A TOAST TO `ROCKY HORROR'
A Cult Classic Vamps on TV

By Frank Lovece. Frank Lovece is a free-lance writer.
`LET'S DO the time warp again"?

We never knew we stopped.

From almost the moment a movie-musical megaflop called "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" played theaters, briefly, in 1975 - and then segued into a $150-million midnight-movie institution - we've been dancing to a step called the time warp, singing along to the sound track, and throwing toast at the screen. (We'll explain. Give us a minute.) More than a movie, this weird melange of monster-flick pastiche and campy sexual kitschy-koo became, quite inadvertently, an audience-participation extravaganza.

Fans who showed up time and again at artsy outposts like the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village began to sing along to the score. Soon they started tossing witty-bitchy comebacks to the dialogue. Then they began throwing rice during the wedding scene. And then, of course, when somebody in the movie proposed a toast . . . well, we said we'd explain.

Then came the costumes. Then came dance-along performers. It all became so campy as to make RuPaul look straight. Though none of this would seem quite so much fun at home, "Rocky Horror" was a hit when it came to video in 1990.

Now, at last, the final great cult-movie holdout is coming to television. Sort of: Fox is indeed airing the TV debut of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (WNYW / 5, tonight at 8, with a rerun on Halloween Eve, Oct. 30) - but it's intercutting, or perhaps blemishing, the film with newly shot scenes of theatrical audience participation.

"It's more exciting, the way we're doing it, than just making it Monday-night-at-the-movies," insists Lou Adler, the famed music producer who brought the original "Rocky Horror" stage show to the United States from England, and acted as executiveproducer of the film.

The film itself has been trimmed from its R-rated, American-release-length 95 minutes to a TV-acceptable 93 minutes and 13 seconds. It's also being broadcast slightly sped-up, to fit into a two-hour time slot with commercials plus Meat Loaf's newly taped intro.

The plot (for the fuddier-duddier who don't already know it) tells of a dark and stormy night at the castle of pansexual Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), whose preferred ensemble is fishnet stockings and a merry-widow corset. Upright Brad Majors and uptight Janet Weiss (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon) come seeking help for their stalled-out car. But the doctor has his own seductive plans for the couple - as well as for his muscleman-monster (Peter Hinwood).

There's a ghoulish - but rocking - butler and maid (Richard O'Brien and Patricia Quinn), a cannibalized motorcycle wild-one (Meat Loaf) and his grieving girlfriend ("Little Nell" Campbell). And there are top-notch songs, electrifying choreography, and Jim Sharman's sweatily kinetic direction.

Sharman had directed the stage version as well. Then it was just "The Rocky Horror Show," which he and playwright-composer O'Brien had mounted at the small Royal Court Theater in London in 1973. An avant-garde success, it had twice moved to larger venues by the time Adler caught up with it.

"I had just had a son with Britt Ekland," recalls Adler, "and I was flying to England to see them as much as I could. And one time she called and said there's this play I should see and try to get involved with. It had already played in England for about ten months when I saw it, and had a following even then, mostly of showbiz-type people." Adler loved what he saw, approached producer Michael White at a party that same evening and the two closed a deal.

Employing most of the original cast, the musical did as well at Adler's Roxy Theater in L. A. as in London, prompting Adler to bring it to Broadway's Belasco Theater. He'd already convinced 20th Century Fox to produce a film version - budgeted, he says, "at under $1 million" - and had it shot during the bicoastal hiatus, with Bostwick and Sarandon replacing the original Brad and Janet.

The Broadway version stiffed, however, after just 45 performances. When the movie did equally dismally, Adler and Fox publicist Tim Deegan scrambled to place it anywhere - even at midnight showings, starting with an April Fool's Day, 1976, run at the Waverly.

And the film took on a life of its own - continuing to this day in a reported hundred or so theaters nationwide, along with fan clubs and at least three books.

The eye of this storm has always been Curry, now a respected musical-theater and film star (Tony Award-nominated for "Amadeus," the upcoming "Three Musketeers" movie). As a young London actor, he'd first heard about the play, he says, "because I lived on Paddington Street, off Baker Street, and there was an old gym a few doors away. I saw Richard O'Brien in the street, and he said he'd just been in the gym to see if he could find a muscleman who could sing. And he told me that his musical was going to be done and I should talk to Jim Sharman. He gave me the script, and I thought, `Boy, if this works, it's going to be a smash.' "

Undoubtedly, some "Rocky Horror" fans will take issue with the broadcast version, as they did when the videocassette release offered dubbed (stereo) songs from the original-cast album, rather than the movie's (mono) sound track. And like the videocassette and disc, the TV version likewise will not include the songs "Once in Awhile" and "Super Heroes," found on the original, 100-minute British theatrical release, but cut from the initial U. S. print.

The reason? So that Adler retains something exclusive for the film's 20th-anniversary videodisc, due in 1995. "The film seems to have a mind of its own," Adler muses. "It shows a direction it should go at any particular time. And I do try to make it very special," he declares, "whenever we go to another medium."