“The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the latest musical getting the small-screen treatment.Fox is developing a two-hour remake of the 1975 cult classic to be directed, executive-produced and choreographed by Kenny Ortega (High School Musical). The project, tentatively titled The Rocky Horror Picture Show Event, is casting-contingent.”
A little voice inside my head said don’t look back, you can never look back. In 1975 I was madly in love with a dancer at Crazy Horse, a club on Phoenicia Street in Beirut, named Marianne O’Hagan. I was 17 at the time and she was 23, and though I didn’t see it at the time, Marianne was not as worldly as she made herself to be, but fearless and gorgeous… and a fountain of pop cultural lodestones. We’d sit in her bedroom at an all female hostel listening to Monty Python (I heard John Cleese years before I saw him), Mick Ronson and Tim Curry. In a way, Marianne looked similar to Tim, the curled, thick lips, heart shaped face and half sneer. Marianne was way beyond hip, four years later it was Marianne who introduced me to Jimmy Honeymoon-Scott in a bar in Murray Hill.
It was also Marianne who insisted I visit the Royal Court Theatre during a trip to London and I finally got to see what I’d only heard for a year. The story of ET Dr. Frank N Furter, a wild and an untamed thing, and the building of a sex machine Rocky Horror. Things go wrong as Rocky takes a lust for Janet (Planet Schmanet) and answers as to the disappearance of a biker come to a head. The music, by the great Richard O’Brien, has improved with time; the camp veneer has evaporated and the just about consistently excellent songs have come into their own.
In 1975, the show became a flop movie and then a cult fave midnight movie. I saw it many times, those audience participation Friday night shows at the Waverly on St. Marks Place were something of a third date ritual for me. And when it played off Broadway in 2000, I checked it out.
Now FOX are threatening to do to it what NBC did to “Peter Pan”,i n time for its 40th anniversary, ergo not much. It is a sign of the times that they don’t think the Frank homosexuality (“it’s not all bad, it’s not even half bad…”) and indeed hereosexuality might not be questionable for prime time television. It will be difficult to truly screw up, Rocky Horror is a fun sci fi romp, all singing, all dancing, all men in heels, stockings and garters, though in a sense all too easy as well: it is all too easy to miss the love under the camp, and the power of rock under the parody or Rock.
And it will have me thinking about my late friend Marianne. When I knew her, she was a truly wild and untamed thing with a lioness mane, a growl, a sneer, a luminous but not girly sexuality and moves to die for. Lost in time, lost in space, and lost in meaning, I remember her her once again.