HORROR CONTINUED

share the same haberdasher, they at least share a similar spirit.

"I just like it because it's different," says a studiouslooking Cleveland Heights boy. "This is the third time I'll have seen it and, well, it's a more interesting film to see than 'Saturday Night Fever', more of a heterogeneous audience. Actually, the whole thing is a lot like a hip game show. 'Let's Make a Deal' for instance."

he Rocky Horror Picture Show" was made by Twentieth Century Fox in 1975 for a trifle

over a million dollars. Based on a highly successful London and off-Broadway very far

off play whose most distinctive qualities were vast amounts of homosexual camping and Myra Breckinridge style movie parody, the film was originally intended for standard theatrical release..

After bombing out with Mid-American middlebrows, the film found its own level as a cult film, which is generally either a commercial film that failed ("Harold and Maude") or a non-commercial film that never could have succeeded (the complete works of John Waters.)

Finding its niche as a focal

-point for giggly guerilla theater, it was only a question of time until the film found its way to the Heights Art Theater. If the New Mayfield has become the local rallying point for the Hollywood classicists, and if John Forman's Cleveland Film Festival has co-opted the art film clique and University Circle culture-vultures, then the Heights, with its crazed mixture of pornography, violence and European classics, is a haven for those seriously interested in sleazy popular culture.

"Playing the film was the idea of the guy who runs the Midnight Movie series for our chain across the country," says

Marsha Fink ("Columbia") and Jeff Shaevel ("a Transylvanian") are from Beachwood.

George Fitzpatrick, manager of the Heights for more years than he cares to remember, a man with the demeanor of a sepulchral mortician, a demeanor that conceals the most amiable of natures.

"We started showing the film in October 1977 and nothing much happened; 100 or 175 people a show, and by the time we deducted Fox's 50% and our advertising and promotion costs, it wasn't really worth it. I was all for pulling it and putting in 'Pink Flamingoes.'

"But as soon as the warm weather came, things really picked up; 250 people, 300, then 400 and we're still climbing. The only real problem we've had is the audience participation thing; there's a wedding scene in the film, the kids throw rice and that's all right. But later, when the characters light some matches to find their way, the whole theater erupted in matches, which, with this neighborhood's history, could be dangerous. So now, when the people in the movie light matches, the kids just switch on flashlights.

"The way things are going now, I think we could run this film forever."

Which would be just fine with "The Rocky Horror Picture Show's" burgeoning devotees, fans so rabid that applause and howls greet things so ordinary as the film's credit titles, the audience even joining in on the witty lyrics to the title song: "It's a late night double feature show by RKO in the back row.”

asically, the film is a joyously silly satire of innocence raped, and the audience responds with the gleeful sadism of children; when doorbells ring in the movie, doorbells ring in the audience; when noisemakers are used in the film, they're used in the audience; dancing in the film, dancing in the aisles; when the drag queen mad doctor chases his muscle bound creation through his castle with carnal intent, two people dressed like the characters tear through the theater; when the hopelessly square, thoroughly inept would-be hero, who has previously been seen perusing a copy of Ohio's

largest newspaper, introduces himself ("Hi, my name is Brad Majors"), the audience, en masse, screams an obscene welcome.

It's all the very essence of juvenalia, but, if caught in the right mood and, one suspects, with the drugs correctly timed it could be a lot of fun and, at $2 a head, it's certainly cheaper than group therapy, which it closely resembles.

As far as the film itself goes, it's nothing if not eclectic, borrowing freely from its betters; the drag queen is closely modeled on Helmut Berger's transvestite turn in "The Damned," and the tattoos of "Love" and "Death" on Meat Loaf's left and right hands respectively, echo Robert Mitchum's crazed preacher in "Night of the Hunter.'

While the film lacks almost everything but an ersatz originality, it at least has energy; while it forsakes the jugular vent of true parody for comic book caricatures out of "Creepy" magazine, it at least has a prep school panache.

The high spirits have even converted Wayne Ardo, a gimlet-eyed Cleveland Heights cop who performs the dual functions of making sure that no minors are corrupted by the R rated picture and that things don't ever get too far out of hand.

"I've gotta admit that at first I thought the whole thing was pretty dumb," says Ardo, warily eyeing a transvestite who is complaining that somebody has stolen his/her money. “But after a while, you get into the spirit of it; it grows on you. Actually, I think the whole thing's pretty funny."

That's one more convert for "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and one small step towards freedom of expression and broadness of mind. Meanwhile, New Year's is a long way away, and I've still got this noisemaker that was pressed on me by a kid from Beachwood. Maybe next Friday. . . after all, everybody says you've got to see it more than once. RJ

Scott Eyman is a free-lance writer who contributes regularly to Sunday Magazine.

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