Linus O’Brien was inspired to make his documentary Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror by reading YouTube comments from Rocky Horror Picture Show fans about how much the 1975 film had helped them.
He has a closer connection to the film than most.
His father, Richard O’Brien, was writing the Rocky Horror stage musical around the time Linus was born. He was about a year old when it premiered onstage, under the name The Rocky Horror Show, at London’s Royal Court Theatre. And he saw it live for the first time in 1976, at about the age of four, at the King’s Road Theatre.
“They let me control the lights around the proscenium,” Linus O’Brien recalls.
His father had started writing the musical as a struggling artist who had come to London from New Zealand. Linus O’Brien was dimly aware of the family’s rising financial fortunes as they moved from a small flat to a bigger house, and began to travel quite a bit. The musical quickly expanded to Sydney, and Los Angeles, and soon all over the world, but hit a snag in New York City, where Broadway audiences regarded its raunchy operatics and B-movie throwbackery with suspicion.
Another failure — initially — was the film version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, directed by Jim Sharman, who helped adapt it for the screen. It premiered almost 50 years ago, on September 26, 1975.
Though the early box office was bad, you probably know what happened next.
The film quickly became an underground sensation, and has played continuously for the last half century all over the globe, often accompanied by “shadow cast” performances in which audience members act out the movie as it plays onscreen.
The phenomenon began with screenings in Austin and New York City, where an audience member’s spontaneous eruption at Susan Sarandon’s character, Janet Weiss, during a storm — “Buy an umbrella, you cheap b—-!” — quickly grew into a series of audience participation cues that evolved into the shadow-cast performances.
“It’s the longest-running theatrical release in the history of cinema, and that’s 50 years,” Linus O’Brien says. “And second place is like one-and-a-half.”
An actor and DJ as well as filmmaker, Linus O’Brien makes his feature directorial debut with Strange Journey, a raucous, joyous documentary about the ups and downs of the ultimate cult classic. He interviews his father, who plays handyman Riff Raff in Rocky Horror, and pulls out his guitar in Strange Journey for glorious stripped-down versions of his beloved Rocky Horror songs.
Other mesmerizing interview subjects include Sarandon; Sharman; Tim Curry, who made his film debut as the “sweet transvestite” Dr. Frank-N-Furter; Barry Bostwick, who played Janet’s straitlaced fiance, Brad; and Patricia Quinn, who played Magenta and brings down the house with a story about kissing castmate Meatloaf.
Rocky Horror owes its success in large part to queer audiences, who embraced its exhortation to live truly to one’s self, epitomized by the song “Don’t Dream It, Be It.” They kept the film alive in all those midnight screenings, in small towns where Rocky Horror was sometimes the only light in the darkness.
“When the midnight screenings first happened, you would expect that maybe like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would have people who wanted to come see it. But it was the smaller cities around the Midwest where it actually had the most impact,” Linus O’Brien explains.
“You know, 10 to 12% of the human race is LGBTQ. So you go into a city which has 20,000 people, you’re gonna have 2,000 people who lean that way, or at least have those kinds of feelings, and they have nowhere else to go. And so Rocky provided a safe space in the community for people who felt marginalized and different.”
Why does he think it lasted so long?
“It was never intended to have a message, to point you in a direction,” O’Brien says. “It was just meant to be fun. And I think that’s one of the keys to the success of it — because if it had tried to preach, people would have gotten challenged, and people would have not liked that. And it didn’t, and here it is, 50 years later.”
Strange Journey premiered at SXSW to begin a successful festival run, and arrives in theaters next week. We talked with Linus O’Brien at the Provincetown International Film Festival, where a queer and LGBTQ-friendly audience enjoyed a screening of Strange Journey one night, and Rocky Horror the next.
Like Rocky Horror, Strange Journey is an intoxicating film to watch with a crowd, dreaming and being.
Linus O’Brien on Making Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror
MovieMaker: What’s it like to grow up with Rocky Horror?
Linus O’Brien: People ask me this, but he’s just my dad, and I didn’t you any different: “Oh yeah, this is his job, and this is what he does. He sings songs, you know.” I mean, as you get older, maybe it changes a little bit. Rocky just came in and out of our lives, with the anniversaries and the conventions and things like that, and when a new version of the stage play would come on, we’d go see that. But it was just always there in the background.
The deep appreciation of it probably happened for me while I was making the documentary. At the end of the SXSW screening, there was a man who came up to the stage after the Q&A, and he was shaking, and he said, “I just want to tell you I met my wife at Rocky Horror 32 years ago, and my wife wanted to tell you that if it wasn’t for Rocky Horror, she wouldn’t be alive today.”
And that story is told over and over again. I can’t think of another work of art, a film, a soundtrack, a stage play, a book that has tangibly saved the lives of, I would say, conservatively, tens of thousands of people. If I say hundreds of thousands, people will think I’m crazy, but it’s a distinct possibility that that’s the case, given that it’s now three generations of people.
MovieMaker: Saved them by letting them know they’re not alone?
Linus O’Brien: Exactly. But also giving them a place to go and meet other people just like them. And they don’t necessarily even have to be gay or LGBTQ. They can just feel different and just not part of anything.
I think one of the things that’s really amazing about Rocky Horror is that society has an idea of what beauty and sexuality looks like. We always see it on magazines and commercials and TikTok and everything — you’re constantly bombarded with girls with giant boobs and butts and having to be skinny and guys with chiseled abs and jaws, right? So that’s kind of the media perception of what beauty is.
But everyone deserves to be a sexual being, right? And so if you’re a little bit shorter, or a little bit bigger, or too skinny, or whatever, you’re allowed to feel like that. It allows you that freedom. And the value of that is unquantifiable, really.
MovieMaker: The Rocky Horror Picture Show has grossed well over $100 million on a small budget. It’s cool that your dad had this kind of success making what must have seemed like the least commercial thing. He seems like he gets a lot of pleasure from just holding a guitar.
Linus O’Brien: That’s his whole thing, really. He’s never chased money. He’s never chased roles. If Rocky hadn’t been a success, I think he would have been a very successful actor, and would have focused on that a lot more. I think Rocky gave him the ability to say no to a lot of things.
MovieMaker: I have a friend whose dad revered Bob Dylan, and as a result he hates Bob Dylan — he was always rebelling against this symbol of rebellion. How do you rebel when your dad created Rocky Horror?
Linus O’Brien: The only way I rebelled even slightly, was when I was about 13, maybe 12, someone gave me a tie, and I started wearing the tie with a T-shirt. And my dad was like, ‘Oh, no, take that tie off.’ And so then that made me want to wear the tie more, and it lasted about two weeks. But that was the only small rebellion that there was — almost wearing a tie.
MovieMaker: This may sound sacrilegious, but I found your movie on a meta level to be as interesting to watch as Rocky Horror, because not only do you get scenes from Rocky Horror, but you also get the story behind it — and to see how well so many in the cast have aged. It’s like being involved in this has kept people young, including your dad.
Linus O’Brien: That’s a very nice thing to say. Even if you take out my dad’s personal journey, you have the fact that Rocky Horror was only meant to have a three-week run in a theater that held 60 people, and then the explosion of the stage show in London, the success at the Roxy in L.A., the failure at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, the failure of the movie when it first came out, and then the resurrection through the midnight screening – that alone is interesting.
But we’ve peppered it with lots of lovely anecdotes, and at the end, it’s a love letter to the fans.
I could watch again and again the parts about the midnight screenings and Sal Piro, the original fan club founder, and the original shadow cast members. When my dad talks about Dori Hartley — the Frank-N-Furter at the Eighth Street Playhouse in the shadow cast — and he talks about her sitting at the front of the stage, and there’s a spotlight on her, and her silhouette on the screen, while the audiences are singing the refrains — I get chills every time I watch that.
Because then you see, “Oh, it’s just not some people acting out in front of the stage.” It becomes art at that point. It becomes something completely different. To be able to convey that to people, so they get a real sense of what’s happening — I can watch it over and over again.
MovieMaker: Speaking of audience participation, there’s an amazing moment in this documentary where we realize that Rocky Horror is kind of Jack Black’s origin story, because he saw Meatloaf in Rocky Horror and related to him. And now you have Jack Black starring in A Minecraft Movie, which is another film where you have audiences participating and adding a layer by going wild during the “chicken jockey” scene. So it’s all kind of coming together.
Linus O’Brien: Meatloaf played his dad in the Tenacious D movie in 2006. And Meatloaf said to him, “You know, the last time I sang on film was Rocky Horror, all that time ago.” So that was really cool for him, and it was really cool for me to hear as well.
I don’t know too much about Minecraft, but it was very funny to hear it, given that for so long, audience participation has been, you know, solely Rocky Horror.
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror arrives in theaters September 25.
Main image: Richard O’Brien, who wrote Rocky Horror and plays Riff Raff, in Linus O’Brien’s Strange Journey