The 20th Century Fox deal was struck, and, hardly surprisingly, Jim Sharman was elected as the director of choice. He later admitted, however, that he thought long and hard about accepting the role, uncertain whether he even needed to revisit those pastures one more time. Then, once he did agree, he found himself faced with a most unenviable choice.
Two options were laid before him, presumably stemming from the money men at 20th Century Fox. He could approach The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a brand new production, casting known box office and rock ’n’ roll stars in the key roles, in which case he would be granted a full blockbuster budget and all the time he required to make a monster.
Or he could stick with the cast, crew and design that he knew and bring the whole thing in for a meager million bucks on a six-week shooting schedule. A B-movie budget for a B-movie film.
The former course was certainly tempting. A few names had already been floated, or at least had floated themselves. Mick Jagger was apparently keen on the role of Doctor Frank-N-Furter; Keith Moon believed he was tailor made to be Riff-Raff. David Bowie’s name was linked to the movie, and a raft of lesser lights, too.
But still Sharman pursued the latter.
Not only was the B-movie approach so much more in keeping with the spirit of the production, he also knew that the established cast and crew had already garnered the understanding and enthusiasm that the movie required.
There would be no prima donnas demanding to know their “motivation” for such and such a scene; no agents harassing him for script and costume changes because their client’s image was somehow threatened by the imagery; no hissy fits or pissing contests. Just a solid corps of people who knew exactly what the movie demanded, and who would bring with them, too, that same sense of style with which they had gifted the original production.
Celluloid Heroes
And so, the call went out for Tim Curry, Patricia Quinn, Little Nell, Jonathan Adams and, of course, Richard O’Brien from the 1973 London production, with Meat Loaf drafted in from the Los Angeles run. Curry later admitted to the BBC, “My agents didn’t want me to do the movie. But I was buggered if anybody else was going to play it.”
Behind the scenes, too, the key faces remained familiar: Sharman, Richard Hartley, Brian Thomson and Sue Blane, with the latter also confessing, later, to having had second thoughts about the whole affair.
Interviewed by Patricia Morrisroe in 1979, Blane recalled “waking up one morning and saying, ‘Oh, I really don’t want to do this movie. I really have had enough.’ I’d been involved with Rocky for quite a long time by then and was getting scared that that was all I was ever going to do. It was also getting embarrassing when you ran into someone on the street and they’d ask, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’d have to say, ‘I’m still doing Rocky.’ Luckily I’ve gotten over that now.”
Yet there were some fresh inclusions, too. Pierre La Roche, one of theater and rock music’s most talented makeup artists, most recently renowned for working with David Bowie on his Pin Ups LP cover, was brought in to handle the cast’s visual appearance.
Photographer Mick Rock, likewise a legend in rock circles, was hired to preserve La Roche’s work for the publicity photographs.
Fresh blood was infused into the cast. The part of Rocky was to be played by Peter Hinwood, a self-confessedly unwilling actor who was apparently far more comfortable working as either a photographer or a professional model, the pursuits that occupied him in between acting jobs, but who had nevertheless impressed in some remarkable productions over the years, among them a breathtaking portrayal of the Hellenic God Hermes in a late 1960s British TV adaptation of The Adventures of Ulysses. He also appeared in one of the great trashy horror flicks of the early 1970s, working alongside Ava Gardner in Roddy McDowall’s first (and only) directorial effort, The Ballad of Tam Lin.
Yet he continued to disparage his abilities, and even with The Rocky Horror Picture Show under his belt, Hinwood would not countenance continuing with his acting career. “One, I can’t act,” he informed People magazine. “Two, I cringe with embarrassment every time I see myself on film. Three, I relish a quiet, peaceful life.”
If Hinwood was the epitome of the recalcitrant thespian, there was also a part waiting for one of British film’s most ubiquitous, recognizable and, in a strange way, reassuring character actors, Charles Gray. Strange, because, although he would be appearing as the Criminologist (as the Narrator’s role was now known), Gray had long since established himself in an altogether opposite vein.
The inimitable Charles Gray, the first and finest narrator.
© AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo
In 1971, Gray appeared as Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever—the fourth actor to play the part (following on from Anthony Dawson, Donald Pleasence and Telly Savalas), and not perhaps the version gifted with the most subsequently quotable lines.
But it was Gray who uttered the immortal rebuke to a superbly proportioned female traitor in his midst, “such nice cheeks . . . if only they were brains”; and he too who lamented, “if we destroy Kansas, the world may not hear about it for years.” And of all the Blofelds who preceded and, indeed, followed him, the suave, upper-crust Gray was the one who most looked the part.
It was for those same reasons that he was utterly believable as the singularly monikered Mocata, the charismatically evil head of the Satanic cult in the movie version of author Dennis Wheatley’s occult masterpiece The Devil Rides Out; and, again, a most convincing Air Commodore Hufford in the war film Mosquito Squadron.
Proudly magisterial, handsomely chiseled and utterly convincing, Gray would naturally gift that same combination of louche charm and unspoken menace to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In fact, he did precisely that when he was offered the role in the first place.
He simply smiled and asked “why not?”
Years later, Gray admitted that he had never actually sat down to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show; that he had not, in fact, seen any of his movies. But he was well aware of its popularity, even if the heights of that acclaim baffled him somewhat. “I never expected to be the object of a cult,” he remarked in the press release for the follow-up Shock Treatment movie. “It’s quite a shock, all the madness that’s erupted around the whole Rocky Horror phenomenon.”
Fresh Lambs to the Slaughter
Finally, making their own way in front of the cameras, the young Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick were introduced to add some wholesome, and genuine, American blood to the production, young and virginal ingenues who could never have imagined they were destined to be bound up within such a dark web of depravity.
Both Christopher Malcolm and Belinda Sinclair had been offered roles in the movie, but not in the parts they had made famous; rather, they were invited back as the bit players Ralph Hapschatt and Betty Monroe. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they turned the offers down (although Sinclair would still voice Janet on the accompanying soundtrack); if they could not play their own roles, they would play none at all.
Barry Knapp Bostwick—Brad—majored in acting at California Western University School of Arts, and also attended New York University’s Graduate Acting Program. He graduated in 1968 and played several roles at the Hillbarn Theatre stage; he was twenty-two when he made his stage debut in a production of Take Her, She’s Mine; and just two years later, he was making his Broadway debut in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy.
But he was also training and working in a circus at the time, and in 1970, Bostwick’s career took a serious detour when he became a member of the Klowns, a bubblegum pop group put together jointly by Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey as a real-life dry run for a projected cartoon series, carved from a similar mold to the Archies.
Resplendent in full harlequin clown uniform, in that pre-Pennywise age when it was not de rigueur for people to say “oooh, clowns always gave me the creeps when I was little,” the six-soul vocal ensemble hosted its own ABC television special in November 1970. There, their musical efforts were interspersed with slapstick comedy, while there was also a full Klowns album that duly arrived that same season.
And it really isn’t as bad as it all probably sounds.
Produced by Jeff Barry, one of the late sixties’ most ubiquitous session mavens, The Klowns runs the musical gamut from lightweight AOR to Stonesy grind, with “Fish Tales” still standing among the most profound echoes of a Sticky Fingers-era Mick ’n’ Keef song ever recorded.
Bostwick takes the lead vocal throughout and reveals himself as a more than competent rock singer. However, if the Klowns offered him any one single advantage over any of the other actors auditioning for the role of Brad Majors, it was via the all-over face paint that he dons for the album jacket. Five years ahead of anyone else, he was already dressed for the Floor Show.
The Klowns never took off, and, by early 1971, Bostwick had returned to theater, first in the musical Salvation and then in the extraordinarily short- (three night) lived rock opera Soon. The following year, however, brought him his first major success as he took on the role of Danny Zuko in the newly born stage production of Grease, appearing alongside Jamie Donnelly, the star of The Rocky Horror Show’s Roxy cast.
A Tony Award duly falling his way, Bostwick was very much the box office coup. He was already making his name in movies when Jim Sharman came calling, with roles in both Road Movie (1974) and The Wrong Damn Film (1975), but this was to be a very different role for him to play.
Susan Sarandon—Janet—was likewise already a known quantity, albeit in a career that she never really planned for.
Susan Tomalin was the first of nine children born to TV producer and nightclub singer Phillip Tomalin and his wife Lenora Marie. She grew up in Edison, New Jersey, and was studying dance at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., when she first met her future husband, actor Chris Sarandon.
The pair had just graduated when they answered a casting call for the new John G. Avildsen’s movie Joe. But what followed was a scene straight out of a Broadway musical. Chris, who was already an experienced actor, was passed over for a role. His dancer wife, on the other hand, was handed the part of the leading character’s daughter.
Her misgivings notwithstanding, it was an impressive debut, one that ignited a career in both television and cinema. By the time she was cast in The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1974, Sarandon was already a familiar face from such soaps as Search for Tomorrow and the short-lived A World Apart; and the movies The Apprentice, Lady Liberty, The Front Page (with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau) and Lovin’ Molly, alongside Anthony Perkins.
Indeed, she arrived in England almost direct from wrapping up The Great Waldo Pepper, costarring with Robert Redford, and she later admitted that it was her own early and formative experiences as an actress that she called upon as she prepared for her role as Janet Weiss. She devoted herself to parodying every ingenue that she had ever been asked to play.
It has been claimed, on more than one occasion, that Bostwick and Sarandon were cast wholly at the behest of 20th Century Fox, who themselves were working under the assumption that American audiences (which, of course, is all they considered as they made the film) needed to see American characters in every movie they watched.
Jim Sharman, however, is likewise one of the voices raised against that assumption, arguing that the two characters were intended to be Americans from the moment O’Brien put pen to paper. Why wouldn’t they employ a couple of real Americans to play the roles?
Besides, both Sarandon and Bostwick were already confirmed fans of the play, and that also counted in their favor. Both had seen, and adored, it during its time at the Roxy, while Sarandon had befriended Tim Curry as well. In fact, it was while she was visiting him at the theater one day that she was first offered a part in the movie.
Soundtracking the Picture
By September 1974, casting for the movie was complete, and that same month, Tim Curry and Meat Loaf bade farewell to the Hollywood stage and flew to London to commence the recording of the movie soundtrack. (Their roles were taken over by Jesus Christ Superstar’s Paul Jabara, and Alan Martin respectively).
Two weeks of musical rehearsal at the Whitehouse Hotel in London’s Earl’s Court district gave way, on October 21, to the sessions launching at one of London’s most legendary studios, the Olympic complex in Barnes, where acts the caliber of the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix had worked in the past.
There, musical director Richard Hartley assembled a band that included bassist David Wintour of the bands If and Stealers Wheel; Phil Kenzie and Count Ian Blair returning from the original London cast album; and, among the backing vocalists, Clare Torrey, an integral part of the Pink Floyd sound ever since her soulful, ethereal tones gave their Dark Side of the Moon so much of its emotional impact—and who would bring similar depths of passion to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Indeed, the crescendo to which “Superheroes” slowly builds, Blair and Torrey locked into absolutely exquisite union, even sounds a little like Floyd. At least if you overlook the vocals.
Also present was keyboard player John “Rabbit” Bundrick, well known from his stint with Traffic, but also, he laughs, “lucky enough in those years to be the ‘Pianist of Choice’ at several studios.” Many of the sessions he worked, The Rocky Horror Picture Show included, were essentially just another date in his diary. But looking back, he admits, “I am so proud that I got to come all the way from Texas, and wind up playing with all these fab musicians in England.”
With such a crew on hand, the backing tracks for the album would be completed within just four days, although first, Hartley would be revising the songs to match, as Sharman put it, “the musical strengths of the cast,” and the mood of the projected movie, too.
The traditionally chirpy and relentless up-tempo “Science Fiction Double Feature,” for example, shifted to a dark, seductive piece, sinewy and almost sinister, but with such a nostalgic fission that it was capable of raising goosebumps on the most irresolute flesh.
That was a good idea. Less pleasing, at least to traditionalists, was Sharman’s decision to have Richard O’Brien replace Patricia Quinn as the featured singer.
Quinn herself was livid. Just as she had taken on the stage show in the first place because she wanted to sing “Science Fiction Double Feature,” so she had agreed to appear in the movie for the same reason. When she learned that she would not be doing so, she came close to walking off the set.
Finally a compromise was arrived at. O’Brien would still sing the song, but it would be Quinn’s red lips that shaped the words and, in so doing, confirmed for eternity the morphing of the brother and sister that were so central to the story.
Man Ray, Woman’s Lips
The shooting of the ensuing title sequence was among the most complicated aspects of the entire movie.
Sharman modeled it partly, but not directly, on the oft-cited example of photographer and painter Man Ray’s 1936 painting “The Lovers” (aka “The Lips”), a copy of which hung on Brian Thomson’s studio wall.
The opening credits to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo inspired him, too. But the chief attraction was a production of Samuel Beckett’s Not I, staged at the Royal Court on January 16, 1973.
There, actress Billie Whitelaw was strapped into an “artist’s rest”—a chair specifically designed for actors whose costuming precludes them sitting down normally, and thus normally employed by men in armor and women in hoop skirts.
Her face and body draped in black, her head clamped between two pieces of rubber, only Whitelaw’s spotlit lips were free to move, an effect that, in the context of live theater, astonished all who saw it, and remained with them, too.
It was not, however, at all comfortable, as Quinn told Hollywood.com.
“I ended up at Elstree Studios on the lot, just me. And they had no special effects planned for the mouth, they just blacked out my face, I sat in the sun with this blacked-out face. And then they filmed it with a cloth over the camera with a little hole cut out. My head kept moving during the filming and the lips went out of focus, so they got one of the arc lamps, took the light out and screwed my head into the lamp to keep it from moving, and I sang.”
Thus was created one of the most distinctive opening sequences in movie history, drawn from one of the most memorable moments in theatrical staging.
Hartley worked on. Songs were nipped and tucked to ensure smooth running throughout the movie. Lyrics were shifted or even rewritten, while one, Brad’s “Once in a While”—intertwined onstage with Janet’s “Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me”—was to wind up being excised altogether.