Let’s do the time warp with Brad

While it enjoys the longest theatrical release of any movie in history, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was all but ignored by critics when its revolutionary brand of camp first hit silver screens in 1975.

And before it whipped up a cult following, Rocky was a fringe theatre hit in London whose first run’s final night — which had attracted such luminaries as Mick and Bianca Jagger — was derailed by an unlikely culprit: glitter. According to the late Tim Curry (who died at 80 in August), the shiny stuff ended up where the sun don’t shine.

“Well, Rocky got some glitter down his trunks and it set up an irritation. When we arrived at the theatre, he was standing in the shower and the show couldn’t go on,” he told the press in 1974, after crossing the Atlantic to lead the show’s American theatre debut.

Glitter is one of the things audiences may not throw at the stage at The Rocky Horror Picture Show screening tonight at the Centennial Concert Hall. Unlike in the anarchic midnight screenings at the New York’s Waverly Theater beginning in 1976, where audiences chucked everything but the kitchen sink, a prop bag will be courteously supplied at the door.

But that’s not all Barry Bostwick expects audiences to hurl in his direction.

“It’s a very rude evening in terms of people yelling things out, and what they call us as characters in such a loving way. And we take it all and throw it back at them in a way,” says the 81-year-old actor, who plays the film’s wholesome but square hero, Brad Majors, a parody of 1950s all-American masculinity.

Warmly put by a man whose character’s name tends to excite the exclamation “Asshole!” any time it’s said in the 100-minute musical movie, screened tonight in Disney’s vivid new 4K version. The insult is just one of many famous one-liners shouted ritually, early memes authored mostly by unknown audience members decades ago.

Bostwick’s presence tonight is one of several draws, including a costume contest, a traditional “virgin ceremony” for first-time attendees, a live shadow cast and a meet-and-greet with the actor — a Tony and Golden Globe winner also known for his role on sitcom Spin City, as well as myriad other TV appearances.

“We have a responsibility to live up to people’s expectations. I don’t mean this in a boastful way, but we’ve become icons,” says Bostwick.

It’s not an overstatement. Rocky may be too Franksteined in its bits and bobs to feel like it came from anything but the original, perverted imagination of its creator Richard O’Brien. And there’s nothing quite like the phenomenon that surrounds it — apart from perhaps The Room or Showgirls, it’s the only film whose screenings have a real and intense participatory culture. The difference is that Rocky’s creators are in on the spirit of the jokes.

But in retrospect, the phenomenon surrounding Rocky seems almost inevitable.

In it, newlyweds Brad and Janet (a breakout role for Susan Sarandon) take refuge in a spooky castle where they meet Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry, also his breakthrough role).

A mad scientist and “sweet transvestite” from the planet Transylvania, Curry’s punk-glam character and rouge lips have become as iconically drag as RuPaul or Divine. He introduces the squeaky clean couple to Rocky, a hulking half-brained himbo brought to life by Frank, and much music, murder, hedonism and sexual subversion ensues.

In her defining 1964 article Notes on Camp, critic Susan Sontag connected the celebration of camp — the exaggerated theatricality of cheap comics, naive musicals and B-films — with a private, quasi-ironic code among urban gay men.

About a decade later, the sexual liberation movement fully in swing, Rocky arrived — a boomer sneer at their parents’ social conformities, but also an homage to the campy monster movies they grew up with.

In our hangover decades after the sexual lib era, Rocky’s celebration of the grotesque and libertine has sometimes been criticized for leaning into homophobic stereotypes. Frank especially can seem a little too monstrous, a predator even, to be the film’s beloved anti-hero.

But for Bostwick, the film is fundamentally about community and liberation among social oddballs and the main reason it still rouses millions of fans across generations to show up in drag and shout things such as, “A chicken stepped on this man’s forehead!”

“There’s a dialogue of insanity that goes on in the theatre. This movie was made by outsiders for outsiders,” he says, giving much credit to Curry, who played a strong part in shaping his sensational character’s defining quirks, for its legacy.

“He was just enormously charismatic. I saw him onstage before we did the movie, and I had never seen a performance as as witty and as colourful and as full of love for who he was playing and for his audience,” Bostwick says.

“I’m hanging on to his end of his cape, being dragged along for 51 years.”

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.com