I think we should keep waving the rainbow banner big and high and become a united society. Good, decent human beings desperately need to band together now because we’re at a crisis moment in society.”
One of my favourite aspects of Strange Journey is the interview between the two of you that is woven throughout the film. What was that experience like for each of you?
Richard: “We’ve always been able to be open. I grew up in a house where certain conversations weren’t allowed around the table—’because we don’t talk about that’—but we’ve always been able to speak about anything because that’s the way sanity lies.”
Linus: “Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. It was a really lovely experience to go down to New Zealand twice and sit down with my dad and hear many of the stories that I’d heard before but in this setting it was very different. It’s lovely how people have really responded to that part of the story. Obviously, it was a Rocky Horror origin story and about its effect on society, but I also wanted to include a bit about my dad’s personal journey. So to be able to do that and intertwine that with the documentary and have it land when it needed to was really important. I give credit to my creative partner and editor, Avner Shiloah, who was able to find exactly the right places to drop in those moments so it didn’t hold the story up but flowed into it.”
It makes it really special and of course it’s a documentary that no one else could have made from that point of view. I also love the acoustic versions of many of the songs from Rocky. What do you enjoy about performing those songs acoustically, Richard?
Richard: “My great tragedy is that my hands are turning into claws and I can no longer trust them. The last time I had to perform on stage it was too awful going out there thinking, Will I be able to hit the chord? Will my hand perform the way it’s supposed to? So I no longer do that. That’s a great loss. Everything gets taken away from you incrementally.”
Linus: “But his body responded on the day when we were with Richard Hartley, so we were very happy to get that on camera. The amount of people who have requested to hear the songs acoustically is immeasurable. I get asked at all the time. So maybe one day my dad will sing some a cappella versions of his songs if he can’t play the guitar.”
The lyrics and melodies come out so beautifully in those acoustic versions and you hear the songs in a different way.
Richard: “I’m not a musician, I have far too much respect for musicians to call myself that. I’m somebody who’s musical. I was blessed with a good ear and I’m very grateful for that. I have a certain talent for writing lyrics, and I love doing that, but I take my hat off to real musicians. When I play and sing along, I treat the guitar in my own way, like a drum, and I sing the songs in my own way. The only thing about doing it with other musicians is that they don’t quite get the same rhythm as me because it is uniquely me. I don’t mean that in a posh way, it’s just a fact of life. Some people have their own way of hitting things and that’s why I’m not very good with a band because they have to follow me.”
As Strange Journey recounts, when Rocky originally opened on Broadway in 1975 it only lasted for 45 performances. How does it feel to have a new production of Rocky back on Broadway right now, Richard?
Richard: “I hope it does well. We’re in this dreadful moment in time economically, along with all these other pressures. So I hope that it does well for the cast and for the producers. Howard Panter, our producer over the years, is a man who sticks his head up over the parapet again and again and takes his chances. Assessed and judged chances, that’s true. But it would be lovely to see it sit down for a little while in New York.”
“The last time it was in New York was at the Circle in the Square Theatre and it was the wrong theatre for it. It could never have come into profit there because it just wasn’t the right size. But it had a happy stay while it was there with Joan Jett playing Columbia. It was a good show.”
“What happened the first time round was to do with the rivalry between New York and Los Angeles. New York considered itself, certainly then anyway, in a slightly snobby way. They had the Met and the Met Gala and proper theatre with proper critics. All Los Angeles has was tarts and cheap movies. Lou Adler and Michael White said, ‘Here’s the hit from London and Los Angeles’ to New York before we opened and they took umbrage with that. They said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t tell us. We tell you. And since you’ve had the temerity to even suggest that it might have been a hit, it’s not.'”
“Again, the theatre was wrong. Lou Adler had put tables and chairs in and the tables were rectangular. Well, you put a rectangular table with chairs around it into an ordinary theatre and some people have to sit with their backs to the stage or certainly on the side and have to watch the show sideways on. It was a big mistake, but it was a terribly good show in New York City. It rocked.”
I love Trixie Mattel’s contributions to Strange Journey and the story she shares about how the midnight shows of Rocky created a safe space for her and helped to shape who she is. Rocky midnight screenings have created queer social clubs in places that didn’t have queer bars or other spaces. Why was it important for you to include that in the documentary?
Linus: “We wanted to include a couple of well-known people who had stories that resonated with everyone else’s. Jack Black’s story is very similar to a lot of people’s and so is Trixie’s. I didn’t know that much about her going in and so I watched a few of her videos before we recorded her. I thought, Oh, this person is going to be kind of catty and have some attitude. Not that that would have been a problem, that would have been fun too, but instead she was very serious. I could tell that it was a story that she was itching to tell because she thinks that without Rocky she wouldn’t be where she is today, which is a huge star. So to have someone who was that no-nonsense, with the vibe of I’m going to tell this story because it’s important to me and it’s important for other people, was fantastic. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to get and in this case, with Trixie, we got far more than we could have imagined with the passion and the intensity she had in telling her story.”
There are so many brilliant contributions from pretty much everyone still living who was involved in different aspects of the original show and the film, including Tim Curry, who talks about the moment when he decided to do the heightened posh English accent as Frank-N-Furter. Richard, do you remember him first bringing that accent into rehearsals?
“Yes, he said that he’d been on a bus and there were some ladies from Knightsbridge who he overheard talking about their terribly nice “hew-ouse”. He said that was the magic moment. It clicked.”
Thanks goodness that happened because it works so well. Watching Strange Journey made me want to immediately revisit the film and see the show and listen to the album.
Linus: “That was exactly what I told the producers at the beginning. When people finish watching it they should want to do exactly what you just said and relive Rocky again. So it makes me very happy to hear that.”
Richard: “Thanks so much. Bless you, James. That’s wonderful to hear.”
By James Kleinmann
Strange Journey: The Story Of Rocky Horror is playing in select theaters now. For showtimes and to purchase tickets head to rockyhorrordoc.com.
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