The Rocky Horror Picture Show celebrated its 47th birthday recently, and actor Bruce Campbell took the opportunity to share a story about how the movie’s star Tim Curry really loved doing the movie for one thing more than any other. Curry, who also appeared in the stage version of the movie, alongside the likes of creator Richard O’Brien and Meat Loaf, found the movie especially endearing for the way it saved a number of small independent cinemas thanks to its unexpected and long-lasting popularity.
In the entire history of stage and screen, there are fewer musicals that have had quite the impact of The Rocky Horror Show. Regularly packing in crowd to live theater performances, many of whom will dress up as their favorite characters, and guaranteed to get a reaction from those being introduced to it for the first time, the movie has defied its critics to continue to be as popular now over half a century since its original stage debut.
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In celebrating the 47th anniversary of the movie adaptation, which included many of the original stage cast, actor Bruce Campbell recalled working with Tim Curry on the movie Congo in the mid 1990s, and the conversation he had with the actor about Rocky Horror’s legacy. Campbell wrote:
The Rocky Horror Show Features An All Star Cast
20th Century Fox
If there is one thing that cannot be denied about The Rocky Horror Show, is that it is something that has to be experienced rather than described, because it is very unlikely that any description can really do justice to the horror comedy that was so far ahead of its time that it may not even have caught up yet.
“While filming Congo, I sat on top of a volcano talking to Tim Curry about that movie. He said one of the coolest things was that it had saved a number for small indie theaters from going under, because they knew that two nights a week Rocky was going to do big business.”
The film included Curry as the stocking and suspender wearing Frank N. Furter, a lustful transvestite from the planet of Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania. While the movie contains very mature themes around sexuality, misogyny and a touch of murder, that didn’t stop a whole episode of the popular TV series Glee being dedicated to it, proving just how far across the spectrum the legacy of Rocky Horror reaches.
While in recent years, cast reunions of the movie have lost some of their number, such as rocker Meat Loaf who passed away earlier this year, Tim Curry still makes appearances at numerous conventions despite having been confined to a wheelchair for the last decade since suffering a stroke in 2012. As an actor known for creating memorable characters, such as Darkness in the Tom Cruise movie Legend, and Pennywise the Clown in the original TV adaptation of Stephen King’s It, Curry’s Frank N Furter is just another of his creations that will live on forever.
