The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The ultimate midnight movie leads to the ultimate cinematic redemption as Brian & Cargill enjoy The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

...how bout that? 


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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Come up to the lab and see what's on the slab.
I see you shiver with an anticipate All right, this

(00:36):
is Dick Miller.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
If you're listening to Junk Food Cinema, who are these guys?

Speaker 3 (00:59):
Don't get strong. It's a midnight episode of Junk Food Cinema,
brought to you by how about that dot com at
cam dot Com DoD perpetually caught in a celluloid jam.
This is, of course, the weekly cult exploitation filmcast. So
good it just has to be fattening. I am your host,
Brian Salasbrandham, joined as per usual by my friend and
co host. He is a novelist, he is a screenwriter,

(01:21):
a lieutenant at Mega Force, and together we are a
science fiction double feature. Mister c Robert Cargill, Hi, how's
it going?

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Man? It is going. It is ure. We are entering
my favorite period of the year, my favorite four months,
and I am very, very excited about that.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
I think we should just commit right now to making
this junk food spooky season, and it just doesn't end
until Halloween is over.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
I mean I would be done with that.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
Welcome to junk food Halloween spirit.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
You know how much I hate horror movies.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
I know you're not a big fan. You're not a
big fan at all, A cargil. Before we get into
what a massive, huge day this is for Junk Food Cinema,
we got to take care of the housekeeping, popkeeping, which
at this point is just sweeping the candy corn from
last Halloween out of the living room.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Finally, but I think, I think that's just Magenta running
around with a you know, with a duster.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
I mean, there's banisters that need to be dusted in
this house.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
That's why I have to sweep all this candy. Corse
keeps tap dancing and mashing it further into the hardwood.
But you know it's my fault for it being there
for almost three hundred and sixty five days, so that
one's on me. If you would like more of this
whatever this is, you can find eleven years of this
horseshit on your favorite podcast. You can follow us on
social media at Junk Food Cinema, And if you really

(02:41):
like the show, I mean, you really like the show,
if you like it as much as something something toilet paper,
you can go to Patreon dot com slash Junk Food
Cinema financially support the show. We greatly appreciate it. Cargiale Yes,
this is an auspicious day for junk food cinema.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
I believe there is a light over in the Frankenstein Place.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
There is a light that is hot under that geodesic
dome of the eleven years of this podcast. Because as
our longtime listeners, No Gargill, you and I have a
rule when it comes to this show, because we have
never wanted to be the podcast that makes fun of
bad movies.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
There are plenty of those, exactly.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
It's not even so much that we feel that we're
above that. It's just there's so many other podcasts that
already do that and do that so well, and honestly,
that's not really our jam. We like talking about the
movies we love, regardless of whether or not they're good movies.
And yeah, like we'll you will take the piss out
of it, but the way you would a good buddy.
Like it's a very different, very mean.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Just today I was throwing yelbows at a very good
friend of mine, Alan Surley Serny aka Nordling from AICN
because he had the audacity to shit on the glory
that is lost in space and I am not going
to let that insult just.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
Oh, this Cold War just got hot. Danger Surney, Danger Serny.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
We love you, Alan, we do.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
And I will never forget the time that I was
standing there next to him wearing he was wearing a
Star Wars shirt, a Star Wars hat and Star Wars
shoes and was talking about some movie and made the
comment that the He said the film was a comment
on nostalgia. And I looked at him and I said,
you're a commentary on nostalgia.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
He really is. He also but also this is a
man who has a hand typed letter from Steven Spielberg
thanking him for his twenty years later review of ET.
So he's got some bragging rates.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
There, and My Ocean's eleven sequel script is about us
stealing that letter. Point being, this rule that we have
in place is to make sure that we're upholding that
core value of always being the positive film podcast, talking
about cheesy movies, perhaps, but always the ones that we
genuinely love. And because of that, we have a long
standing rule that if either one of us deeply dislikes

(05:01):
the movie that is being discussed that week, unless of
course it's a patron request we don't cover that movie
because it really is no fun for only one of
us to be on board. It really has to be
a shared love for whatever the movie is. And on
top of that cargill in our mail bags. We would
often get the question, you know, is there a movie

(05:22):
that you won't cover on junk food Cinema or is
there a movie that you've decided not to cover on
junk food Cinema? And today's film was my go to answer.
Today's film is the movie that I went, Yeah, we
probably won't talk about this one because it's one that
I don't like. Mostly, I can't speak to the movies
that are just you have hard lines against necessarily, but
I could speak for myself and say that the Rocky

(05:43):
Horror Picture Show.

Speaker 4 (05:45):
This is an open letter to Richard Nixon. Dear Richard,
do go and see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. All
those unfortunate incidents will seem trivial after you've seen The
Rocky Horror Picture Show. President Ford he'd love to see it,
but he doesn't have the same amount of freedom you do.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
See The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Speaker 4 (06:07):
Rated R under seventeen not admitted without a pair is.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
A movie I have gravely disliked for practically my whole life,
but I decided to give it another chance given a
its massive cultural impact B and pursuant A there's a
new documentary about Rocky Horror. It's due out this month,
but really overall C because Cargill asked and I couldn't

(06:34):
come up with a good enough excuse, so I thought,
fuck it. We're getting into the spooky season. We haven't
had a cinematic redemption in a while. I did not
hold out a lot of hope that that's what would happen.
But I also know that my cohort over here has
major personal connections to this movie and the midnight show
culture around it. So before I go any further, I'm

(06:57):
gonna see the floor to the Delegate from Transylvania.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Yeah, so this is this is that movie for me.
I have always loved this movie. I was introduced to
this movie when I was fifteen or sixteen years old.
They don't remember exactly how old I was. I remember
where I was, how I went, and it was something
that I'd heard about for years. It was that legendary

(07:23):
cult film that people would talk about. You'd hear about
people dressing up, but you know, it really was, you know,
a subculture all its own. And one night I was
out at a game night with a bunch of local
friends that i'd met on the local BBS's and they

(07:44):
were all adults except for my best friend from high school, Chris.
He and I were there that night and someone didn't
show up. We weren't going to end up gaming, and
so everyone was trying to figure out what we're gonna
do because we're just there on a Friday night, and
someone sort of making Rocky Horror Picture Show jokes, and
people started throwing lines back and forth and we were

(08:05):
at a loss. We really, we don't know what you're
talking about, and like, you've never seen the Rocky Horror
Picture Show and we're like, no, I've heard about it,
but I've never seen it. We're going, So we loaded
up the car, we went, and it melted my little
high school fucking brain and instantly I had found my place.
I had found my tribe. And so from then on,

(08:25):
for most of high school Friday or Saturday nights, you
could find me at the Rocky Horror Picture Show and
I developed made a whole bunch of friends there I
went from being someone who wasn't dating anyone in high
school and not dating anyone on the regular, to all
of a sudden, I'm dating multiple girls all over town

(08:46):
who I'm meeting at the Rocky Horror Picture Show every week.
I have these dual lives, Like people from school would
come and they would see me there and they'd be like,
it's a fucking nerd doing here, And then all of
a sudden, I'm part of the show, a crowd hustler,
I'm around and afterwards they pulled me aside and have
this kind of like astounded like, wait, we didn't know

(09:06):
you were kind of cool? What the fuck is this?
And became friends with a bunch of people at school
who were people the type of people that would go
to Rocky and so it kind of completely changed my
my my social life as well as really got me
to come out of my shell and become the guy
that you guys know here, that guy you know learned

(09:26):
to be himself at Rocky Horror. And of course, eventually
I met a girl in fell in love with her,
and followed her up to Austin. Yah yah, yaha. You
don't need to know any of that, you know, the
woman who I've spent you know, thirty years of my
life with just a small thing. It really did impact
my life, and it was one of those things where
I have done it over five hundred times. Me and

(09:50):
my crew down in San Antonio, we had a bunch
of like comics that were a part of the group
and the like that were crowd hustlers, and so we
would invent our own lines on the regular. A lot
of shows around the country wouldn't and they would just
use the standard lines that had been around for a
couple decades, and we wrote new lines. And so eventually

(10:12):
people would come from other towns who are crowd hustlers
and they would come and watch our show and take notes,
and they would take a bunch of our jokes back
with them. And so to this day, if you go
to Rocky Horror in certain certain cities, you can hear
jokes that I wrote thirty years ago that just have stuck.
And it's a very weird subculture that way, and jokes

(10:36):
have been layered and layered and layered. The last time
I saw one in Austin, they were practically yelling over
each other new jokes, trying to squeeze in as many
jokes as possible into the thing, and I'd hear a
joke that I wrote with the joke of friend wrote,
and then something that was new that I'd never heard before,
all mixed together, and it's been this thing that has
been going like this for fifty years. And it is

(11:00):
a subculture for the misfits, the weirdos, the queer. When
you find a rocky horror and you get along with
those folks, you find your tribe, and you find people
that you may end up being friends with for the
rest of your life. As I have, I still am
in contact with several of my friends from the Rocky
Horror days. And it is a whole thing, and it's

(11:22):
it was never meant to be this, and that's what's
kind of beautiful about it is it's this weird, happy
accident of this weird ass film that was considered so
bad at the time people couldn't believe it and started going.
And then one night somebody yelled out at the screen.
And that famous moment was when Chan It's getting out

(11:42):
of the car and holding a newspaper over her head,
and somebody in Times Square yelled, buy an umbrella, you
cheap bitch and the audience laughed and a subculture was born,
and it is this incredible thing that for years has
been crawling up the track. It's the highest grossing movie
of all time because it has never been officially out

(12:05):
of theaters for years. Every every few years it would
be a big deal when Fox would go ahead and
announce that they were doing new reprints, so if a
theater had a print that was raggedy, you could get
a new print. And that was a big deal for
us in the nineties because for years we had a
print that was getting ragged but it was one of

(12:26):
the older prints, and the new prints included an extra
song that was originally put on the DVD, and not
a lot of theaters had it. So we got superheroes,
and we were over the moon that we had four
extra minutes of rocky horror every week to fill to fill,
and it was it was a whole thing. But yeah,

(12:47):
so this has been a huge part of my life
for a long time. I still can't watch it without,
you know, saying the lines, even to myself, even if
I'm not calling them out. It's just it's been ingrained
into me. A big part of me and I'm so
so thrilled, but we're going to talk about it.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
Today, so I wanted to make sure everyone got to
enjoy the parade before I came in and reigned a
little bit. When I'm talking about my relationship with this movie,
my dislike of this movie has weirdly snowballed throughout my life,
and all due respect to present company, I had more
to do with its fan base than with the film
itself like and I was always aware of that, But

(13:26):
I don't think I ever recognized how little of a
chance I ever gave the actual movie. Because I was
a theater kid all through high school and most of college.
So that happened like discovering theater happened like literally fall
of my freshman year. So I found my place very
early in high school, and I was surrounded at all

(13:50):
times because I was in the theater department by very
big personalities desperate for attention. Also, I was very much
one of them. Don't worry about it.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
But what guy with a podcast wants some attention?

Speaker 3 (14:02):
Don't worry about it. Look something about the hyper aware,
self indulgent like cheesecake love for the movie, which also involved,
you know, being loud and throwing things in a movie
theater kind of made my skin crawl because I think
as much as Austin catered to my sort of sacricynct
feelings about the theatrical experience, I feel like I've hated

(14:22):
movie talkers my whole life, and that's not necessarily fair
to put that on Rocky Horror. But when you coupled that,
when with the people I knew in the department who
were huge Rocky Horror fans, and how I couldn't really
stand them, I think those two things just kind of
culminated into me disliking it then, and then as I
moved to Austin and saw what the flip side of
that coin was when people did treat movie theaters as

(14:45):
a holy place and the cinematic experience was something to
be protected, it, I think it wrongfully or wrongheadedly validated
my feelings against this movie. And again, I don't think
I ever gave the movie itself a fair shot because
all of this was playing into it. Something I never
considered until now is that what I'm talking about and

(15:07):
bitching about ruining the theatrical experience is the exact same
thing people said about Mystery Science Theater yeah, which is
something I love and adore. And people say that Mystery
Science Theater fostered a whole generation of people who think
it's okay to talk during a movie. I never saw
Mystery Science Theater that way because that was a specific
space and it was speaking to a specific fan base

(15:27):
of a specific thing. That doesn't translate to all theater
going behavior. But guess what, that's also Rocky Horror. Like
my justification, my defense of Mystery Science Theater, I'm just
now realizing, is also a valid defense of Rocky Horror.
So all of this table setting aside, let's get to

(15:49):
the eating of the actual meat loaf.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
Here's literally and figuratively.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Well, literally and figuratively. I am happy to report that
this is officially a junk food Redemption EPISOD. So the
movie is redeemed. I am hopefully redeemed, And I only
wish that I could time more back many years and
tell my younger self to relax and enjoy, because give

(16:15):
over to the pleasure, because as it is astounding and
time is fleeting, madness does take its toll. When I
start thinking about all the viewings of this movie that
I've missed, and I will say this. I don't think
I I don't think I'm ready to ever go to
an actual live screening of this movie.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
It's its own thing.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, and I don't think it's my thing. But the
movie itself, Holy shit, this was This is a movie
that feels like it was custom made. Like we talked
about Freaky Tails last week, being sort of like born
out of this weird junk food cinema crucible figuratively like
that's also Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Yeah, no, let's get let's go roots. I mean, the
thing is is Rocky Horror Picture Show is at its
heart satire, but it's also a satire that burgeoned out
of a very interesting era. So the early seventies in
you know, the UK and the United States were really
kind of at a loss culturally. They it was one

(17:16):
of those moments where you know, in the US we
had hippie culture in the Summer of Love, and in
the UK they had some of that, but they had
mod culture and they had the swing in sixties, so
they had this very like where we in the States
had this very free love, hippie dippy nobody belongs to anyone.

(17:38):
Culture is changing, the youth are changing, the world. Everything
is peace now. The UK had fucking they were just
they were shagging, they were going to parties, you know. Uh.
London was just kind of the center of the universe
of this. And out of both, uh, out of both

(17:58):
those eras emerged a greater tolerance would be a good word,
but a greater embracing of queer culture and the idea
that hey, maybe we break down these social norms a
bit and there are people that are like this. These
people are awesome. They should be able to live their
life their way as well. And Richard O'Brien was one

(18:21):
of those people in the UK, and he decided he
wanted to make a very queer musical and at the
same time found himself very inspired by the nostalgia of
the kind of movies from twenty years before the nineteen fifties,
the things he had grown up with, you know, these goofy,

(18:42):
tongue in cheek science fiction movies, and had this brilliant
idea to make a satire of all those bad movies
and make it as a stage play that was in
and of itself essentially a bad movie that would then
not only have fun with those types of films, but
also have something to say about queer culture and be

(19:04):
able to be queer out in the open, while also
because it wasn't widely accepted, keep it a little bit
more in the closet and be a little tongue in
cheek about it and be a little cheeky. And so
he created this incredible stage play which I've gotten to
see live and was amazing and did incredibly well, came

(19:27):
over here to the States, you know, played on on Broadway,
was a big hit over here, and then, of course, indelibly,
as happens with most big productions, we should make a movie.
And that's where everything starts going wrong.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
And that's honestly, that's something I had written down to
kind of discussed as we went along, but you brought
it up, the LGBTQ connection to this film. This is
something that I was too ignorant and or too privileged
to understand in my teens, even as a theater kid.
Because you know, I'm grateful that being in that world
exposed me to a lot of great people all along

(20:06):
the sexual spectrum, but as a straight white kid from
the suburbs, there was no way for me to grasp
the degree of need to belong you know, to have
a community in which you can take refuge when the
world is cruel and bigoted, because you know, I wasn't
facing that adversity. So you know, this being a movie
all about androgyny and identity and liberation and pleasure and

(20:29):
refusing to conform, it's it's a film that's directly challenging
the conservativism of its day. And it's funny because they
couch that challenge within the trappings of rebel culture from
the fifties and how things like greasers and rock and
roll music challenged the establishment of its day. But the

(20:49):
world being what it is right now, I feel like
one of the other things I took away from this
viewing is that we can't really afford to discount or
throw out any films that embrace sexuality and freedom and
gender identity and boundless expression. So yeah, like that was
that was another big takeaway from me and I, you know,
in understanding why queer culture has so embraced this movie.

(21:13):
So again, just allow me to apologize for my teenage
self not grasping that. But it's definitely a situation like
we need to embrace and champion these movies for sure,
and that's that's something that there was no way I
was going to grasp as a teenager.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, I mean I got I was fortunate in that
when I was fifteen, my my best friend came out
of the closet and and so I was challenged right
then and there. So when he and I started going here,
going to Rocky Horror on Friday and Saturday nights, the
thing about it was that for the first time, I
was exposed to the fact that he wasn't an outlier,

(21:53):
that there were a lot of people like this, and
that that community and belonging was important. And so that
was that was burned in me in my teen years,
so that by the time I was a senior in
high school and my friend was out out and everyone
in school knew he was gay. Everyone just assumed I
was gay too, because I was hanging out with him
all the time, and the amount of times I was
consulted in high school was astounding. But because of this community,

(22:18):
I learned to take that on the chin and just
be like, Okay, that's not an insult, Like, I know
you think it's an insult, but you and I are
on very different have very different worldviews, and you don't
realize that you're the one that sounds like they need
to be insulted here. And of course it's very easy
for me, as a CIS white guy to be like

(22:39):
to just let that blow off and just take it
on the chin like that, because that's again white privilege.
You know, I was being a straight guy. It's very
easy for me to blow that up. But at the
same time, you know, that was there was still that
you know, intense in the nineties, especially in Texas, that
intense pushback and this really you know, going to Rocky

(23:02):
Horror once twice a week really did restructure my brain
in a way that that that made me much more
widely accepting of all of this and and and understanding
and getting to know people, so that by the time
I was an adult, I was you know, I was
fully formed in that respect, and I could not could

(23:24):
not appreciate the myriad of people I got to know
over the years who taught me UH and that all
came from this like the importance of that community cannot
be understated, not just to UH anyone who is queer
and was trying to find their place, but to those
of us who are trying to find our tribe. Uh

(23:47):
and acceptance because we were, you know, we were our
own little weirdo misfits on our own and only really
felt comfortable in that kind of community. And uh and
and and boyd I find my dribe after these messages,
We'll be right back.

Speaker 5 (24:04):
Rocky Horror Picture Show is a must for all of you.
So if you're into science fiction, music, horror, comedy, or
dare we say it, sex, The Rocky Horror Picture Show
is the video and soundtrack for you. The Rocky Horror

(24:26):
Picture Show out now on video and compact disc. Just
look for this horror display a record on video outlets.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
If you haven't seen The Rocky hor Picture Show, It's
a movie about this very square, naive couple Janets and Brad, who,
after witnessing a couple of their friends get married, decide
that they are going to become engaged and they are
going to visit their high school science teacher, doctor Scott,
when on the way they get a flat tire and

(24:54):
they go to use the telephone at this big creepy castle.
And inside the castle they meet a manag of weirdos,
including the butler Riffraff, a maid named Magenta, a group
he named Columbia. And then of course doctor Frankenferter, a
transvestite mad scientist who runs the show in this house
and is doing an experiment to try to bring to

(25:15):
life a tall blonde man named Rocky. So that is
the general setup around which we we have so many
legendary musical numbers, so many great uh so many great
set pieces. But honestly, I respect tremendously in the movie,
it shocked me, not shock treatment, It shocked me how
quickly Rocky Horror won me over on this viewing from

(25:39):
the opening musical number, which is literally called late night
double feature Picture Show Michae Garinis.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Still he told us grim stand and flash Cordy with
rains with the Invisible Name.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
And I respect tremendously that that song could easily be
the official anthem for this podcast.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
M hm.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
The very origin of the stage show is not at
all dissimilar from what inspired us to create our podcast.
Like you said, just O'Brien's love of b cinema and
those science fiction double features that played in drive ins
when he was a kid, Like.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
That opening, That opening song is full of direct references
to the movies he grew up lumbing. Yeah, like they're
not invented, they're they're all about that air and are
they not invented their name checked. That's like we're just
going to list a bunch of them, yeah and uh yeah,
and and then it goes in and hits all of

(26:50):
the tropes along the way. And you can actually, if
you know your your horror and genre of the thirties
through fifties, you'll identify where most of this stuff comes from.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
Absolutely, and and and talk about this being a foundational
junk food cinema movie. I mean not just because of
Cargill's relationship to it, and not just because of all
of the fifties b sci fi movie references, which, by
the way, as a teenager, I wouldn't have gotten half
of these, right, But Tim Curry and Barry Bostwick are
themselves foundational components of our specific deep fried movie love.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
Oh yes, oh absolutely uh Look, and Hay Spunter is
one of the stars of this movie.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Come on the good guys this week.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
I mean, dude, not only is eight Hunter one of
the stars of this movie, I have no bullshit performed
damn it Janet with Barry Bostwick on stage.

Speaker 3 (27:52):
Amazing.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
We were at a that convention, that famous convention where
he deemed me, gave me, made me a lieutenant magapors.
Part of the reason I had earned that in his
eyes was the fact that, uh, he was doing He
and several of the cast members were there for a convention.
Nell Campbell was there, Patricia Quinn was there, and the

(28:13):
three of them were gonna do it on stage with
folks and uh, you know, do Q and A and
and do some of the performances on stage. And there
was a audio issue and the audio dropped out right
as damn it. Janet was going and he just looks
off stage and he goes, Cargil, you know, the words,
come on up, and he brought me up and I

(28:35):
didn't know the words, and so I played Janet and
it was a fucking blast. It was. It was one
of those bucket list items like done, check that one off. Yes,
but but yeah, Barry Bostwick and Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon
absolutely a big part. You know. She she was in
so many of the movies we we grew up with.

(28:58):
And of course you can't be an eighties kid and
nineties kid without loving meat loafs. So like there's there's
so much here.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
There really is, and that's the moment Cargil earned his
ranking as lieutenant of Mega Force, in the very moment
that he made it a contractual obligation that I mentioned
it at the top of every episode, that is not true.
It's very true. I had to sign paperwork. I don't
know what the opposite of this is true. I don't
know what the opposite of an NBA is, but I
had to fill that out. That said, I would say
every single opportunity that I got that Cargolo is a

(29:28):
Lieutenant of Mega Force, and I've been upholding my endo
that bargain ever since. But I did want to mention,
you know, you mentioned being at a convention with Barry Bostwick.
One of the things I did in preparation for this
episode is I watched this this nineteen ninety five documentary
on the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's currently on YouTube,
and one of my favorite moments in that whole documentary

(29:49):
is they have a lot of footage from these live screenings,
and they also interview a lot of the original cast
members that show up for these screenings, and of course
Tim Curry is there and he walks into this packed.
You know, it's nineteen ninety five. He's looking immaculate. He's
got his hair slick back, probably honestly coming directly from
the set of The Phantom, which I love, uh, because

(30:11):
he looks he literally looks like his character from The Phantom,
And I'm like, I'm pretty sure he just stepped off
the set. He looks out at the crowd and he says,
I think I'm the only person here tonight he doesn't
look like me, because everyone's dressed like Frankenfurter, and here
he is in a suit with his hair slick back,
and he's just like, I'm the only one here who
doesn't look like me. Oh, it's so good. It just

(30:33):
it warmed my heart. And that's the other thing, man, Like,
how dare I? How dare I refuse to savor another
Tim Curry performance?

Speaker 1 (30:44):
And not just one of one of his greatest performances.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
Yes, yes, not just I mean he is absolutely slaying this.
He's also a total smoke show. Like I don't know
if you've ever seen young Tim Curry, but the dude
total smoke show. And knowing what he's currently struggling with
and how much I adore him as an actor, it
would be insane to not love and embrace the exceptional
work he's doing here. I mean, he's not just chewing

(31:08):
the scenery. He constructs an entire replica of the set
out of cake fondant, coats it in peanut butter and
hubba bubba gum, and then proceeds to chew on it
with his mouth wide open. Oh yeah, it is one
of the greatest things. And then on top of all
of that, belting out these songs beautifully, beautifully. It's an

(31:29):
incredible performance. Like, he absolutely has earned every bit of
cult icon status that this movie afforded him. And I
love that he never stopped. He kept taking risk after
risk after risk, playing interesting character after interesting character after
interesting like. This is the reason we love Tim Curry.
Tim Curry is a fearless actor. Tim Curry is a
guy who takes seriously every single thing he's given to do.

(31:49):
It literally does not matter the size of the role,
it doesn't matter the quality level of the movie. If
you hire Tim Curry, tim Curry is gonna treat it
like he's putting it on his fucking oscar Real.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
And that's why we love him absolutely. And this didn't
do him a lot of favors.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
His first film role, and this is his first film.
In terms of the success of the movie out of
the gate, I imagine there were a couple of weeks where
he went, am I going to be able to do
this ever?

Speaker 1 (32:16):
Again? Oh? I mean I've talked about this in the past,
but mid mid eighties he would go to conventions and
to events and he had a button that he made
for himself that said great for turkeys, and and yeah,
he was like at that point, He's like, look, if
you if you're the type of person that's gonna coak
to me and talk about Rocky or a picture show,

(32:38):
you're probably not making an Oscar movie.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
So yeah, I'll be in it.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
And that was his thing, and you know, but he
but of course he would always bring it, which is
why he's one of the legends, you know. And yeah,
he's so fucking great in this.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
If you're going to be the kind of asshole that
comes up to me and talks about the Phantom or
tells me to stop eating your sesame cake, you're probably
a host of junk food cinema. I went full Jeff
Foxworthy on that without doing the voice, and I'm proud
of myself for not doing the voice.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yeah, but at the end you really wanted to that.
I can hear you there it is. You couldn't stub yourself.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
If you've ever argued that The Phantom is on par
with Tim Burton's Batman as the greatest Dart deco superhero
movie of all time, you might be a host of
junk food Cinema.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
Uh and Curry, of course was he was in the
stage show.

Speaker 3 (33:30):
He was.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
I don't think he was the first American Frank Conforter.
I can't remember, but he did do it on Broadway
and he was part of one of the casts. I
can't remember if he's original cast or not. There are
people out there that are like car Gil. How do
you not know that? It's like because I'm not from
that end of Rocky Horror.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
That's another from the West end of Rocky Horror.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
No, no, no, Like. The thing is is that what was
weird about Rocky Horror is that every city would have
its focus on different things. Like you never I never
attended a city that had its focus equally spread out,
And so there's three different ways to do Rocky Horror,
and you'd see every place kind of puts its focus somewhere.

(34:13):
One of course, is the one everyone knows, which is props.
You know, some places love the props, throw the rice,
squirt the squirt guns, cover your head with the newspaper.
You know, there's tons of physical gags that allow audience
participation and some places focus on that. The place where
I came from, we always had a cast, but we

(34:33):
focused online calling. That was you know, we the line
callers pretty much kind of ran everything. We were the
main thrust of what people did. Because of the the
size and shape of our theater that we had, it
was hard to see the actors, so a lot of
actors would get frustrated that they weren't to start the show.
And we have a rotating cast of those. And then

(34:54):
I've performed like out in Tempe, Arizona, where they had
a full on stage in front of the screen at
the theater where they shot it. Where they showed it
in Mesa down on Mill Street, and that was a
very cast centric version. While I was there where it
was you know, everybody took it very seriously and line callers,

(35:14):
I guess, like when I showed up and started, you know,
having a whole host of jokes that they had never
heard before. All of a sudden there were other people going,
oh shit, I guess we're doing line calling at this one,
and we got additional line callers. But the focus was
always the cast and the man, the cast manager was,
you know, running the show there. And so you always

(35:35):
get this like mix of people and experiences depending on
where you went. Some places would have no line calling
but amazing casts up front. Some places would have casts
that would sing along and had you know, we're great vocalists.
Other places would just be full of props and you'd
walk in and you'd be handed a bag of stuff

(35:56):
and you know, playing cards and things like that. You know,
and you'll you'll know when to do it. And so
the one thing that everything has in common is sacrificing
the virgins, which was always a big thing and in
some way, shape or form, embarrassing the people who are
there for the first time and don't know better than
not to admit that this is their first time.

Speaker 3 (36:17):
And of course the other reason I will not go
by the way is because I know.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
That you've seen it. You know, when they go, hey,
has anybody here never seen the right on your picture show?

Speaker 3 (36:25):
If you haven't seen the movie, Okay.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, it's not your I mean some places might be like, oh,
or you know, have you never seen it live in
a theater, We're gonna harass you. But if you've seen it,
you've seen it, like it's all about popping that cherry.
And uh, if you've heard about it but haven't heard enough, that,
don't admit or you know, some people wanted it. Some
people love to be like, fuck, let's go. You put

(36:48):
a put a big V on my forehead, bend me
over in front of the crowd, simulating anal sex with me. Whatever,
let's go. The first time I met Jessica, I did
not meet meet Jessica the first time at her I
met her in passing after having auction off her friend
in the virgin auction and they laughed shortly after and

(37:10):
would come back a year and a half later when
me and jess would actually meet. And that is that.
That is the weird. Me and my wife kind of met,
you know, and saw each other from Afar a year
and a half before we met and fell in love.
But yeah, the experience was always weird and different, no

(37:30):
matter depending on where you went.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
Yeah, I feel like I'm gonna have to already be very,
very plastered before I dive into that Todd Browning fever
dream of a live performance of The Rocky or Picture Show.
But I also just want to point out that I
believe you mispronounced it. It's not audience participation, it's audience participate.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Patient.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
There it is, and I am delighted to be able
to inform you of something about your your favorite movie
and its origins. Tim Curry was the original Frankenfurter from
the very first West End production of The Rocky Horror
Picture Show. And then I believe it's the Los Angeles
production in seventy four where meat Loaf comes aboard if

(38:13):
I remember correctly, as Eddie, the motorcyclist who comes blazing
out of a freezer to challenge the attention of the
room away from doctor Frankenfurter, which he cannot have.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
A greaser from the freezer like a bat out of hell.

Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah, it's a bad at hell man. That's catchy. I
think we should do something with that.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
That is right, Like I feel.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Like calling calling him, being like, hey, meat Loaf, you
know that name of your album you're looking for, Well,
listen to this. And I just play himself saying Bad
out of Hell. Look, I love meat Loaf, not just
the food, but the actor slash singer. He's amazing in
this movie. He's turned in some of the greatest rock
ballads of all time. Bad out of Hell is one

(38:56):
of the greatest rock albums ever composed. Do not fight
me on this. But what I love most about this movie,
and again, something I don't think I gave the film
enough of a shot to realize before, is that Richard O'Brien,
for all of the other B movies that he's referencing
that he's paying tribute to, this is him making his
version of Plan nine from Outer Space. M h Like,

(39:19):
this is Richard O'Brien making the Hammer Studios version of
Plan nine from Outer Space, where conceptually we're mixing sci
fi alien invasion stuff with gothic horror elements, which is
exactly what Plan nine is, right down to the vampire
in the graveyard and hell. Even the fact that Frankenfurt

(39:40):
is a transvestite feels like a more sexually liberated decades
tribute to Edwood, who not only directed Glenn or Glenda,
but was also by many accounts of transvestite himself. So
this whole time, I have languished under my disdain for
this movie. I wasn't nearly as educated in be cinema

(40:01):
as you know, things like being a critic and being
an Austin and doing this podcast have you know allowed
me to be so all these wonderful references in Homaja's
bounced off me, and I just I didn't appreciate it.
But that's essentially what Richard O'Brien is doing. Is like,
what if I did a rock opera that's my version
of Plan nine from Outer Space, if it was made
by Hammer Studios, if you had pitched the Rocky or

(40:22):
a picture show that way to me, Like when I've
moved to Austin and just didn't tell me the title
of it, I'd be like, I want to fucking see that.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah, And I mean, and it's loaded with it is
so loaded with stuff. That is that That is like
in our core DNA, like it's obsession with RKO pictures
in the way that we're obsessed with canon. You know,
our Ko had been dead fifteen years when when it
first uh played on stage, and and so this was

(40:53):
this was nostalgia, This was Hey, remember this logo Hey
remember this. You know there's a king long reference in
this fucking movie.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
Yes, there is. And you know what, Cargill, if there's
something that you and I are going to appreciate, it's
logo specific nostalgia. And I love that it's It's r
KO is the biggest one for sure. There are references
to Universal, to MGM, to uh, what was the one
that Capra created that was the logo was just an
eagle holding it looks like the.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
NRA logo Republic Pictures.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah, there's a reference to that in this fucking movie. Yep,
that logo specic not just movies in the catalogs of
these studios. I'm saying specific nods to their fucking logos. Yeah, yeah,
that is so specifically our shit.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
That That's the thing about this movie. The reason why
it's it was so well regarded on stage and the
reason why there was the rush to make it as
a movie is that the if you got the joke,
the joke is super fucking smart. Yeah, Like, this was
really a really clever reinvention of this nostalgia we grew

(41:56):
up with, aging up with us and now being about
sexual freedom and the how conservatism can walk in and
fuck up that sexual freedom like this is you know,
Brad and Janet are what destroys everything. It's not really
just Frankenfurter's madness and his obsession to create the perfect

(42:19):
man for himself, but he, you know, these conservatives come
in and his desire to destroy them and to expose
them as being you know, the bisexuals or possibly even
homosexuals that they are. Really it is part of the undoing.

(42:42):
But it's them themselves and what they bring with them
and the damage that they do while they're there. That
is also part of the danger. Like there's a lot
of subtext here about what was happening in the late sixties,
early seventies, what through the lands of really bad fifties movies.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
Yeah, No, it's the violent resistance to repression, especially self repression. Yeah,
that's that's what this movie is going for. And I
love that about it. I also think the production design,
the costuming on this flick are so fucking on point.
And you want to talk about a movie that's baked
into our DNA cargil the Oakley Court in Windsor, England,
which is basically serving as the castle in this movie.

(43:26):
It was the same location used for hammer films like
The Brides of Dracula and oh yeah, Screaming Starts, the
Old Dark House and a detective smooth movie that you
and I both love, Murder by Death.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Yeah, well, and the Old Dark House is where they
really stole the opening plot of that. Like the opening
of this movie, Brad and Janet's car breaking down in
a rainstorm and needing a telephone is the the the
impetus in the Old Dark House, and so getting to
use the Old Dark House in the parody of the
Old Dark House is in and of itself its own

(44:01):
genius little piece of ephemera.

Speaker 3 (44:04):
Dude, I'm about to play reference tennis with you right now,
and I don't care. I don't care if it sounds
to the listeners like I'm Chris Farley doing an episode
of The Chris Farley Show on SNL. Do you remember
the before we even get to the broken down car,
when they're coming out of the church, when when Brad
and Janet are coming out of the church and they're
talking and you look at exactly how Barry Bosstwick's hair

(44:25):
styled and the outfit he's in, the glasses he's wearing,
and suddenly they're walking through a cemetery as he begins
his song, and then you hear the thunder. That's the
fucking opening of Night of the Living Dead. Yep, that's
literally like all that's missing is the black and white.
That's it. Like that is damn it, Janet, that's the
opening of the Night of the Living Dead.

Speaker 1 (44:45):
They're coming to get you, Janet.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
And then then then who fucking shows up as the narrator,
car Gill Charles mother fucking Gray as the criminologist shows
up him Krim to show us what's happening in this movie. Yeah,
that's right, Blofeld himself, Hnderson himself, Blowfeld and also Hinderson
himself from the James Bond movies. Is the goddamn criminologist

(45:08):
narrating this whole thing.

Speaker 6 (45:09):
And I god, ah, I would like a neck. If
you may, you may not, you may take you on
a strange journey. Oh so good, a strange journey? Jump
up my ass?

Speaker 3 (45:26):
Is this is this banter from the live Oh yes, okay,
I can't I can't tell if it's just you're you're
quoting the references from the live show. You're just drunk
and surly already I have.

Speaker 1 (45:38):
The weird thing about this is I literally have seen
this movie so many times just watching it as the
movie itself and watching it you know with a live audience,
that I have two versions of this movie completely coded
into my brain. Like you start naming, you know, you
start off with with lines of dialogue from the movie.

(46:00):
I will throw the lines of dialogue back, or I
will be driven to give you the lines of dialogue
that the line callers would call back, because that is
I just I did it so many times. The reason
I was able to do it so many times was
because where I lived in San Antonio, the Fox Theater
which the Central Park Fox, which no longer exists. It's

(46:22):
a parking lot now with strip centers in it, sadly
rest in peace. It had two screenings a week at
ten pm because nobody did anything in San Antonio after midnight,
so their midnight was ten pm. And so as a
high school student, I was able to go twice a

(46:45):
week every week and do that for years. And so
you do that every week for fifty two weeks, you
just cleared your first hundred. And I did it on
the regular for over five years, and then off after
that and it's uh uh it was, yeah, I saw
when I saw it live, they actually gender swapped Krim

(47:08):
and and by the way, Chrim in the stage show.
They by the way, they embraced the heckling at the
stage show. So they literally at shows of Rocky Horror
on stage now in the West End, if you go
to see it, you went. Whenever they have a revival,
they will plant audience members who will call lines out
to get you comfortable with calling lines at them, so

(47:30):
that you because otherwise you'll have audiences that are like,
I don't think we're supposed to do that here. Uh,
So they literally have plants in the audience to make
that happen.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
That's fucking amazing.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
After these messages, we'll be right back the Rocky horrorsal lining.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
Halloween Knight at the Organic Theater.

Speaker 1 (47:53):
You've seen the movie.

Speaker 7 (47:54):
The all new production of the all time called Client
Think is coming live on say three, can file Rocky
Horror Show take a while you can at the Organic
Theater and take a master.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
Of Buddy Her Friend of Mine.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
The Rocky Horror Show.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
By the way, the guys on the motorcycles like that
passed them on the road. Not so much meat Loaf
because if you look at meat Loaf, his whole look
is styled after Elvis, because at one point they wanted
Elvis to play this role for the movie, and Elvis
was like on board. And apparently Elvis, oh huh yep,
thank you very much. Uh No, he actually went to
a few performances of Rocky Horror Picture Show and Meet

(48:39):
Loaf talks about him like holding court with with Tim
Curry and Meet Loaf and they're just sitting there listening
to Elvis talk like he invited them over. And I'm
just like Jesus Christ, if there's a fly on the
wall moment that I can go back to, I want
to be a fly on the wall. And the meeting
between Elvis, Meetloaf, and Tim Curry, that's a that's a
mad Libs reality.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
Yeah it is that.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
I'm all about it. But the motorcyclists that that are
passing them on the road are one thousand percent modeled
after the motorcyclist in the British horror film Cyclemania. That's
not something I would have known as a teener. That's
not something I would have known when I first moved
to Austin. But like all these little, tiny references all
throughout the movie because that's how much Richard O'Brien loves

(49:20):
this shit, and it's such a great love letter to that.
By the way, speaking of Richard O'Brien, forget about all
of the creative talents that went into creating this. How
good is he his riff raff?

Speaker 1 (49:32):
Oh, he's the He's the riff raff. There will never
be a better riff raft than Richard O'Brien.

Speaker 3 (49:39):
My favorite part of him doing this is I was like, man,
I love this voice he's putting on where it's kind
of like a little Boris Karloff, a little Peter Lorrie
and it's this great affectation. Then I watched the nineteen
ninety five documentary. Turns out that's not an affect. That's
how Richard Bryan actually fucking talks.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
They didn't like me, they never liked me.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
Now you are my prison. Uh, Like, it's authentic weirdo
shit he is doing. Like, it's not a thing he's
putting on. He's just an authentic weirdo And I'm f
it's a Oh my god, the fucking dude. Not since
your Hunter from the Future as a movie decided at

(50:21):
the very end to go, oh, you know what, we're
sci fi now, like there's always been a little bit
of sci fi, but it turns out aliens as well,
like I know, all this Haunted House stuff and where
we're doing the Frankens, but also aliens too.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yep, from from uh, Transsexual Transylvania.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
Yep, the planet transsexual in the Galaxy of Transvestite or
the Galaxy of Transylvania. It's so oh my god, it's
so fucking good. Oh so good.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
No quick aside, it also looks fucking great. Oh yeah.
And the reason is cinematographer Peter Suski, which was always
a fun gag at the beginning where you could go Ski,

(51:09):
but he he would go on to you know, he
had already directed some things, nothing huge at that point,
like it was, you know, he was doing a lot
of stuff in England. But after this he do Listomania,
The Empire Strikes Back, Kroll, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, The Vanishing, Immortal, Beloved,

(51:32):
Mars Attacks, Man in the Iron Mask, Exist Ends, Red Planet, Spider,
History of Violence, Eastern Promises. As you can tell, he
quickly you know, became Cronenberg's guy and shot his last
film in twenty twenty, like he has an epic career

(51:53):
as a DP and and always had a great eye.
Now the movie has it's problems, Well, the.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
Movie was shot in a matter of weeks, like a
very very short turnaround on this movie. So honestly, it's
even more impressive to me that he was able to
get the shots that he got and the movie looks
as good as it does because a lot of the
times he's editing in camera and on the fly because
they don't have chance to get they don't have the
opportunity to get extra coverage, so he's doing a whole

(52:22):
lot with very little. By the way, if all you
know about this movie are Time Warp and Sweet Transvestite,
which are two songs that have absolutely transcended the actual
movie and have just become sort of pop culture mainstays,
what you may not know is that those songs are
back to back in a way that almost gave me whiplash.

(52:43):
It's like Bam bam, two biggest songs in the musical
Bam Bam. Here we go. But I will say this,
and again huge credit to Richard O'Brien, this is a
rock opera that very much rocks everything about the songs
in this are just so catchy and so upbeat and
fun and clearly clearly referencing, you know, the rock and

(53:03):
roll of the fifties, but then dabbling in some other
styles as well, and dabbling in different meters, in different
you know, in different keys, and it's just I love
that they found a way to give everybody in this movie,
even somebody like Susan Sarandon, who was terrified of doing
this because she's like, I don't sing, I don't really
know what I'm gonna be doing here.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
And I still doesn't talk about the movie, still.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
Does not like to talk about the movie because you know,
she said that it didn't it didn't help her career
in terms of getting her more work, which I can understand,
but she they find a way to give her music
that she can belt out and is faithful to that character.
Like it's just it's a really smartly written musical in
terms of the books, the book and the lyrics, and
it's something that when you find out it's just something

(53:46):
he kind of put together for fun, it's actually deeply complex.
Like the songs that they're they're singing, and then the
different story beats that are being told through the songs
and the different ways that the songs are composed. It's
incredibly complex, and yet it was just thing. O'Brien was like, oh,
you know, it was just kind of fucking around. It's like, oh,
you were fucking around and you wrote this music. Goddamn
every Saturday there's a guaranteed party, whether you have a

(54:11):
DATO or not. I didn't think I'd be referencing Moneyball
talking about the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but there's a
scene at the end of Moneyball that I think directly
relates to this movie's life. After they wrapped production. There's
a scene at the end of Moneyball where they're watching
video of this sort of bigger, heavy set baseball player
who hits a ball and tries to round first thinking

(54:32):
he's gonna get a double something he never does because
he knows he's not very fast, and as he's rounding first,
he falls down and they're like, this is his nightmare.
This is like the most embarrassing thing he ever dreamed.
What happened to him? And then you know, Brad Pitt's
like the all they're all laughing, and he goes yeah
because he doesn't realize he just hit a home run
sixty feet over the fence. So then he gets up
and rounds the bases, right. I kind of feel like

(54:54):
this movie had the shortest turnaround between falling on its
face and being embraced by cold audiences of anything that's
ever come out. Oh yeah, Like, within a few months,
this movie went from doing so abysmally in any theater
in England outside of the one it premiered in that
the New York Halloween premiere was canceled, you know, and

(55:18):
trying to play in these theaters in the States, and
then like having to try and repackage it later as
a double feature because nobody's going to see it, to
within a few months it starts playing this brand new
and you know, by the mid seventies burgeoning midnight film culture,
this was a brand new thing. And when this movie

(55:38):
was sort of repackaged as a midnight movie and re released,
you know at midnight showings, all of a sudden, it
just started taking off and taken off. And if you
look at how like the movie made like maybe less
than a million initially, and then by the next year
it was like eleven million dollars, is like, wait, what
the fuck? And then it just kept going up from there.
It's kind of the ultimate sleeper movie, except it's more

(56:00):
of a cat neat movie because the turnaround from major
release to midnight success is a matter of months.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, it
was just a few weeks in when somebody called out
the first line and people reacted and someone said, oh,
there's something to this, and Salpiro was one of those.
It was one of the very first people to really
fall in love with this, of course found in the
Rocky Horror Picture Show fan Club was of course the
president for the fan club all through his life.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
In the documentary on YouTube is well.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Yeah, he's one of the most important people in the
history of this recently passed away. Rest in peace, sal
And really you know drove that. I remember in the nineties,
Entertainment Weekly put out the list of the hundredth highest
grossing films of all time. And in the nineties everything

(56:52):
was top one hundred. This top one hundred that we
were coming up to the end of the century and film,
you know, was a thing of our century, and so man,
the media was obsessed with making top one hundred lists
of fucking everything. One of the things I've liked about
the being in the early part of this century is

(57:13):
we don't have as big a push of those as
we did at the time. But I remember everyone was
kind of shocked because Rocky Horror Picture Show was at
the time the thirty seventh most profitable movie of all time,
and with you know, it had never left theaters at
that point. It had still played and it just crept
up there because it was never out of theaters and

(57:36):
it was always playing every weekend around at least around
the country in the United States, but you know, was
also playing around the world, and so it was just
constantly a source of revenue for twentieth century Fox, and
they just supported it. You know. That was what was
was funny, was they you know, they really did get

(57:56):
behind the fact that they were just making money every
fucking weekend off this thing that it happened long before
you know, any of them were working there at twentieth
century Fox. Like it was, it was just something they
inherited that was just bringing in a couple million dollars
every year, and you can't complain about that.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
So, speaking of Fox and pursue it to this movie
being the Amino acids of our show's DNA strands. Apparently,
Fox re released the film around college campuses once its
initial release kind of flop. They re released the film
around college campuses on a double bill with another rock
opera Cargill from the mid seventies.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
Which rock opera would that be?

Speaker 3 (58:38):
That would be Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise.
Oh yes, And to me, there's possibly no better double
bill than the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Phantom of
the Paradise.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
Like that is one of those perfect double features. They
are two different films from two different countries, grasping at
the same point in history.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
They are two completely off the wall takes on universal monsters.
One is on Doctor Frankenstein, the other is on the
Phantom of the Opera. Yep, literally, that's how you sell
that double book.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
Both both musicals, both you know, deeply cynical about both
their times and and also while deeply immersed in, you know,
the language of camp filmmaking. They're both intentional camp, which

(59:31):
was something that was relatively new, This was something that
really kind of exploded in the in the late sixties,
and both very nostalgic and also both still fucking bangers.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
Yeah, one of them, I would argue, took a little
bit longer to be embraced as a cult film than
the other. Yes, I don't think Phantom of the Paradise
really got it to do for several years afterwards. But yeah,
we've been speaking a lot about Tim Curry and Susserana Berry,
Bostwick and and O'Brien. But I also want to make
sure that we shout out to other of the original

(01:00:07):
cast members that are original cast members from the stage production,
Patricia Quinn and Little Nell. Little Nell Patricia Quinn another
person who in the documentary proved that they speak exactly
like their character in this movie. Oh us Magenta every
moment of every day, and I love that about her.

Speaker 1 (01:00:26):
And when she was younger dated a young Patrick Stewart.

Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
The idea of there being a young Patrick Stewart unsettles me.

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
But Patrick Stewart and Patricia Quinn just makes so much sense,
it does. It makes so much sense.

Speaker 3 (01:00:43):
Make that, so she's really great in this And then
Little Nell as Columbia, who's a groupie of doctor Frankenfurter,
who was discovered at a soda fountain in England because
she had gotten this reputation for tap dancing for her customers.
So literally, Richard O'Brien and the other name that I

(01:01:03):
feel terrible. What we haven't mentioned yet in the creation
of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is the actual director
co writer of this movie, Jim Sharmon. So he and
Richard O'Brien go to this this soda fountain and watch
her do this stap dance and basically cast her on
the spot. And she is just a fucking ball of

(01:01:23):
She's a dynamo of NonStop energy. I love all of
her dancing, her dancing. Clearly, he has become a big
part of If you've ever seen a high school do
their production of Rocky Horror Picture Show, a lot of
the choreography is basically just everyone doing what she's doing
in the movie.

Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
Oh yeah, no, no, she was. She was great and
provided many many a fifteen year old girl her way
into the queer community by being this week's Columbia, the
most heavily rotating cast member of any any cast member
in history.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Is that a fact?

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, no, that was always you know, one
of those things where you know, if you had a
long run ning Columbia, you were very lucky, but generally
you'd have a Columbia for like three weeks, and uh,
you know, it was like because I know in our
in our scene, we had a big joke about it
because this is the era of dinosaurs, the show.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
Tim Henson Dinosaurs.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
Yeah, yeah, and there was you know, there were a
couple of tag you know, catchphrases that came out of
that show. You know, I'm the baby, I love me.
But one of the other ones was there was, uh,
here's mister Lizard, which was you know, the science teacher,
mister lizard teaching, and I.

Speaker 3 (01:02:39):
Know the line, can I get when you get there?
Let me know, I'm gonna say, we're there, We're there.
We're gonna need another Timmy.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
We're gonna need another Columbia. That was our running gag.
And it looks like we're gonna need another Columbia. But yeah. Also,
one other thing I want to mention were mentioning you
know everybody. The one person we have not mentioned yet
that is very important to this one of the producers
of the movie, who is a junk food alum, mister

(01:03:09):
Lou Adler, who would was a music producer, got involved
in a number of musical things and would famously direct
two films, the last of which being Ladies and Gentlemen
The Fabulous Stains.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
Of course, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Lou Adler. Absolutely
he's featured. He's got some great moments in the documentary
as well, talking about the legacy and like why people
attached to it and it's it's he's phenomenal. I'm really
glad that he's involved in this. But yeah, plays Gentleman.
The Fabulous Stains is a junk food cinema previous episode,
so go back and listen to that if you haven't already.

Speaker 1 (01:03:43):
After these messages, we'll be.

Speaker 8 (01:03:45):
Right back to Absolutely Pea shall swim the waters of
scenes of the flesh in what he White Man is
beyond any measure and sins who are day dreams to
tread or forev called. You're just seed. Don't dream it.
Be it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
Alive on stage, don't dream it.

Speaker 7 (01:04:03):
See it after eight Rock and Rooman Years in London,
Live on stage from London, The Rocky Horror Show December
eighteen through January fourth, that's the Granada Theater. Tickets now
at Ticketronto are charged by phone at eight hundred.

Speaker 1 (01:04:14):
Two two three eighteen fourteen.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
Wow, as we moved through this this insane plot, and
doctor Frankenfurter is slowly turning both somehow turning both of
the couple that stumbled into his house and making them
be in their underwear most of the time, which did
not make for a very comfortable, uh shooting process because

(01:04:36):
they were almost always wet. But yeah, just like all
of these insane things that are happening, this rivalry he
seems to have with Eddie, the character played by Meatloaf,
the subsequent murder and dinner party Denu Man of that murder,
like just man, it is everything I want from absolutely unique,
you know, Wild Cinema. It's so much fun. The music

(01:04:59):
is incredible. Car you know what is Let me just
ask you this question, since you've seen it so many times.
If you take time Warp and you take Sweet Transvestite
out of the mix, what is your favorite song from
Rocky Horror Picture show?

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
Hot Patuty?

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
Hot Patuity is fantastic. That's the ones that Eddie sings
with the trade.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
He comes out and sings It's so much fun. It's
such a banger. Uh, it's just a really good time.
I mean, there's a lot of fun too. There's a
light over the Fank Frankenstein place. That's a great one
to get the crowd singing, because.

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
What patuity, by the way, sounds like if Meatloaf sang
a little Richard song. Well, yeah, which is the craziest
smashup I've ever like tried to mentally wrap my head around,
except he does it perfectly.

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
Yeah. No, I know a guy who was uh was
They were doing a stage revival in the nineties and
he was our Frankenferg and he was impeccable. He was incredible.
We were blessed that we just had one of the
greatest people in the country playing Frankenfurter at the time,
a guy named Lee just wonderful dude, and he uh

(01:06:07):
uh went out. He flew out because they'd heard about
how great he is. They flew him out and he
got there. His voice is a little strained, he's exhausted
from the travel, but he's ready to fucking go and
he's like ready to perform, and they go, Okay, give
us hot Patuity, and it was he could do it,
but it was just a hair out of his range,
and he was so tired he blew it. And for

(01:06:29):
years he was always bitter about why did they why
did they make me do hot patuity? Why didn't I
have hot patuity? Ready?

Speaker 3 (01:06:37):
Nothing worse than some cold patuity?

Speaker 1 (01:06:42):
Yeah, but uh but yeah, no I would if I
had to pick you know, you know, Uh, there's a
part of me that loved superheroes just because for so
many years that was not a part of my viewing experience.
And then we got the New Print and got superheroes.

Speaker 3 (01:06:56):
Yeah, I've not seen superheroes because the version of the
movie I watched it not have it. I know, it's
it's the.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
Classic theatrical does not have superheroes. But when they made
New Prints, They're like, everybody wants this, so I'll just
give them the extra scene. And uh, and they did.
And it's a it's a very it's a very downer
of a film, but it's everybody kind of singing their
final moments and getting their last This is the lesson
that I've learned and what happened to me during this movie. Uh.

(01:07:23):
And it's it's pretty great.

Speaker 8 (01:07:25):
And super.

Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
Yet mine is science fiction, science fiction double feature. I
fucking love that song.

Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
So, I mean, it's great, it's great. It's it's hard
to there's there's very few songs you can literally, you know,
look listen to and be like, ah, I could do
without that song, Like so many of them are great,
and I had so much fun, you know. I mean
that the first time I ever, you know, touched Jessica
was you know, jumping behind her during the time warp

(01:08:16):
and you know, put your hands in your hips and
when yep or somebody else's in I grab Jessica by
the hips and she leaned into me. And that's when
I knew, oh, hey, this girl, Uh, I should be
talking to this girl. This girla seems a little into me.

Speaker 3 (01:08:28):
This girl doesn't know about the Warhammer stuff yet.

Speaker 1 (01:08:31):
Well, the Warhammer stuff didn't exist yet. To be fair,
I wasn't into Warhammer in the nineties. I didn't realize.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
Oh it just not that it wasn't in existence. It
just wasn't in your orbit yet.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
No, no, no, I was. I got into Warhammer in
the odds. I was. I was still this was the
I wasn't playing Dungeons and Dragons anymore. I was playing
Vampire the Masquerade and Cyberpunk and you know, the the
oddball RPGs and Lots of Magic, The Gathering and that
sort of thing. They're so cool, Brewster, U.

Speaker 3 (01:09:00):
Don't dream it to be it. I think as another
great song in this movie that sums up a lot
of who the doctor Frankenfurter character is, and I love
that he gets that, you know, in wrestling we would
call it a face turn, where by the end of
the movie you are very sympathetic to Doctor Frankenfurter, and
I love that they add a little bit of complexity
to him. That's amazing. But yeah, like you're right, there's

(01:09:22):
not really a bad song in the whole bunch, And
I'm gonna have to track down superheroes and watch that
because definitely not in the cut that I saw. I think,
honestly getting to the end of this Cargill and having
this sort of redemption with the movie, I think my
lingering problem that I still have is the reputation that's
been built around Rocky Horror. Because here's the cold, hard truth,

(01:09:46):
Rocky Horror Picture Show is not a bad movie. Rocky
Horror Picture Show is an homage to bad movies that
is itself crafted and executed pretty damn well, and it's
based on a wildly successful play that paid tribute to
the creator's love for midnight movies, which somehow translated into

(01:10:06):
Rocky Horror being embraced by the then brand new burgeting
midnight movie crowds. But the telephone game of all this,
the telephone game of this story, unfortunately, is that, oh,
they show Rocky Horror at midnight because it's a bad movie.
It's not a bad movie. It's a very well thought
out movie. It's odd, it's off the wall, it's weird,

(01:10:29):
but it's actually executed very well with some stellar performances,
some amazing music, some great cinematography. Like, I literally don't
know by what other criteria you're trying to tell me
that Rocky Horror Picture Show is a bad movie, because
it's not. And you can sit there all day and
say things to me like, oh, but it's a low
budget B movie. It's low budget by choice. I don't

(01:10:51):
know how many of you know this, But O'Brien and
Jim Sharmon were offered a much larger budget by Fox
if they agreed to cast the movie with current pop
stars people like David Bowie or Lou Reed or Mick
Jagger or share. But O'Brien knew that it was the
original cast who made the product what it was, and

(01:11:12):
he opted to accept a lower budget from Fox in
order to cast them. This is low budget by intention.
Everything about this movie is intentional, but it is never
as campy as it is, as kitchy as it is.
It's not one of those movies that is relying on
that basically saying it doesn't matter what the quality of
the film is because it's kitchy. No O'Brien still wrote

(01:11:35):
the hell out of this musical. Tim Curry still gives
a career defining performance, a real shot across the bow
for who he would be. Everybody in this movie is
committed to it, like, there is nothing about this movie
that you go you have to forgive that because it's
just kitchen.

Speaker 1 (01:11:51):
It knows it.

Speaker 3 (01:11:52):
That's not a thing in this movie. So I'm gonna
argue right now that No Rocky Horror Picture Show is
not a bad movie. It is a movie paying tribute
to bad movie that has an actual point. It has heart,
it has you know, it's like I said, it's challenging
the morays of its time, and it has something to say.
You cannot look at any part of this movie and
go that's lazy that you know that doesn't work because

(01:12:14):
you know, people weren't invested in it. It's a good
movie about bad movies. Yeah, and I think that's maybe
something that even I in the Telephone Game didn't fully
understand until this viewing. So again, I'm glad we're kicking
off spooky season with a rocky horror picture show Redemption,
because it's kind of perfect for this time period.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
I mean it is, and that's and also to say
it's not without its flaws. They had a hard time
shooting this movie. There are really bad edits in this movie.

Speaker 7 (01:12:45):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:46):
It's one of those things that I literally having seen
it so many times, having written so many jokes, you
know about the movie. You know, me and my friends
would you know, every once in a while we'd sit
down and be like, hey, let's just sit down this
afternoon and rewatch the movie and see if there's something
we haven't made a joke about. You know, anytime there
was dead air, you kind of wanted to find something.

(01:13:06):
And so I can point out every flaw in this
fucking movie. I can point out everybody going from button
unbuttoned shirts to button shirts. You know, the point where
little Nell's nipple pops out of one of the holes
while she pulls down her shirt wrong. You know, all
the craziness that goes with this movie. And then yet
at the same time everybody is giving it. They're all

(01:13:28):
and it is the king of all cult films. There
is never in history going to be a cult film
bigger than the success that Rocky Horror earned itself.

Speaker 3 (01:13:39):
Yeah, it's not a perfect film. It has flaws, but
it is in no way a bad movie. Yep, but
you know it is pretty bad. And I just found
out this existed. Were you aware, Cargo and all of
your years of loving this movie, Were you aware that
there's a fucking Commodore sixty four Rocky Horror Picture Show game.

Speaker 1 (01:13:56):
As somebody who had a Commodore sixty four? Yes? I did.

Speaker 3 (01:13:59):
Did you play this fucking game?

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
Of course I did?

Speaker 3 (01:14:02):
Oh my god. Okay, So, for those of you listening,
this was a game released in nineteen eighty five where
you get to play as either Janet or Brad and
then you just wander around the castle trying to find
keys that will help you Demadusa your cohorts, which means
take them from being statues to being human again. Big
plot that I was completely skimmed over in the episode.
Don't worry about it. But the entire time, this terrible

(01:14:22):
eight bit version of Time Warp is playing. I watched
it play through for probably twenty minutes.

Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
It's terrible. It is so bad. It's a terrible game.
So many of those games for the Commodore at the
time were terrible, but they were so easy to crack.
And I was on an air Force base that I
was getting I was able to copy tapes and discs
from all over to place and would end up and stuff.
That was actually my first my first exposure to exposure

(01:14:57):
to Rocky Horror and so but that I had, you know,
been like, oh, it's this sole movie whatever. And then
of course you know when I when I I, as
I mentioned before, I knew about it, but I hadn't
seen it live, and that was that was where everything changed.
But yeah, I did play that for a minute or
I thought you were gonna be like, did you know

(01:15:19):
there's a sequel? Oh God, And I was like, my
brother in Christ.

Speaker 3 (01:15:23):
Please, would you be shocked to find out there's a
sequel to Rocky Horror Picture Show that includes almost none
of the characters on the first movie because they did
not want to come back.

Speaker 1 (01:15:32):
Well none of the actor did. Little Nell and the
Richard O'Brien are in it. But yeah, it is a yeah,
it's a shock treatment as a whole thing.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
I'm gonna watch it. Let me be clear about that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
You should and also know that that that the you know,
the Denton that they're mentioning is Denton, Texas. So there
there's there's a whole dent in Dentin. You've got no pretension,
that's true.

Speaker 3 (01:16:01):
You can't have pretension if you're from Denton. I've been there.

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
Yeah, but it's a yeah, it's it's not quite Rocky horror,
and it's one of those that that a lot of
us are like, I love rocky horror, and even I
revisit shock treatment once out every ten years out of
reverence and then pretend that it doesn't exist for ten
more years.

Speaker 3 (01:16:23):
So you're saying, if you're given the choice between two
video games of this era based on Barry Bostwick movies,
you're not gonna play the Rocky Horror Picture Show for
Commodore sixty four. You're gonna play Megaphores for the Atari
twenty six hundred.

Speaker 1 (01:16:38):
Mm HM and hope that there's a Pirate of Penzance game.

Speaker 3 (01:16:42):
We can only hope, we can only hope that would
be the very model of a major modern video game cartridge.

Speaker 9 (01:16:48):
I'm happy with it as it is, as you know,
as a kind of as a kind of home movie
about some pretty extraordinary people that lived at a particular
moment in time and that somehow other ended up and attaining.

Speaker 3 (01:17:00):
And that brings us to the junk food pair and Cargill.
And for this one, I went with wax lips. I mean, yeah, yeah,
it's a reference not only to the opening scene, but
also the second poster that was created after the initial
poor release for the film had you know, just the lips,
the opening lips from this movie, and the new marketing
piece had the tagline a different set of Jaws, and

(01:17:24):
that proved to be iconic and forever indelible to the
Rocky Horror Picture Show, which of course was released in
the mid seventies right after Jaws, or.

Speaker 1 (01:17:33):
Right seventy five. This is we Are, we Are right
before the fiftieth anniversary. It had a premiere in August,
but September seventy five. I am it is one of
those things that this is so important in my life,
and I knew that I was like two and a
half weeks older than Rocky Horror and so, and then

(01:17:53):
a week after that Saturday Night Live. So seventy five Jaws,
Rocky Horror, Saturday Night, Saturday Night Live, and Cargile. That
is a seventy five good year. I love that you.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
I feel like you want me to do that, like
Don Pardo, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jaws, Saturday
Night Live, and also Cargo like it's just the whole
parade when things were trotting out in seventy five.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:18:22):
You know what else got really popular in the mid seventies.
Cargill was this novelty candy made from paraffin wax, which,
if you don't know, paraffin wax is a byproduct of
kerosene distillation. That's what we were giving the kids. And
what was usually popular in the mid seventies was this
weird pair of lips that you could maybe eat. I've
never actually eaten a pair of wax lips.

Speaker 1 (01:18:45):
They're not good, yeah, cause.

Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
They're fucking paraffin wax. That doesn't feel like something a
kid should be eating. It's edible, But Mark, did you
hear the question mark at the end of what you
just said, Cargill.

Speaker 1 (01:18:56):
It's yes, I did. And also the great thing about
wax lips is there the same color going in as
they are coming out.

Speaker 3 (01:19:02):
That's horrifying. They're like beats in that way. Yeah, gross,
I would think I would rather eat beats, which is
saying something coming from me, But much like wax lips,
I struggled for years to understand the appeal of the
Rocky Horror Picture Show. So maybe by Halloween I might
be giving out wax lips to the trick or treaters
just to get my house egged.

Speaker 1 (01:19:20):
There you go.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
Oh what a kickoff to what we've now randomly decided
on the fly as are a Rocky Horror Picture Show redemption.
I am so happy that this movie can now enter
the rotation of spooky season movies.

Speaker 1 (01:19:34):
Would you like to know my junk food parent?

Speaker 2 (01:19:37):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (01:19:37):
No, I would not, because I totally just gloss right over.
That's what's going on, damn it, Brian.

Speaker 1 (01:19:43):
A big plate of meat loaf. Oh yes, dude, third's
the way through the movie. You serve some meat loaf,
you know, maybe a nice fatty gravy, But yeah, you
do you definitely want to be eating meat loaf later
in the movie.

Speaker 3 (01:19:58):
I would do anything for love, including that that sounds awesome. Yes,
get yourself some meat loaf and have wax lips for dessert,
because you are a freak just like the rest of us,
and we love you for it. If you would like
to hear more Freakish Junk Food Cinema episodes, you can
find our eleven year back catalog on your favorite podcast
or follow us on social media at Junk Food Cinema.

(01:20:18):
And if you really like the show, I mean you
really like the show, you like it as much as
Richard O'Brien likes Forbidden playing it, you can go to
Patreon dot com slash Junk Food Cinema financially support the show.
We greatly appreciate it. Cargiol Where can people find you
on the interwebs?

Speaker 1 (01:20:31):
You can find me on Blue Sky atcy Robert Cargill
Blue Sky, not social. You can find my previous movie,
The Gorge, on streaming on Apple Plus or wherever you
rent your movies. You can find my next movie in
theaters next month, also playing at a number of festivals.
We're playing at We're playing at fantastic Best. We're playing

(01:20:53):
at Sitches, We're playing at Beyond Fest, we are all
over the place, and then of course we release wide
on October seventeenth. You'd find my latest story in my
latest story, wrong Pucking Place, Wrong Plucking Time, in the
new best selling hardback anthology at the End of the
World as We Know It. And you can find my

(01:21:15):
lesser known story in our smaller indie book, Haunted Reels too.
You can find my story Eat the Rich, so you
can get that wherever you get your books.

Speaker 3 (01:21:25):
Go track down that story, Jonathan Swiftly, that's going to
do it for this episode. I just want to remind
you as we wrap up, it's not easy having a
good time, so don't dream it, be it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
Pict