FAMILIES Village Idiocy

You can see them any Friday or Saturday night. The kids, I guess of an average age between sixteen and twenty, begin lining up in front of the Village Theatre in Highland Park at 10 or 10:30. By 11:30 the line snakes all the way down the block past Pappagallo’s and up toward the corner of Douglas and Mockingbird. At midnight, 400 of them, a sell-out at $3 a ticket, file into the small upstairs theater for another showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And that’s been going on for two years now, since the film opened at the Village in May of 1977.

“Rocky Horror has got to be the champion midnight show of all time,” says John Atchley, the Village’s good-natured, sharp, harassed manager, when I mosey by out of curiosity one spring day. “In New York it just completed 156 weeks with a box office gross of $600,000, and it’s still going strong – there and all over the country. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

At approximately $2400 a weekend, the Village has grossed close to $240,000 on Rocky. A whopping 65 percent of that, some $156,000, the theater retains, as opposed to only 10 percent of the box office gross of such films as The Godfather.

“We’re cleaning up,” says Atchley. He laughs and shakes his head ruefully. “Cleaning up is right. We had to go to $3 a ticket because of the cleaning costs. You take two nights of people throwing rice and wienies and toast and toilet paper, of firing squirt guns on newspapers, of grinding it all into the rug doing the Time Warp – not to mention the kids who come in drunk and are too sick to make it to the restroom – and you’ve got a mess. But it’s worth it.”

I’d wanted to see Rocky Horror for quite a while. Six months after it opened, my daughter’s friend Russ, a sweet but spacey boy, brought me a jar of his grandmother’s homemade pear preserves and told me proudly he’d already been to Rocky 27 times. I was curious then, but at my age one doesn’t cheerfully contemplate the prospect of getting out of a movie at 2:15 a.m. But rice? Toast? Wienies? $240,000 from teenage allowances? I talked to Atchley on Friday afternoon, and that night I set the alarm, got up, and went.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is an outrageous musical assemblage of parodies of science fiction movies, Marvel comics, Frankie Avalon/Annette Funi-cello teen romances, and rock and roll stars from Presley to Frampton. The absurd and complicated plot centers on the confrontation between a couple of middle American Ike-Age kids, Brad Majors and his fiancee Janet Weiss, and the mad scientist Dr. Frank N. Furter, who bills himself in his opening number as a “sweet trans-vestite” from the planet of Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania.

But far better than the movie itself, night after night, is the audience. “When the film was originally released in 1976 on a regular run,” John Atchley says, “it bombed. You take your ordinary audience, they don’t know what to think about a movie like Rocky Horror. People walked out. But it really caught on when it went to midnight, and when the audience began to participate.”

And how they participate. Phil Latka, member of SMU’s Student Senate, says, “I saw it in Chicago when it first came out, and the audience just sat there. It was pretty dull.” Now, across the country, young people dress up elaborately like their favorite characters. Even kids who can’t or won’t learn algebra and history, who disdain church services, take part eagerly in a complicated ritual of stage business and dialogue based on the film. Atchley explains, “They can all join together, so it becomes kind of like a party to them. We’ve deliberately kept it in the small auditorium to keep the party atmosphere and the intimacy. Instead of a whole bunch of individuals experiencing the thing, they all seem to be like one person. It’s something.”

It is indeed.

Still semi-somnolent, I sit in the dark of the theater and wait. The nap has eased me from myself; my eyes rest peacefully on colors, shapes; I am slow to make conclusions. The house is full and in the closely packed overstuffed seats we all breathe together.

A slight blonde boy, sixteen or seventeen, in faded overalls and a Padre tee, is on my left. Our arms touch on the chair and I look around. “Have you been here before?” I ask.

“Sure,” he answers. “I come every week.”

“So often,” 1 marvel. “Why?”

He tosses his feathery blonde hair. “Oh, mostly to watch the new people,” he says, and grins at me. I look away, abashed.

On my right sit two boys and a girl; all are clad in stiff formal white shirts, black ties, black pants. They are dignified, aloof. Are they an act of some kind? I wonder, but they are talking quietly, so I don’t ask.

On the stage before the shrouded screen a little fat boy in a tee-shirt that says “Short people do it better” sits cross-legged, apparently lost in thought. As “The Sound of Music” and “September Song” blare from the speakers, others join him: a frizzy-haired girl in black with a lot of cleavage, two tall boys in business suits, fedoras, and dark glasses, a boy – girl? – in a green surgical gown and pink plastic gloves. They prance around, lie down, show off.

Then the stage clears, the curtain rises on an announcement: “Do not smoke anything in the theater.” We all laugh. Who wants to smoke an anything? We are settling into one mind, a nice feeling.

The movie opens with a white wedding in a small white rustic church. A large sign proclaims the location to be “DENTON, THE HOME OF HAPPINESS” Den-ton, Texas? We don’t know, but we all cheer anyway, here with our friends in the warm dark.

Janet, whom the credits call simply “a heroine,” in a pink mini, bouncing blonde curls under a white hat, and Mary Jane shoes, catches the bridal bouquet, and Brad, “a hero,” with horn-rimmed glasses, a JFK lock of brown hair, and a strong chin, is the best man. All around me kids are digging into baggies and pelting the screen with rice. Unwisely sitting down front, 1 have Uncle Ben crawling down my collar, in my hair.

Brad pursues giggly Janet into the church and hems and haws boyishly. “Ask her, ask her,” the audience chants. Thus encouraged, Brad launches into his big proposal number, “Dammit, Janet, I Love You.”

She accepts, natch, and the two Klean Kut Kids set out in Brad’s car to visit their beloved college professor Dr. Scott. Lightning flares, thunder rumbles, torrents of rain begin, and Janet and Brad immediately have a flat. “Get out and look!” we instruct.

Brad gets out and looks. “Kick it!” the audience yells. He kicks the tire. In her silly dress and shoes, Janet gets out of the car with a newspaper over her head. Newspapers suddenly cover the heads of the audience.

“What did you pass back there?” the audience queries loudly, and as if on cue, Brad turns to Janet, “Didn’t we just pass a castle back there?”

“No joke, Sherlock,” chants the audience. As Brad and Janet stumble down the dark road, my unprotected head is splashed by countless water pistols.

At last, a lighted window! Gratefully Brad and Janet sing a soulful “There’s a LIGHT.” On the word “light” dozens of Bic lighters glow for a moment in the dark theater. And again, “There’s a LIGHT,” and the transforming glow, like a midnight candlelight service on Christmas Eve. We are hushed with the beauty we have so easily made.

But evil lurks, and luckless Brad and Janet are unwittingly seeking help at Frank N. Furter’s castle, where a convention of Transylvanian transsexuals is about to witness the unveiling of FF’s latest creation – his male bride-to-be, a rippling-muscled simpleton named Rocky Horror. The kinky household retinue is presided over by FF’s hunchback henchman Riff Raff and Riff Raff’s incestuous sister Magenta.

Stripped of their wet clothes down to Brad’s athletic white jockey shorts and Janet’s I-dreamed-it-all-in-my-Maiden-form bra, our timorous two watch in horror as the freaks dance the Time Warp. In the row in front of me six kids in jeans, red gimme caps, and logo shirts stand and go through the motions too.

It’s a jump to the left

And a step to the right,

Put your hands on your hips

And bring your knees in tight,

But it’s the pelvic thrust

That really drives you in-say-ay-ay-ay-ayne!

Let’s do the Time Warp again!

I look around uneasily. All over the theater, in the aisles, between the rows, people are dancing.

It’s a jump to the left

And a step to the right – My serious black and white clad neighbors are now dancing in passive, perfect unison.

But it’s the pelvic thrust

That really drives you in-say-ay-ay-ay-ayne!

I feel the way I used to the third time through “Just As I Am” in the Baptist revival, with the altar full of penitents. You think you oughta do it, but you don’t wanta. I’m glad when the Time Warp ends.

Frank N. Furter appears, a young man with a heavy mobile face and a mop of curly black hair. Garishly made up, he wears a merry widow corset, a black garter belt, bikini panties, red garters, black stockings, and high-heeled purple shoes studded with rhinestones. He leers, he pouts, he writhes and wriggles. The crowd goes bananas. I’m a little shocked to realize that I think Frank is sexy as hell. 1 go bananas too, discreetly, of course.

An oafish motorcyclist named Eddie, played by the Texas rock musician Meat Loaf, plows into the castle wailing on a saxophone, and Frank dispatches him messily but casually with a pickax. “Picky, picky, picky,” we shout with gusto, and gasp in delicious horror at the trail of blood.

Dinner time, and Frank serves up a tough roasted haunch. Accusingly the crowd yells, “Meat Loaf again!” And when the grisly host then proposes, “A toast,” the stage is deluged by slices of specially prepared and smuggled-in toast.

My overalled neighbor nudges me and hands me some. I hurl it enthusiastically at the screen.

Now Brad’s and Janet’s dear old prof Dr. Scott, who also happens to be Eddie’s uncle, appears at the castle searching for his missing nephew. “Oh, Dr. Scott,” simpers Janet, “I’m sorry about your nephew.”

“Slut!” yells the crowd.

“You mean Eddie?” Dr. Scott asks stupidly.

The cry goes up, “No, stupid, the one in Cleveland.” We love our own wit.

Perhaps our greatest unanimity in this litany occurs after a musical beds episode, when Janet is caught in flagrante delicto with Rocky Horror and Brad ditto with Frank. A mock recognition scene follows:

DR. SCOTT: Janet!

JANET: Dr. Scott!

BRAD: Janet!

FRANK: Rocky!

ROCKY: Ugh!

– a sequence repeated four times. The crowd shouts happily, “Roll call,” and sings the names out smartly in unison.

Tired of Frank’s sadism, Riff Raff and Magenta suddenly appear in space togs with powerful anti-matter laser guns ana announce they are going home to Transsexual. Believing he is going to be taken back with them, Frank sings a Jolson-like number, “I’m Going Home.” Big tears run down his face, smearing his bizarre make-up. The audience knows he is going to die; they grow quiet and reverent. The impassive face of the black-white girl on my right breaks, and she begins to cry. A black-white boy hands her a handkerchief – white, I notice. They all feel very sorry for Frank. So do I.



John Atchley has warned me, “The kids hate Brad, hate all the straight people. They’re against people in the movie who represent the ordinary part of society. But they worship Frank. They haven’t joined the norms themselves yet, I guess, and they like to have somebody to look up to who shows them they can be different.”

Kristin Gazlay, 20, an English-journalism major who edits SMU’s student newspaper, The Daily Campus, agrees. “It makes a lot of lonely people feel better. People envy Frank because he does what he wants to do in a way they can’t.”

In a Campus column, Kristin described Rocky Horror as “like a disease: Once you’ve contracted the fever, you can’t see it just once.” In our conversation, she elaborates, “People who go all the time don’t have anything else to do. That’s their idea of culture, like people who read nothing but Tolkien. They may be intelligent, but they get quirky, go off on a peculiar bent.”

Yet Kristin, who has the healthy good looks of a Seventeen model, acknowledges having seen it “four or five times, maybe more” herself. “I did get caught up in it. I know it’s tacky and cheap, but that’s the way I liked it. You know?”

Kim Flagg introduced Kristin to Rocky. Kim, a broadcast-film major with long dark hair, an impish face, and bright brown eyes accented by enormous glasses, brought news of it back from her hometown of Omaha. “I just loved it – I thought it was hilarious.” Kim, who says she’s seen the move “16 or 17 times, I guess,” also sent off for the press kit, and has compiled a hefty notebook (in a New York Life Insurance binder!) which includes her own taped, transcribed, and typed out script – “so we could think of some really good lines to put in.”

On Kristin’s 20th birthday, several of her friends rented a light blue limousine, took her to dinner at the Reunion Tower, then came back to Rocky. “We were all dressed up – the guys had on suits, and I was wearing a shiny purple dress and heels and had my hair all curled. When we drove up to the Village in the limo, and the chauffeur came around and let us out, the whole line applauded. They thought we were celebrities.”

A lot of the fun lies also in taking novices to see Rocky. Kim says, “Once I took a guy who was very macho and egotistical. He kept looking around the whole time to be sure he didn’t know anybody there, but he liked the film. He thought they were mocking gays, and he really liked that – he completely missed the point.”

What is the point? “1 think a lot of people are letting their aggressions out, doing something ’wrong’ behind their parents’ back that everybody else is doing. It’s a really safe way to rebel.

“It also makes the audience feel powerful,” she goes on. “We get to tell the characters what to do, and they do it. We’re in control.” She pauses to reflect. “Then you know, you have a dark theater and a lit screen – alter the conditions and people would be different. It’s nice in the dark being one of the group.”

The next Saturday night I go back. Ricky Weaver, a student at Tarrant County Junior College, is standing in the line wearing a Frank N. Furter outfit. Ricky, who is tall, thin, and good-looking, seems barely covered by his bikini and corset, but he is not self-conscious: “I didn’t actually try the high heels on when I bought them, so I had to cut off one of the straps to get them on. But they look okay, don’t they?”

I assure him they look great. Alison Holcomb, who stands beside him in a black leotard adorned with sparkle, points proudly to his hair. “I put it in curlers for him this afternoon. But he looks just like Frank N. Furter, don’t you think?”

Exactly.

This time I know the ropes. I sit way back in the back, safe from the rice, toast, and wienies. I don’t chant anything, but once or twice I applaud pretty wildly. And when Brad and Janet sing, “There’s a LIGHT,” and all over the dark theater dozens of Bics glow prettily, I find myself reflecting that at this moment in Chicago and Phoenix and L. A. and New York, thousands of kids are holding cigarette lighters aloft.

It must mean something, but I don’t know just what.