“Is Chicago ready for ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show?’”
Moviegoers in Los Angeles and New York — shivering with antici … pation — already scooped up gobs of tickets for the theatrical release in September 1975. The Chicago International Film Festival hosted a private screening for its members at the Esquire Theater. But Tribune columnist Maggie Daly wondered how the campy combination of science fiction and B-horror flaunted in fishnet stockings by Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) would play here.
It bombed. The Tribune didn’t initially review the film. If it played locally, then the movie didn’t make the newspaper’s listings.
Yet successful stage versions — including the original at London’s Royal Court Theatre (from which many of the movie’s actors came) and another one by Lou Adler (the film’s producer) in New York City — wowed audiences with their punky, rock ‘n’ roll-themed songs (“Time Warp”) and interactions with audience members. Something was special about “Rocky Horror.”
For those who haven’t seen it, “Rocky Horror” follows engaged milk toast couple Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) who suffer a flat tire on a dark and stormy evening and stumble upon a castle where they are welcomed to spend the night. The inhabitants are friends of Dr. Frank, a native of Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, who have gathered for their annual convention. That’s when the mad scientist reveals his latest creation — a muscular mate named Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood). It’s a wild and crazy night that forever changes Brad and Janet’s lives before the castle blasts off back toward the heavens.
Local theaters reintroduced the film to a late-night crowd the next year. Midnight showings were soon accompanied by shadow casts who screamed key phrases, led crowds in singalongs and tossed key props (toast, rice, water, etc.) at the screen. The result: Cult status. By 1985, the movie grossed more than $60 million and at that time was the longest continually running movie in America. Maybe part of its allure was that the only place to watch the movie was at a theater. “Rocky Horror” wasn’t released on video until Nov. 8, 1990. Even then, it was expensive — $89.98 on VHS. Local TV finally aired it in 1993.
Fifty years later, cast members from the original movie will be at the Chicago Theatre on Oct. 19 for a screening. Halloween showings — with costume contests — are also planned around the area.
For now, give yourself over to absolute pleasure and revisit some of the venues that have hosted the hysterics of “Rocky Horror.”
Three Penny Cinema (now Lincoln Hall)
2424 N. Lincoln Ave.
The Lincoln Park theater — where “Deep Throat” premiered in 1968 — was the first in the city to bring “Rocky Horror” back to the silver screen on Friday, Aug. 13, 1976.
That’s when Tribune critic Lynn Van Matre gave it a 2½-star review. “It’s not exactly a great movie, but more often than not it’s great fun, provided your heart belongs to drag parodies with overtones of dementia,” she wrote. “If it all sounds terribly ridiculous, that, of course, is the idea.”
Biograph Theater
2433 N. Lincoln Ave.
Copying the Waverly Theater in New York, Biograph owner Larry Edwards set midnight as the time for weekly “Rocky Horror” showings on Friday and Saturday nights. Its first screening was March 3, 1978. Except for a brief break in 1983-1984 when the theater changed management, “Rocky Horror” stayed at the Biograph for 11 years.
“There seems to be a distinct and very loyal audience that comes out to watch movies at midnight on weekends,” 20th Century-Fox executive Tim Degan told the Tribune. “Those are the people who are going to see ‘Rocky Horror.’ The commuter and the housewife don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
About five months into its run, Tribune critic Gene Siskel attended a showing at the Biograph where hundreds of people paid the $3 entry fee to sing, dance and party like a Transylvanian. According to Siskel, the movie grossed just $450,000 nationwide in the six months after its theatrical release. By then playing in more than 70 cities, it was grossing $100,000 nationwide each weekend.
“The audience repeatedly talks back to the screen during the picture. Talks back and yells back,” he wrote. “The night I saw the film, it appeared as though at least half of the 700 people in the theater knew the film line for line.”
Siskel asked then-20th Century-Fox sales supervisor Cary Brokaw why the movie received such an extraordinary reaction.
“The movie is bizarre, but I think it allows people to indulge the dark side of their character in a way that is still fun,” Brokaw said. “It’s a one-of-a-kind cult picture.”
Granada Theater
6427 N. Sheridan Road
The first touring production of the “Rocky Horror” live stage version premiered in Chicago in December 1980 at the 3,342-seat theater in Rogers Park. It was the first stage show at the Granada in 25 years. There was, however, one warning to the crowd — the live actors appreciated it if the audience refrained from throwing anything at the stage during the performance. Dancing in the aisles, however, was encouraged during the 90-minute show.
“None of the voices in the 10-person cast rises much above simple professional competence and the perpetual passing around of hand microphones is at times distracting, but the overall energy and enthusiasm is entertaining — not to mention the fact that the volume level drowns out the annoying and self-congratulatory audience commentary, at least for a while” Van Matre wrote in her review.
The Tribune didn’t like a revival of the production in November 1988, at the Organic Theater either.
Music Box Theatre
3733 N. Southport Ave.
A weekly Saturday night showing at the Lake View theater became part of the Music Box’s schedule on March 8, 1986. “Rocky Horror” was, by then, also screening on a variety of suburban theater screens.
It’s still in the rotation — and so is “Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror.”
400 Theater
6746 N. Sheridan Road
Claiming to be the longest continually operating movie house in the city until it closed in 2023, the east Rogers Park venue hosted “Rocky Horror’s” midnight madness in the early 1990s. A cast of 21 people — ranging in age from 17 to 43 — acted in front of the film. Some moviegoers, however, were thrown off when Dr. Frank was played by a woman.
“Well, I’d never seen (that) before,” one said.
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