Rocky Horror

The day I started working there, the managers and projectionists told me that I just had to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which played on Friday and Saturday midnights. It was the worst movie ever made, they assured me, perfectly dreadful, but the audience reactions beggared all belief. Okay, sure, I’d like to see it. I had seen the preview at The Guild sometime before, and was not at all impressed, which is why I was not expecting much. They booked me to run three midnight shows. The audiences back then were much wilder than they are now. People queued up for blocks, perfectly made up and costumed, some of them indistinguishable from the characters on screen. We sold out every midnight and had to turn people away. The managers and projectionists told me that I should start the movie and then lower the lights, because the audience would go wild instantaneously, like a thunderclap. The fire chief introduced at least one of those three shows, to lay down the law that there were to be no candles, no cigarettes, no lighters, no joints. The audience, as one, booed him, loudly. I started the movie and then lowered the lights. As soon as the first frame was on screen, there was an instant roar that rocked the building and was probably heard over in the next county. Then there were candles, cigarettes, lighters, and joints. Because we were instructed to crank the sound up as high as it would go, there was no point in using the booth monitor, since it would simply shut itself off with such a high input. We just opened the porthole windows if we wanted to hear the movie. The booth and the auditorium were on different ventilation systems, and so I got the draft of 238 joints for two hours straight, blowing forcefully and directly onto my face. I had been taught that second-hand marijuana smoke is psychoactive, and so I was worried. That first night, I learned that second-hand marijuana smoke is not psychoactive. I sure as heck needed to do my laundry the next day, though.

I’ll tell you, though, that the moment I saw the Fox logo accompanied by electric piano, and then the highly unusual opening credits, I realized that I was about to witness one of the greatest movies ever made. I was right. The audience members were a bit annoying; they were distracting me from the movie, dancing right in front of the screen. Enough already, I thought to myself, get out of the way so that I can watch this heavenly movie! Over-the-top, flamboyant, no-holds-barred comical exaggeration beyond the point of absurdity generally appeals to me, and there’s too little of it in this world. (I am one of maybe six or seven people on the planet who has ever enjoyed L’urlo and Lisztomania and Fellini’s Casanova. I find them addictive. Others find them repulsively, painfully, offensively dull and meaningless. To me, they are of a piece with Rocky Horror.) The next time the managers and projectionists saw me, they asked what I had thought. I said that the audience was interesting as a curiosity only, but that the movie itself was fantastic, brilliant, funny, lovely, out of this world. They were stunned. Ernie couldn’t believe his ears, and asked, “No, you mean you hated the movie, but you liked the audience, right?” “No,” I explained, “I loved the movie.” They were dumbstruck, and I got the distinct impression that their estimation of me took a nosedive as soon as I said that. The second or third time I ran the movie, I took along a cassette recorder and placed it in the little space in front of the booth, the little space we would occasionally crawl into to check on the sound. That was on Friday night/Saturday morning, 16/17 June 1978. Somewhere in storage I still have those cassette tapes. Unfortunately, that was the one night that, out of habit, I lowered the lights first. Drat! There was a crescendo of cheers as the lights went down, rather than the sudden roar.

Just to set the record straight: No release print or video of Rocky Horror is authentic. All have been reformatted, re-edited, remixed. The print I ran was certainly altered from the original, sometimes quite plainly, such as the two shots near the beginning that were reframed to fit on widescreen, and, unlike the first handful of prints, it was missing “Super Heroes,” and there was a terribly noticeable jump at that deletion. Even not having known anything about it, I could see that something was missing there. It was also bilateral monaural, another change from the original. I don’t know how much was production audio and how much was ADR and postsync. My best guess is that it was almost entirely ADR and postsync, with pre-record for the songs. Nobody believes me, but I know for an absolute certainty because I saw the print and I ran it: It was shot entirely with the Academy 1:1.375 aperture in the cameras and, except for the first reel or two, was composed for a 1:1.75 crop. 1:1.66 is wrong. 1:1.85 is wrong. As I confirmed when I bumped into Graeme Clifford sometime around 2005 or 2006, in the original studio prints, never seen by the public, the opening of the film, up to part-way into “Time Warp,” was optically reduced to be a miniature 1:1.375 image in the middle of a 1:1.75 screen. Graeme Clifford also confirmed that the film was miked and mixed in four-channel stereo with Dolby A noise reduction, just like I thought it was. It was probably the first movie ever recorded and mixed in four-channel stereo with Dolby A noise reduction, and though the prints made for the studio screening room were certainly optical Dolby A, I doubt that any original release prints were optical Dolby A. After all, no cinema in the world would install optical Dolby A until Star Wars came out in 1977. Optical Dolby A can play perfectly well on monaural equipment, but, nonetheless, I think the optical release prints were all mono. (For the record, the first optical Dolby A movie was A Clockwork Orange from 1971, which was three-channel: left, right, surround. It was never released that way, since producer Kubrick could not get a confirmation that any cinema would install the proper processors. That’s why Kubrick did a monaural remix, which is what went out to cinemas. The mono remix retained the overly bright highs, which would normally have been rolled off; that is why the sound is so appallingly harsh.) Graeme Clifford could not remember for certain if “Once in a While” had made it to the final cut. As I learned later, it had been included, but was deleted by 20th Century Fox immediately prior to release. The original spherical prints, which are now all lost, had a Dolby logo on the end credits, with the double-D, and the end credits and end music were entirely different originally. How do I know? Before vanishing, one of those prints was copied to video and I have a pirated VHS of it. Some of the roadshow prints were converted to 1:2.35 anamorphic (top and bottom cropped) with four-channel mag/op stereo. Other roadshow prints were 1:2.35 anamorphic optical monaural. Those prints have all vanished. The four-channel stereo is now lost. Multichannel reissues were synthesized from the monaural mix-downs, sometimes mixed with the Original Soundtrack LP, which was recorded separately and should never have been used for this purpose. Nobody believes me, but I insist that this is the truth.

A week or two after I started, the matinée shift was ending, and Ernie had just arrived to run the evening show. I was at the inspection bench, about to check out and go home, when a staffer ran up the tiny spiral staircase and poked his head into the booth doorway. “Hey guys, [the owner]’s wife is downstairs and she’s not wearing a bra!” Ernie and the manager instantly leapt up and all three men darted down the little spiral staircase as quickly as lightning. I just looked at them, dumbfounded, as they vanished before my eyes in a nanosecond. I was in a state of disbelief. Now, everybody knew that the owner’s wife had been a Playboy Bunny, which meant nothing to me. Also, the managers and projectionists made no secret about how stunning she looked, and about how thrilled they were whenever she showed up. Because I never dashed down the tiny spiral staircase that evening to gawk at her, I still do not know what she looked like. I don’t gawk. I don’t like gawking. It offends me. These are the guys who thought I was an immature little kid. I did not disagree, but that evening I saw with my own eyes that they were less mature than I was — far less mature. (Late-added note: I found some photos of her from the local newspaper. She was a high-school cheerleader, then a photo model, and later a socialite. Had the photos not been captioned, I would never have recognized that those vastly different faces belonged all to one person. She died on 1 October 1992, and her obituaries made no mention of her ex-husband. Another gal, with the same name, and born the same year, now resides in Santa Fé, and I wonder if she’s related.)