On Tuesday, you can see the world’s most famous midnight movie in Tempe. It’s showing at Gammage Auditorium at 7:30 p.m.
But despite the fact that many consider "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" passé, commentator Robrt Pela maintains there’s still a lot to appreciate.
ROBRT PELA: One night last year, my friend Kim and I — our husbands in tow — attended a screening of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." It had been nearly 50 years since she and I had gone to this groundbreaking movie musical together, and nearly as long since either of us had seen it in a crowded theater.
Back then, the world’s most famous midnight movie was just getting started as the cultural phenomenon it would become. This month, the movie is marking its 50th anniversary with all the usual cinematic bells and whistles.
Disney, which now owns the rights to Rocky Horror (insert ironic laughter here), is rolling out a high-res restoration, a Blu-Ray release, and a deluxe vinyl reissue of the soundtrack album.
Rocky is going on the road, playing all over the country in respectable playhouses, accompanied by original cast members. At a screening next week at Grady Gammage, Tempe gets Barry Bostwick, who played straightlaced Brad Majors and who’s apparently gotten over his public disdain for the picture.
But in the 1970s in Phoenix, sneaking out of the house to attend a movie at midnight was the height of oddball behavior. For teenaged misfits in suburban America, the experience of watching Richard O’Brien’s campy parody of sexuality and science fiction films wasn’t about either of those things. For people like 16-year-old me, it was a hopeful promise: There will be a place for you one day. Look around at all these other weirdos. You’re not alone!
It was a message we needed to hear, way back when. But today? Kim and I both noticed that the throng of Rocky Horror fans at the screening we attended seemed sort of ... bored. Even though they jumped around, doing the "Time Warp" — the musical’s signature dance number — and yelling rejoinders at the screen — a longtime Rocky Horror tradition — there was a certain monotony in their catcalls.
There was less of the urgency and joy we remembered having at 1 a.m. on a Saturday, our shoes sticking to the filthy floor of Phoenix’s Sombrero Playhouse.
But these teens and 20-somethings grew up in a world that had evolved, landing closer to Rocky Horror’s ethos of radical self- expression. They knew that if they wanted to, marrying their same- gendered love interest was an option; that even claiming a gender was up for grabs in this new world. They hadn’t needed that promise that “fitting in” was over-rated; that equity was on its way. They could see it, closer every day.
And lately, somehow, yet again, they do need — just as we did — some reminder that they’ll overcome this unfortunate era, where conservatives are trying to dial back the inclusion clock to 1975. Rocky Horror’s hopeful message — that queerness isn’t just valid but colorful and transformative — offers that same hope and solidarity we discovered, in the dark, yelling at a movie screen and throwing rolls of toilet paper — when we were the kids. This crazy, beautiful little movie is offering a different promise today: If a bunch of weirdos from Transexual Transylvania can make it back home, so can we.
Stand strong, and as Tim Curry once sang from a swimming pool, in fishnets and a merry widow, “Don’t dream it, be it.”
