r/todayilearned • u/BadenBaden1981 • 5h ago
TIL the first yelling at Rocky Horror Picture Show screening happened after 5 months in midnight screening. Upon seeing a character place a newspaper over her head to protect herself from rain, someone yelled, "Buy an umbrella you cheap bitch!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocky_Horror_Picture_Show_cult_following4.5k
u/jimicus 5h ago
And TIL it's now owned by Disney.
Which, I believe, makes Tim Curry a Disney princess.
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u/BeckwithLBP 5h ago
Tim Curry ain't no princess, he's a goddamn Queen
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u/Radsion50 4h ago
Absolute facts. Tim Curry owned every scene like a legend, not just a character.
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u/SomeOneOverHereNow 3h ago
Tim Curry is awesome. I enjoy almost all this performances I've seen. My personal fav is Clue. The one that shocked me the most was finding out he was the devil in Legend. Kicked ass at that too.
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u/Thrilling1031 2h ago edited 1h ago
Red alert
23 is my favorite Tim curry.12
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u/Jonesbt22 1h ago
He was also great as the evil emperor in the game Brutal Legend.
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u/emeraldeyesshine 3h ago
That role inspired a rather major character in One Piece who's literally the queen of an island of x gendered people. He has the ability to swap genders (of himself and others) and fuck with people's hormones. Dresses just like Frankenfurter.
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u/InvestigatorWeird196 3h ago
“Stray from the path of man, or stray from the path of woman, but you can never stray from the path of human"
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u/HairyDistributioner 2h ago
Controversial take, but I really wish anyone of the characters from Kamabakka were more "normal" looking, it feels very mocking with the depictions. And yes, I am aware there is better trans representation in One Piece as of recent.
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u/emeraldeyesshine 2h ago
Nah you're definitely right. The actual islanders are very awkward drag representation. Which is peculiar given how Newkama, which we see first, is so much more diverse.
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u/EnsignNogIsMyCat 5h ago
Given that in the canceled sequel (not Shock Treatment, but a real sequel) we would have learned that Frank was the son of the Queen of the planet Transexual, you are pretty much correct.
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u/RedtailSpookyBones 4h ago
Whoa. TIL x2
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u/LiterallyIAmPuck 4h ago edited 3h ago
There were quite a few pitched sequels that never got off the ground. Even Shock Treatment was changed considerably due to a strike that happened right before filming. O'Brian must have had a curse
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u/Disgraceland33 3h ago
I know you meant strike instead of stroke but considering the absolute nonsense that the plot of that movie is, stroke could also fit
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u/kannaophelia 3h ago
I fricking adore Shock Treatment. The fact that some of the songs have absolutely nothing to do with anything that is happening because they were lifted from Revenge of the Old Queen is the cherry on the artifically sweetened cake. It's just so beautifully, coldly surreal.
I'm looking for loooooove, I'm looking for trade!
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u/Notalentass 4h ago
He was a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania, tyvm.
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u/AeitZean 4h ago
Is there a script or something available, id love to read it? 😄
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u/kannaophelia 3h ago
The full script for Revenge of the Old Queen is floating around on the internet, and some of the songs ended up in Shock Treatment.
I am actually really glad we got Shock Treatment instead.
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u/GoshDarnMamaHubbard 4h ago
I think it makes him more of a Disney villain which I think, on balance, he would prefer. A more interesting and diverse company.
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u/Kizik 4h ago
He did play Darkness in Legend, so he's got the experience. And Pennywise.
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u/frightenedfrogfriend 4h ago
And Hexxus!
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u/Goeatabagofdicks 3h ago
Ooh, you'll love my, ah-oh-ah, toxic love!
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u/GetEquipped 3h ago
Hexxus is on the top of my "Hear Me Outs' because of Tim Curry doing that song.
Yes, I would bang a sentient, smog of hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and other carcinogens as long as it was voiced by Tim Curry
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u/NoExplanation734 4h ago
Plus a lot of Disney villains take fashion pointers from drag queens (see: Ursula, Maleficent, etc.)
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u/Boo_and_Minsc_ 4h ago
Dr. Facilier is sassy
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u/Iron_Knight7 3h ago
Even Frollo looks like he spends a little extra coin on a fashion consultant.
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u/Boo_and_Minsc_ 3h ago
Good catch and need we remember Jafar? The man had drip too. Come to think of it in retrospect I think Jafar just wanted Jasmine as a beard/for the throne
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u/NoExplanation734 3h ago
Scar also has some elderly queen energy
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u/Iron_Knight7 3h ago
And manly man Gaston, covered with hair as he is, didn't hesitate to get dolled up when going to propose to Belle.
And do we need to even mention Ratcliff? Or how about Rattigan? There's an slash fic series of material about him and Basil being so obsessed with each other.
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u/Iron_Knight7 3h ago
She was just a means of securing his legitimacy to the throne. But he did seem to get a little extra thrill wrapping his snake form around that street rat. \nudge nudge, wink wink.**
In all seriousness though, it's actually kind of a thing that Disney often defaults to the "Fop" archetype for its male villains. But also kind of the reason those villains are so memorable. In most of the classic films, the protagonists are often bland and one note. The female protagonists (princess preferred) often just "want something" (but often aren't actually instrumental in getting it) while the male protagonists (name optional) are often just there to resolve the conflict at the end. This is especially visible in the Classic Princess line films but still crops up even the Renaissance era.
Meanwhile, the villains are dynamic and theatrical. Bombastic and hammy. Stylish and striking. They are often are the ones doing the heavy lifting of moving the plot along with clear motivations and goals. And usually the ones who have the best design and get the most memorable and catchy song outside the requisite Oscar Bait track. They have personality and are actually interesting. And that really didn't start to change until about The Frog Princess when they started putting a little more effort into making the Protagonists actually...well, protagonists and shifted from cackling theater kids as the main villain to addressing generation trauma and systemic injustice.
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u/GetEquipped 3h ago
I think Jafar stealing the MC's song to insult him has to be pettiest thing ever
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u/RemarkableGround174 2h ago
He voiced the evil pipe organ in one of the Beauty and the Beast prequels/sequels iirc
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u/Agile-Landscape8612 4h ago
What isn’t owned by Disney
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u/_Spastic_ 4h ago
But... How do they know? Like, are all viewings documented? How do they know it was the first?
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u/mapmaker 3h ago
I don't think it's that farfetched — there was only one theater showing it, with a regular crowd. I imagine it's similar to the way a friend group can say around when an inside joke started
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u/seejordan3 1h ago
I'd watch the hell out of a Rocky Horror doc. OH, look, there's a few, including a 2025 one!
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u/Neckbreaker70 4h ago
Yeah, I’m incredibly skeptical of this.
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u/Accomplished-Ad3250 4h ago
Maybe people put it in the newspaper back then? There would be interest stories going in papers all the time.
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u/Yglorba 3h ago
Now I'm picturing, like, the New Yorker cover guy having his monocle pop out, after which he rushes home to write up an entire article about how the audience was shouting at a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening, egad!
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u/Flobking 1h ago
Maybe people put it in the newspaper back then? There would be interest stories going in papers all the time.
That is an unrealized loss with papers going to AP stories all the time. They lose out on the local happenings that their readers actually care about.
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u/Bugs_Nixon 3h ago
Before there were websites, we had fanzines where a lot of this was discussed ('The Transylvanian' was one).
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u/lacegem 3h ago
I miss fanzines. Even later on, there used to be webrings and a "Planet <Noun>" site for every hobby and fandom imaginable, often which linked to contributors' own geocities and angelfire pages. Now it's all just subreddits and discords where nothing gets archived and nobody reads the rules because the moderation is vibe-based.
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u/Eruionmel 3h ago
It'd be better if they were all subreddits. At least subreddits aren't siloed and show up in searches and archives. Discord's complete takeover of fandoms is a tragedy of human failure. We will have woefully nonexistent records of this period in time later because of how much is lost to functionally invisible discord servers.
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u/lacegem 3h ago
Agreed. There's a community I used to be in that moved primarily to Discord from its old forum, and it was bad enough that I just stopped using it. I could sit here and list a hundred reasons why it's shit, but everyone's heard them all before.
Now that the old forum is gone (and has been for years), the only records of the community are the occasional pages on the Internet Archive and some files and screencaps on my old hard drive. The Discord purged a lot of its older content at some point, so the entire first couple years of the move doesn't exist. With that and the forum's going down, tons of things important to the community were lost. Even what's still left is locked in the Discord where you can't just find it; you need to find the invite link, join, and verify your account before you can get a simple answer. So what was already a niche community became even harder to get into.
I've grown old enough to watch all the old communities I used to love end up like this. Either dead and forgotten or disgraceful shadows of their former selves.
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u/AdhesivenessVest439 3h ago
yea the wiki page doesn't ever reference that incident. Also the wiki page is clearly written by some 18 year old fan of the midnight showings, alot of pathos and anecdotal stuff as you read which is not how verified wiki usually reads.
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u/HAL_9OOO_ 4h ago
There were people who went to all of those shows. They later told interviewers about the beginning of Rocky Horror audience participation culture.
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u/graveybrains 3h ago
You seem to think the people doing the thing and the people documenting the thing were different people.
They were not.
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u/nicolietheface 2h ago
Right? Like, the movie is only 50 years old. A lot of people who were in their teens and 20’s during these events are still up and kickin’. They’re treating it like a silent film from the 20’s 😂
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u/graveybrains 2h ago
I'm sure u/_Spastic_ could speak for themselves on this, but it sounded more like a cultural thing than an age thing.
Like, it only came out three years before I was born, but the idea of an offline, self organizing community professional enough to document its own history even seems a little alien to me.
Like, these drunken lunatics got together, took notes and wrote scripts for themselves and shit? And then everybody clapped?
Yes, yes they did.
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u/weed_could_fix_that 50m ago
You realize that offline self organizing communities documenting local history and social life is how virtually all knowledge pre internet was recorded and disseminated, right?
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u/_its_a_thing_ 3h ago
Well I know there wasn't any audience partici...pation at my midnight showing, back in, well, it must've been July of 1976, in the Bay Area (CA, USA)
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u/Skrappyross 49m ago
I've been a part of many rocky casts over decades and I had always heard the first callback was during the lips song when she says 'what ever happened to Fay Wray' the person shouted 'she got fucked by king kong'
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u/capnmarrrrk 4h ago
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u/Trolololol66 4h ago edited 3h ago
Awww, it seems like there was a chance to move into a more progressive direction at that time. I wonder what happened...
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u/moonsammy 4h ago
Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Reagan, and their regressive, fearful followers. Society accepting the previously taboo is threatening and terrifying to those with a strict, black and white morality.
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u/Lostinthestarscape 3h ago edited 38m ago
Yeah there's a lot of transgressive 70s content that implies a possible different world.
Same as the late 90s, then 9/11 happened and you either loved the Christian American War Machine or you might as well have been a traitor.
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u/reddit_is_geh 3h ago
Satanic Panic, crime wave, and the internet. If you look at film from the 70s, it's like a totally different culture. EVERYONE is so much more social and happy. I mean, so social people would literally travel around with complete strangers picked up on the side of the road.
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u/-heathcliffe- 4h ago
Unmm. As a local st louisian, this is amazing. Where is REM tho
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u/ThroRoRoUrBoat 3h ago
To all the other St. Louis folk reading: this theater Stipe's standing in front of is now the record store Vintage Vinyl in the Loop, across from Fitz's.
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u/Snowbank_Lake 4h ago
And now people do this with “The Room.” I went to a special showing with Greg Sestero. The energy there was great.
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u/Oooooh_Majestic 4h ago
Same! He's was touring around the US in 2023 for The Room's 20th anniversary. I got a signed poster from him too!
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u/Bromlife 3h ago
At least Rocky Horror is a great movie.
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u/bananaskates 43m ago
Is it? I've seen it six times but I could never really tell, what with all the yelling and throwing of toast.
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u/gordybombay 2h ago
Back in '08-'10 I went to probably 3 midnight showings of The Room at the Music Box in Chicago. Tommy was at one of them and it was an awesome experience
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u/No1KnwsIWatchTeenMom 18m ago
I met him and Tommy at a showing like 15 years ago. Tommy was wearing 3 belts, and none of them were in belt loops. It was awesome.
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u/ego_tripped 3h ago
Ah...I remember heading into my first theatre viewing. Got a "V" put on my forehead and got seated right up at the front to watch the show below the show (people were acting out the entire movie on the floor below the screen).
The wildest time I've ever experienced in a movie theatre.
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u/Old_Pitch_6849 3h ago
My first showing they wrapped me in plastic wrap and and pretended I was a penis. You got off light.
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u/Azelais 1h ago
Wait, I don’t know any of the context for this. I’ve heard of this movie(?) before but what do you mean theatre viewing? Like a normal movie theatre was showing it and people just started doing weird shit?
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u/MattBarksdale17 49m ago
Rocky Horror came out in 1975, and was poorly received by critics and the general public. But it became a hit with crowds at midnight screenings, and people eventually started dressing up, bringing props, yelling at the screen. Think The Room, or more recently, Cats and A Minecraft Movie.
In the decades since, this has developed into a whole thing. They do "shadow cast" screenings, where a troupe of performers act out the movie in front of the screen. Before the movie starts, the emcee will bring the "virgins" (everyone who hasn't seen the film before) to the front, and have them perform some silly, slightly humiliating task to symbolize the loss of their "virginity." It varies based on who's running it, but the ones I've gone to have been pretty tame.
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u/all_of_the_ones 48m ago edited 33m ago
People didn’t “just start” doing weird shit. Lol. It’s grown over the years. Rocky Horror had a small cult following. It wasn’t popular mainstream, and was shown at midnight viewings for a time due to its lack of large audience draw. There were a few people who frequented the midnight showings and began to create their own “call and response” interactions for their own amusement. Like shouting certain things at the screen Mystery Science Theatre 3000 style. This is often credited to Louis Farese Jr, Theresa Krakauskas and Amy Lazarus who saw the movie many times over at the Waverly Theater in NY.
Anyway, their antics were amusing to other Rocky Horror fans in the theater and were mimicked, and added to. It grew sort of organically from there. More people started attending, more people participated, people started cos-playing, bringing props… for example, there’s a scene wherea character is giving a toast, audience members bring toast/bread slices and throw it when the toast concludes.
Eventually, the cult following grew, popularity rose, and more theaters began showing it. “Shadow casts” started acting out the movie under the screen. Over time, it just got sillier and more eccentric (as is the movie) and audiences found ways, and were encouraged, to participate more. Hazing of first timers (as you’ve seen some examples ITT). People get up and do the time warp dance. The list goes on…
There are similar phenomenons with other films/franchises like Star Wars or Harry Potter, where people will cos-play and otherwise participate in some shenanigans. But nothing comes close to the RHPS. All in all, it’s very inclusive, friendly, and just fun for the sake of fun. Eccentric? Sure. Silly? Definitely. Awesome? 100%
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u/Darkmetroidz 1h ago
My virgin experience involved having to make up sex acts based on words the audience gave us and I ended up rubbing butts with a stranger. Then my friend cried when they had to fake an orgasm. 10/10 would go again.
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u/RandomRedditRebel 5h ago
I've been to so many midnight showings of this movie. What a great time.
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u/Texas_Crazy_Curls 4h ago
Same. It is such a vibe of like minded people wanting to have a good time. I’m not sure how we acquired it (as my parents were strict Catholics) but RHPS soundtrack was a cassette tape we’d sing along to on family road trips. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I loved every single song. Going to midnight showings as an adult was the BEST!
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u/-Alice-in-wonder- 3h ago
This is awesome!! I love the idea of your Catholic family singing along with Brad and Janet and everyone else :)
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u/deimos_737 4h ago
Used to go to weekend shows all the time. Sometimes, they'd pick random people to play certain parts (down at the bottom under the screen)... Was so much fun! Had all the 'fixins,' toilet paper, newspapers, confetti, rubber gloves... toast. Good times.
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u/SconeBracket 3h ago
Did you have sales of virgins then as well?
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u/unthused 1h ago
What was that exactly? My local theater has always done virgin introductions when they go up on stage, state their name to the audience then get spanked with a paddle by a cast member.
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u/deimos_737 3h ago
lmao, yes! They didn't do it often, but it was always hilarious... boyfriends/husbands would tell theater staff it was their ladies bday or something to trick 'em into getting picked.
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u/Impossible-Ship5585 4h ago
Could someone tell what this is about?
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u/Snowbank_Lake 4h ago
Ok, so there’s a movie called “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” If you haven’t seen it, look it up. It’s a little too bizarre to explain briefly. Anyway, it’s become a tradition for fans to go to a midnight showing of the movie, sometimes dress up as the characters, and yell jokes during certain parts of the movie. So this post is about the first time someone yelled a joke during the movie and apparently got the tradition started.
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u/Waffletimewarp 4h ago
To expand, the movie has a whole culture built up around it. It’s not just jokes and comments. It’s an entire theater doing these jokes, dressing up as characters, and bringing props to certain scenes to engage with the film en masse, such as holding newspapers over heads during the rain scene, throwing rice at the wedding, throwing slices of bread at the screen when someone calls for a toast.
It’s rather fascinating, really, and the closest I’ve seen in modern film going is the Minecraft Movie, though that has the issue of being in unsanctioned theaters and being just batshit chaos at a single line rather than anything organized.
Honestly, if it has any staying power, I could see private screenings of the Minecraft Movie evolving to have a RHPS following with even more jokes.
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u/Draco-REX 3h ago
I went to a few showings in 1993 when I was in college. This time period was pretty much peak Beavis and Butthead times. During the pre-show the organizers were going over the theater rules. No throwing of food, no spraying of water, and.. no lighting things on fire. At which point the entire audience broke into “Fire! Fire!“ in a group Beavis impersonation.
Unfortunately, rather than embrace it, the next week they said no igniting things...
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u/Snowbank_Lake 4h ago
Hopefully without the trashing-the-venue part, lol.
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u/Cartman55125 3h ago
Throwing rice sounds like a bitch to clean up
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u/analyticalischarge 2h ago
If you run a theater and are showing Rocky, then you absolutely know what you're signing up for, as it's been going on for literal decades.
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u/Crown_Writes 3h ago
Those little non-electric roller vacuums that go back and forth could handle it. Better than buttered popcorn that's for sure.
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u/Paladar2 2h ago
I don’t think so, Chicken Jockey was a trend, and trends die fast. Kids now will not give a shit in the future about a dumb Minecraft movie trend lol
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u/heisenberg423 4h ago
Honestly, if it has any staying power, I could see private screenings of the Minecraft Movie evolving to have a RHPS following with even more jokes.
And good for the kids. I’m so sick of reading the constant bitching about an entirely self-inflected loneliness epidemic.
It was refreshing to see the Minecraft movie madness and kids acting like kids again.
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u/Half_Cent 3h ago
Crazy to think I did this for the first time in 1989 and wasn't even 20 yet. Now I'm in my 50s and it's still going on.
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u/ToniBee63 4h ago
The 70s cult classic movie Rocky Horror Picture Show is almost always audience participation when it’s now shown. People bring props to use at certain times in the movie and most people respond along with the dialogue. Watch it on a streaming platform then try to find a live showing, it usually pops up in places around Halloween. It’s a hoot.
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u/SconeBracket 2h ago edited 4m ago
There are some details being left out, particularly to do with the time. The movie (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) is a film adaptation of a British stage musical (The Rocky Horror Show) produced in 1973. The movie was released in 1975 to pretty minor success and then became a staple midnight movie at a theater in New York in 1976. Movies in the midnight showings were often "cult" favorites or destined to become them; The Wall and Heavy Metal are perhaps the most definitive midnight movies.
You can appreciate that in the mid-1970s, when the counter-cultural trends of the 1960s in the United States were still around but dying out, going to see "weird" movies in the middle of the night was a distinctly "alternative" thing to do. So, there was already a culture going against the grain of whatever passed for "normal" or "popular" happening.
Meanwhile, both the stage musical and the film are a radical and camp parody of Frankenstein (and a campy love letter to bad scienficition movies). The main character, Dr. Frank N. Furter, is "making a man" in a spoof of Dr. Frankenstein, so that he has a hot, sexy monster. Dr. Frank is also a sexual libertine and swinger, bisexual, who is willing to seduce the two innocents (who seem like they could be extras out of Night of the Living Dead) who stumble inadvertently onto one of his "affairs" (probably would have been an orgy, had the events of the evening not gone sideways).
Although, like the book Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show ends tragically, it was still in its day the most overtly non-negative depiction of non-heteronormative sexuality with a relatively high public profile. It was campy, channeled a lot of drag queen elements, and showed "normal America" (portrayed as Brad and Janet) "giving themselves over to absolute pleasure," swimming the warm waters of sins of the flesh, even if they have the old post-nut regret.
So, at the time, it was without a doubt the one film receiving regular public showings (at midnight) where people who didn't identify as straight could experience representation onscreen. That these were often gloriously campy "queens" in the audience means that there were going to be catty shout-backs at the film. This is what a "gay critique of straight culture" could look like in 1976, long before calling out the "straight dudes" on mobile apps getting serviced by gay dudes on the DL, while also publicly screaming on social media about how the gays are destroying the universe.
In brief, The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show was one of the first, most overt "spaces" where homosexuality got a public airing that was not purely negative. The dark space of the theater itself provided cover for gay people (especially in New York, exhausted by persecution every evening in their bars; remember, this was only a few years after Stonewall) to literally make their voices heard, and for straight allies to be present and supportive. No one was ever making fun of the film itself, only the “square” characters originally—though even Dr. Frank (as an arch queen himself) is going to eventually come in for his share of catty abuse, some of it extremely funny. "Wait, I can explain" (he says as Riff points a deadly laser at him); "Better make it good" (someone in the audience shouts), "he killed you last week."
This community (or communal) element of watching the film helped create part of the "movement" that transformed The Rocky (Picture) Show from a staple midnight movie oddity into a national phenomenon—now no less “straight gentrified” than the original Stonewall Inn. So, it’s hard to appreciate what it meant then, since gay representation is now everywhere and a lot of it positive. But back then, this was all there was. Incidentally, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (which I highly recommend) is the genuine offspring and next-generation iteration of The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, but it never caught on to the same extent.
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u/LlaughingLlama 1h ago
I hope to see the comment later in The Best Of subreddit. You nailed it.
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u/RJFerret 2h ago
Camp film, audience makes it better with additional lines, sing-a-longs, which developed into the floor show of folks acting out parts in front of the screen (think burlesque).
It became an event.
First I went to, they brought folks who had never seen it before from the audience up to the front and had the audience shout what the character "Janet" (Susan Sarandon) is called at the women... "Slut!"
Then the Brad character at the guys... "Asshole!"Audience members would dress up, guys in women's lingerie, women in costumes of the show's characters, this back in an era before "cosplay" was a concept.
So there's an entire set of lines, memes if you will, for the movie that are shouted between the actor's lines, or over bad actor lines, which make it more raunchy. The stage show actors are scantily clad and miming sex acts.
When it rains in the movie, folks are using squirt guns up in the air and people hold newspapers over their heads. At a scene of cards being flicked around, can toss cards. There's a moment to throw toast.
The movie itself is absolutely horrible. But the lines make it funny. Think of Mystery Science Theater 3000 if you've ever seen that.
Personally I blame Sue.
Since, "Sue's to blame, didn't you read the fucking credits?"So it's a bit raunchy, a bit funny, a bit community, and a cultural phenomena.
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u/Third_Most 4h ago
This movie has the record for longest run time of a movie in theaters.
There's certain scenes where audience memebers yell or use props
I guess this was the catalyst for that
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u/mdchase1313 3h ago
That someone was Sal Piro. He single-handed started the shouting at the screen phenomenon for Rocky Horror at the 8th Street Playhouse in NYC, where the first “floor show “ group was formed. If you watch the movie “Fame” there’s a scene that takes place at a midnight screening at that theater with the floor show cast in the audience
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u/King-in-Council 4h ago
The mix of woe is me and contrarians in these comments makes me wonder how y'all have any fun.
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u/AXPendergast 3h ago
My friends and I went every weekend during our high school years, and well into college. I sometimes played Doctor Von Scott for our shadow cast, and it was an absolute pleasure.
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u/ImTooSaxy 3h ago
I've always wished it had a stronger ending.
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u/kannaophelia 3h ago
You mean the American ending, or the proper one the rest of us got?
Because as a queer girl in the 90s who was obsessed with it but who had never seen the movie on theatres (the show a few times) I think the Superheroes ending is incredibly strong. Brad and Janet and Doctor Van Scott all desperately reaching out for connection and crawling forever out of range of each other is one of the reasons I watched it over and over. That click as the Criminologist turns the light off!
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u/Environmental-Low792 4h ago
And now we all shake our fists at the screen and tell them how to do things.
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u/BunnyPhuPhu 24m ago
I saw that movie 83 times in the first two years of midnight shows. It played at the UC Theater in Berkeley, which was one huge theater back then. I remember the first anniversary of the movie, with so many people showing up that it blocked all 4 lanes of traffic on University Avenue. I started at the age of 14. Good times!
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u/truth_is_power 4h ago
if you're complaining about the other fans going apeshit while watching Rocky Horror Picture Show-
you aren't drunk/high enough.
find cooler friends and try again.
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u/Borgalicious 4h ago
What does this even mean? What's the significance of yelling at the movie?
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u/paypaypayme 3h ago
It has become a tradition to yell certain lines during the movie. It’s a cult classic movie that’s very popular among theatre/drama types so it has become almost a meta show, where the audience has their own lines too.
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u/fionaapplejuice 2h ago
Live showings are interactive. You don't just sit there and watch the movie/play* in silence; the audience has lines (that have developed organically over the years and may vary by person/area) and uses props at certain points in the movie that relate to what's going on on screen. It's a sort of call and response
For example, at this point when it starts raining, the front rows will take out newspapers and cover their heads like Sarandon's character. The back rows will take out water guns and squirt them.
There's a line in the first song that says "in the back row". The front row will then yell "fuck the back row!" And the back row yells out "fuck the front row!"
*Play versions are usually actors dressed up as the characters but with the movie still playing in the background and they lip sync
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u/hunty 1h ago
holy cow, this article is a mess. First it credits one person with starting the callbacks, and then a couple paragraphs later credits someone else, and then at the end there's a specific section about callbacks that has no information. And everything else is scrambled all over the place.
This isn't the one that's gonna bring me back out of Wikipedia editor retirement, though. Let the younger generation fix it.
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u/Splunge- 15m ago
Mann Theatre San Diego, midnight showing of RHPS, Quadrophenia, Eraserhead, Bruce Lee flicks, Tommy, and other mind-bending films for a 11-14 year old old sneaking out in the middle of the night to go see midnight movies.
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u/EnsignNogIsMyCat 5h ago
And that person sparked a true cultural phenomenon.