For anyone in the LGBTQ+ community, The Rocky Horror Picture Show isn't so much a rite of passage as an induction video. Mention the film in a group and at least one person is liable to tell you how Susan Sarandon's rendition of Toucha-A Touch Me was their sexual awakening, how Tim Curry in fishnets was how they knew they were queer or, even in the quieter moments, how hearing I'm Going Home stopped them from plunging off the deep end.
It's not just a cult film, it's the cult film. Starting from Richard O'Brien's surprisingly brief script in a small sixty seat theatre to a production that has never stopped touring, and a film that has never been out of cinemas globally, his son Linus directs Strange Journey, a documentary about the stage show's inception all the way to the present day.
It's perhaps because Linus is connected to the show—his father was writing it while he was but a wee lad— that the film has a candidness about it. Naturally all the old favourites are there to talk through it: O'Brien himself, Patricia Quinn (Magenta), Nell Campbell (Columbia), Tim Curry (Frank-N-Furter), Susan Sarandon (Janet) and Barry Bostwick (Brad). But, Linus also manages to get time with Peter Hinwood, the film's Rocky for a very rare interview. It's this sort of insight that makes the film really sing.
Anyone interested in the show/film will know a lot of the stories. How Curry based Frank's voice on a woman on the bus, how O'Brien wanted to play Eddie, how they bolted Quinn's head to a vice so she wouldn't move while singing Science Fiction/Double Feature but the film isn't just a puff piece about the making of an iconic film.
Linus wisely stops the history lessons every so often to examine the importance of moments. Of women's liberation and Janet's sexual desire, the commodification of masculinity and Frank's flouting of it, and as the film goes on, how the cult that grew around the film was salvation for the queer youths of the world at a time AIDS was rampant and prejudice rife.
Linus gets great stuff out of his father, who discusses his own conflicted sexuality at length, how he never truly felt 100% male and, how this fed into the production, as well as looking at the importance of LGBT culture in the wake of the midnight showing. It's interesting also to hear the likes of Lou Adler, legendary producer, discuss the risk of making the film and examining why it flopped so badly when it was released into cinemas.
The film, much like the one it's chronicling, is a joyous one, but it's also very melancholy. Naturally the passage of time means several cast members—Jonathan Adams, Charles Gray and Meatloaf —are no longer alive and cannot comment on the film. It's also darkly funny how Richard O'Brien sings the songs to camera quickly commenting “I've not got much time left”.
As if Rocky Horror ever needed more celebrating, but on the occasion of it's fiftieth birthday it seems only fair to examine its strange journey: how it changed the lives of its creators and the legions of people who found their chosen family, their identity and their salvation in a film that was made for less than a million dollars, made no real money in the multiplexes, and confounded critics.
It's a film that found it's audience the way Brad and Janet found Frank's castle: by total accident, and of course, by absolute fate.
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror is out from 3 October
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