ROCKY HORROR - So it's come to this...?

Variety reports that Lou Adler will produce a new film of The Rocky Horror Picture Show - to be titled, simply, Rocky Horror - for MTV Films, to air on the erstwhile music video channel at Halloween 2009. The tele-pic will use the original screenplay, but include music not in the film - presumably the cut songs "Super Heroes" and "Once In A While."

Update - Author Richard O'Brien tells the BBC he will not be involved, nor does the remake have his blessing. O'Brien controls the stage show, while Fox owns the film rights.

This seems an exercise in perversity - the wrong kind. Rocky Horror is sui generis, a product of its time and a distillation of a unique set of personalities and sensibilities. Its very success was a fluke, a case of the audience making the film their own. If you do a slick, well-made version, then it loses the amateur charm. If you do it intentionally cheesy, then it's a too-knowing spoof of a spoof. I get the heebie-jeebies imagining Rocky Horror as a sort of High School Musical for the Hot Topic set.

Much as I hate the idea of a remake, my theatre brain can't help but stray into thoughts of casting. First and foremost is the impossible task of finding someone to fill Tim Curry's platform heels. Online speculation reports that Marilyn Manson has been approached to star as Frank N. Furter. As Manson can't sing, act, dance or be funny, he's hardly qualified to embody cinema's grandest camp divo. If they MUST make this film, then impish Alan Cumming would make a vivid, lascivious Frank - and he has the box office credibility to be attractive to financiers. British comedian Russell Brand, so funny and sexy in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, would also be a good choice, though I've no idea if he can sing. Though I insist on a British Frank, John Barrowman might be good - a bit wholesome maybe, but he can trade on his musical theatre cred and sexy Torchwood rep. If budget were no object, I think Robert Downey, Jr. would be a revelation in the role.

While we are dream-casting, Justin Timberlake as Brad would not only be perfectly appropriate, but a major coup as well - and how about Reese Witherspoon as Janet? These two blonde cuties have the all-American look, and both sing quite well.

Marilyn Manson, if you insist, might make a great Riff Raff - though the vocals would need to be transposed to baritone. Once upon a time, Axl Rose possessed the perfect tenor yowl for Riff-Raff, and though Sebastian Bach can't act his way out of a paper bag, he sounded amazing on Broadway in the role. Killer tenor pipes and the ability to lurk and smirk are a must. As Magenta, Amy Winehouse would be an intriguing match for Manson's Riff, but Daphne Rubin-Vega, sounding just like Darlene Love, was fabulous in the Broadway show and would be more reliable. Jack Black as Eddie seems a no-brainer (get it?) and he'd even be a good Dr. Scott, in make-up. Or, get Meat Loaf to play the Doctor - he was both Eddie and Dr. Scott in LA and on Broadway. Patrick Stewart and Anthony Stewart-Head, with their gravitas and genre associations, would both make excellent Narrators.

Of course, all this misses part of the charm of the original film - the cast were mostly unknowns at the time, and so audiences saw Frank and Brad instead of "Tim Curry as Frank," "Barry Bostwick as Brad," etc. Celebrity casting in Rocky Horror will just make it seem like karaoke. It's the same problem that plagues many projects that rely on casting to sell themselves. Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was was never able to generate horror and pathos for the creature, because all you saw was "Robert DeNiro as the Creature." Then again, this new Rocky Horror will be a pop-culture Event, not a strange cult item that comes out of nowhere, so celebrity casting might actually work in its favor.

Lou Adler has always said that he didn't like the Hammer Gothic style of the film - he wanted it in black and white, with cardboard sets, in a more self-consciously kitschy style. Perhaps this is his attempt to do what Stephen King, who never liked the Kubrick film, did with his made-for-TV version of The Shining. That turned out great, didn't it?

If they want a new version of Rocky Horror out there, what they should do is have a good director - Sam Mendes maybe, or Julian Crouch - stage it, and release a live DVD. There are excellent videos of stage shows like Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and other Broadway musicals, not to mention many iterations of operas such as Don Giovanni, Aida, etc. A new Rocky Horror in this vein would be much more acceptable.

I grow weary of this world. Why can't Hollywood leave well enough alone?

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ROCKY HORROR - It was great when it all began!

Richard O’Brien was an unemployed actor living in London when he came to write They Came From Denton High, later called The Rock Horroar Show, soon to be famous as The Rocky Horror Show (1973).

"Rocky started as a way for me to spend winter evenings shen I was an out-of-work actor," remembers Richard O'Brien. "To me, it was just like doing the crossword or making a collage. I just wrote some songs that I liked. I wrote some gags that I liked. I put in some B-movie dialogue and situations. I was just having a ball." Allied with musician Richard Hartley (who thought “oh no, not another rock musical!”), O’Brien made a demo tape and approached Australian director Jim Sharman – for whom the New Zealand actor had recently performed, briefly and ignominiously, as Herod in the London production of Jesus Christ Superstar - with an idea for a musical B-movie spoof with a bit of sex thrown in. Sharman loved it, and the show was soon on the boards for a limited run at the experimental 75-seat Royal Court Theatre Upstairs.

Read more about the origins of The Rocky Horror Show, and why this seminal piece of rock theatre is now lost to us forever, after the jump...

The Rocky Horror Show sort of came together rather than being worked out in detail; rehearsals started with a bare-bones script that was embellished by the director and cast, with the actors providing their own improvisations which then became canon. Some of the songs O’Brien had rattling around for years: “Science Fiction Double Feature” was written for a party at an Elstree film studios, “Super Heroes” and “I’m Going Home” were tunes O’Brien had doodled with for ages and “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me” was a late addition when director Sharman noted “We need a song here.” “The Time Warp” evolved in rehearsals to give the three household retainers something to do. “Eddie’s Teddy” was added for the move to the show’s second venue, the Chelsea Classic. Though it does not appear on the cast album, it was released on 45 by O’Brien and his then-wife, Kimi Wong (she is the Asian Transylvanian with the long hair) as Kimi & Ritz.


Richard O'Brien sings "Over at the Frankenstein Place."

Director Sharman gave free reign to his team’s creativity. Set designer Brian Thompson – another Australian who, with Sharman, had made a camp sci-fi film called Shirley Thompson Versus The Aliens (1972) - came up with the idea of an Usherette singing the opening song – the original concept was a kid watching TV. Brian Thompson’s ingenious shoestring set consisted of little more than a couple of platforms, an old Coke machine and some tubes and wires for the lab. In a move of pure genius, he erected scaffolds and draped tarps around the space to suggest a cinema in the process of demolition (indeed, after the Royal Court engagement the show moved to an actual cinema, the Chelsea Classic in the King’s Road). The actors clambered over the scaffolds and played in front of a sagging, dusty movie screen, as if the flickering images of a thousand forgotten films had suddenly popped into three-dimensional life. Thompson’s settings put bones into the shapeless body of the work, just as his designs for the film version placed the story in a setting that, rather than mere background, provided context and coherence to the proceedings. But that is in the future.

The original Brad and Janet were Christopher Malcolm and Julie Covington. Canadian Malcolm is now well-known to Brit-com fans as Eddy's ex-husband Justin on Absolutely Fabulous and now walks with a cane due to a near-fatal motorcycle accident.
After angrily turning down the role of Ralph Hapschatt in the film version, he went on to become a successful theatrical producer. He is part of The Rocky Horror Company Ltd, which oversees new productions of the play. Actress Julie Covington had a career acting and as a recording star in the 1970s. Her biggest success came with the original concept album of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Evita, in which she sang the title role and had a #1 single with "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." Covington left the show early in the run, and was replaced by Belinda Sinclair, who is featured on the original cast album.

Richard O’Brien originally planned to play Eddie – sing one song and then retire to the green room, collect paycheck – but Sharman convinced him to play the sinister Riff Raff instead. Marianne Faithfull was sought for Magenta, but Patricia Quinn snagged the role. She accepted the part on the strength of the opening number, "Science Fiction Double Feature," which she sang as an ice cream-vending Usherette. Her agent warned against taking the role sight unseen - after all, what if there were only four lines? It turned out there were not many more than that - it depends on which iteration of the script, but there are fewer than 20 - but Quinn's turn as Magenta in the play and film is nonetheless indelible. (Surely I am not the only one who sees Riff Raff and Magenta as the descendants of Lolita's Claire Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom, lurking on the sidelines with mocking smiles, planning the protagonist's downfall?) Columbia was a late addition to the story – Little Nell used to clean Jim Sharman’s apartment, and he thought the spunky, tap-dancing Australian deserved a role, so Magenta’s part was split in two (à la Eddie's brain) to accommodate her.

Richard O’Brien met Tim Curry outside a gym while scouting for muscle-men to play Rocky. Sharman and O’Brien had considered an actor called Jonathan Kramer for the role of Frank, but Curry’s audition blew them away – he ripped through Little Richard’s manic “Tutti Fruitti” and the show had its leading man. Curry's Frank N. Furter was originally a bleach-blonde. His hair later was dyed blue before reverting to his natural brown ‘fro. Curry flirted with a Lugosi-like “Transylvanian” voice, then an American accent, before settling on the familiar posh “Kensington” intonation. The American-accented portrayal is enshrined on the original cast album. When Tim Curry was indisposed, O’Brien would take over the role of Frank – in fact, when film producer Lou Adler saw the show and decided to bring it to 20th Century Fox, it was O’Brien vamping it up instead of Curry. One longs for a recording or photo of O’Brien as Frank to surface!

Sue Blane created the distinctive costumes, which have become as iconic as any in cinema history. Frank’s famous corset was left over from a production of Genet’s The Maids. Magenta was not promoted to housekeeper until the film - in the original show she is just a hanger-on lurking about in naughty underwear. Most of the other costumes are more or less what made it to the film version.

The show premiered on an appropriately dark and stormy night in June 1973, with legendary horror-movie ham Vincent Price in the audience, as if giving his dark blessing. What must have that first audience thought, as masked ushers silently thrust mimeographed programs - with a crude illustration by Richard O'Brien himself - into their hands, then climbed onstage to whip the tarp off an Usherette, as if she were yet another mothballed relic of the cinema's past glories?

The show was an unexpected hit – its run was extended, and it was later moved (appropriately enough) to a converted cinema seating 400. Rocky Horror was the toast of London - a London giddy with David Bowie and T. Rex, a London in the wake of the decriminalization of homosexuality, a London with the Sex Pistols just around the corner. Rocky Horror presaged the 1950s nostalgia boom that took off with Grease and American Graffiti, a wave of Boomer sentimentality that infused pop culture for the next 20 years. Productions in Los Angeles, Broadway and Sydney followed, as well a movie deal…but that’s another story.

The infamous Jonathan King recorded the original cast album in a single marathon session – and it shows. The sound is garage-band crude and the singing more enthusiastic than accomplished. And yet this record is, for me, the definitive Rocky Horror in many ways. It’s rawer, crazier, and just plain more fun than any version that came after. This is Rocky when it was an impromptu labor of love, staged in a dusty old theater on a shoestring budget. You can just hear the relish with which the actors jump into their roles. The band attacks these brand-new songs with a gusto that almost makes the polished movie versions seem tame. “Sweet Transvestite” is sleazier than ever, all piano and cowbell and squawky guitar, with Tim Curry oozing oily charm and Brad’s verse “rapped” in time to the music. "Touch-A Touch-A Touch Me" has an innocence that all other versions lack, and Chris Malcolm's performance of the oft-deleted "Once In A While" has never been bettered. Curry’s rendition of “Whatever Happened to Fay Wray?” on this disc is unequalled, especially his “Whoa-oh-oooh, don’t dream it…!” The pounding Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano on “Wild and Untamed Thing” never fails to get my heart rate up, and Frank’s breakdown in “I’m Going Home” is hilarious. “I - I’m sorry, I can’t go on,” he sobs. This is the Rocky Horror ur-text, and its cheesy charms seduce me every time.

Jonathan King remembers: “I had to preserve that raw, rough and ready, totally fresh and exciting feeling that had come over in the Theatre Upstairs. And that ethos of amateurishness, that thrown-together quality.” Mission accomplished!

THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW - THE LOST MASTERPIECE

Why do I call The Rocky Horror Show a "lost masterpiece"? Well, the masterpiece part is obvious. This is Richard O'Brien's best work, and what he will be remembered for. But lost? Isn't Rocky Horror alive and well?

Perhaps, but the fact remains that we can never again see the show that premiered that dark and storm night in 1973. The show's fame and cult following have robbed it of its transgressive, revelatory power. Imagine going to see a show, having no idea what was in store, and suddenly that score comes blasting out of the pit, and Tim-freakin'-Curry storms down the aisle! Imagine seeing a live production and never hearing the audience anticipate every joke or throw back their own comments, but rather being allowed to experience what is on stage. Rocky Horror helped define a moment in pop culture that has resonated through the intervening 30 years - glam rock, goth, punk, gay liberation, Baby Boomer nostalgia, all have made their mark in Rocky's wake, and all have robbed the original of its status as a uniquely fabulous beast. The wild and untamed things that cavorted on stage at the Royal Court are now VH-1 relics and Hot Topic commodities. How transgressive is a sweet transvestite when the malls of America routinely host fishnet-hosed, black-lipsticked baby goths? Don't get me wrong, I am glad to live in a world where such things are commonplace - but I can't help mourn what is lost in the process.

The show itself has become a museum piece, a bit of commedia dell'arte, with stock characters who resist directorial re-interpretation at risk of alienating an audience who thinks they know what they want. An enterprising director can't do a "new" version - despite such intentions, the fans will be reacting to the show they remember, and will be bemused if not hostile to any true originality. Rocky Horror is a victim of its own success, as are many such seminal works - but few works have suffered so much from being mummified by its own fans.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Many of the quotes in this blog entry come from 2002's Rocky Horror: From Concept to Cult by David Evans and Scott Michaels. The book contains many fascinating, unvarnished interviews with the creators and stars of Rocky Horror, including Richard O'Brien, Jim Sharman, Richard Hartley, Brian Thompson, Patricia Quinn, and other Transylvanians and backstage crew. Particularly intriguing are the revealing information from Kimi Wong and the elusive Peter Hinwood. It's out of print but available used.

The Rocky Horror Show Book by James Harding is a large format book focusing on the original show and the touring productions. Most of the pictures of the original London cast in this article appeared in Harding's book. It's also out of print, but not impossible to find.

The Rocky Horror Show: As I Remember It by original Rocky performer Rayner Bourton is an invaluable memoir of the actor's experience from audition to first read-through to smashing success. Buy it!

And no fan should be without The Rocky Horror Scrapbook, designed by Brian Thompson, which gathers a treasure trove of photos, drawings, press clippings and miscellany into a large-format book. Print quality is a bit fuzzy and low-contrast, but the book itself is a treat. Buy it!

Fun fact - when film and music producer Lou Adler saw the show, he was immediately enchanted and sought the film rights. But Tim Curry was out that night, and Richard O'Brien was playing Frank in his stead! (I wonder who was on as Riff Raff that night?) Here's a brief, low-quality video of O'Brien as Frank in 1990.

ROCKY HORROR - The Queen of All Cult Movies

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the undisputed queen of the “midnight movie” genre. Home video has all but destroyed the tradition of cinemas showing oddball movies in late-night slots, sadly, but in the 60s, 70s and 80s there was a real vogue. It all started with exploitation fare like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Night of the Living Dead (1968). As the counter-culture took hold, audiences embraced campy relics like Reefer Madness (1933) and Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). Soon, underground movies like Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972), Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) and Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) aimed directly at the midnight movie circuit.

Into this fray appeared The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Originally released wide, the picture died a death at the box office, and it's only thanks to the far-sighted marketing of Tim Deegan at 20th Century Fox that Rocky Horror found a second life as a midnight movie at the Waverly Theater in New York’s Greenwich Village. Opening on April 1, 1976, it soon found a following and burgeoned into the beloved audience-participation phenomenon of the late 70s and early 80s. Indeed, it became something of a rite of passage among the more arty and alternative teens in middle America, and there is not a coffee shop or community theater where the lyrics to “Dammit, Janet” are not known by heart. While many critics and fans - even some of those involved in its making - find the film an airless, embalmed version of the original stage show, it's very clever on its own terms, and the audience participation brilliantly adds back the raucous energy of a live performance. It's a perfect multi-media event, involving film, theater, ironic deconstruction (of a film that is, itself, an ironic deconstruction) and music. Truly, Rocky Horror is the Queen of All Cult Movies.

Read more about the origins of audience participation and the UK tradition of Pantomime after the jump!

The audience participation angle has its roots in a couple of traditions. First, and most obvious, is the near-universal habit of talking back to the screen. “Don’t go in there!” we shout at the hapless heroines of horror flicks. Liberated by the midnight setting and, perhaps, a certain level of inebriation, audiences were soon sassing back to the portentous dialog and filling its many pregnant pauses with saucy innuendo. Legend has it that the first-ever callback was “Buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch!” when Janet uses a newspaper to shield herself from the rain. (Click here for a history of the Rocky Horror cult by Sal Piro.)

The second tradition the Rocky cult draws on is the British Pantomime. In America, a pantomime is a dumb show, a silent acting-out of something. In the UK, “Panto” is a theatrical tradition dating to the 18th Century, based in the same tradition as the commedia dell’arte. By the Victorian era, the Pantomime became a Christmas tradition, a sparkly, spoofy version of traditional fairy like “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk” or “Aladdin.” Broad humor and sing-along songs (often parodies of popular tunes) enliven the proceedings, and the well-worn fairy tale plots are spiced with topical references. There are audience-participation rituals such as children clapping to revive Tinkerbell, as well as call-backs from the audience. “I’ll get that Cinderella, oh yes I will!” snarls the wicked Stepmother. “Oh no you won’t!” cries the audience, and so forth. There are often naughty double-entendres aimed at parents, which supposedly goes over the heads of the children. The juvenile male lead (Jack, Peter Pan, etc.) is traditionally given to a gamine young actress, while the older female lead (Wicked Stepmother, etc.) is a man in drag – a Pantomime Dame. Christopher Biggins, the portly Transylvanian party-goer, is now a well-known Dame. These days, Panto is often a star-studded affair, with TV celebrities dragging it up as Widow Twankey or appearing as the back end of a pantomime horse.

Thus it’s very easy to identify Richard O’Brien’s show, with its stock characters and situations, as a panto for adults spoofing the Hammer Frankenstein films with a Panto Dame instead of Peter Cushing. Suddenly the dress-up, call-back and sing-along tradition makes a lot more sense.

It should also be noted that, in a strange way, the participation is embedded in the film from the first song. "Science Fiction Double Feature" is sung by Richard O'Brien, but lip synched by Patricia Quinn (the lips on the poster are either Tim Curry's or Loreli Shark's; sources differ but they are not Quinn's). So you have lip-synching and gender-swapping subliminally present from the very start. It's also worth noting that Frank spends most of his time trying to emulate glamorous movie stars of 1940s cinema.

Interior of the Audience Participation Album. Sal Piro, front right, is seated next to Dori Hartley, as Frank N. Furter. Piro and Hartley were the leading lights of Rocky fandom in the 70s and 80s.

Sadly, the release of Rocky Horror on home video has all but killed the late-night audience participation phenomenon. While it’s now easier to appreciate the movie on its own terms – and it is certainly not the lousy film that even many of its fans claim – it’s only in big cities that the midnight cult remains. Even these have lost the spontaneity and invention of the old days – a midnight Rocky Horror screening feels rather fossilized by now. Though there is something wonderful about the traditions in and of themselves, it often seems that the audience’s off-the-cuff riffing is left behind in favor of the floor show. Said floor show is usually performed by a regular troupe, ridden with politics and territorial pissings, who are much more interested in doing “their” version instead of allowing for free-wheeling improv.

You are much more likely to get a thrilling, unexpected experience seeing a theatrical production that re-invents the original show than watching a group of college kids and 40-somethings parrot the routines they heard on the Audience Participation Album. Rocky Horror should celebrate creativity, not mimesis. Even live performances of the play suffer from this - how many sub-par Tim Curry impersonators have we seen? And shouted lines about the Narrator’s neck make sense only the context of Charles Gray and his starchy collar.

Future posts in this series will look at the original stage production frim 1973, a quick glimpse at the many productions around the world, Shock Treatment and my own analysis of the Rocky Horror film and how it is not the movie most fans think it is.