Hacker Cinema
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
1975 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Jim Sharman
After getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, newly engaged couple Brad and Janet encounter the eerie mansion of the flamboyant, seductive Dr Frank-N-Furter and a variety of eccentric characters. Through elaborate dance and rock music, the mad scientist unveils his latest creation: a perfect, muscular man.
7 positive13 neutralfrom 20 commenters
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20 comments on Hacker News
Endgame is basically "camp" (though large as camps go) at this point, and I mean that in a nice way, like how Rocky Horror Picture Show evoke similar audience reactions.
But T2 references were everywhere and people not in to movies or action or sci-fi or pop culture knew and know them.
The midnight showing of movies like Rocky Horror Picture show are fun when everyone knows that audience participation is the entire reason of going, but that's the only time I want audience participation.
I don't know where people get these crazy prices. Try to find a little hole-in-the-wall theater. I like the local Landmark Cinema. It is about $8 a ticket and I skip on the junk food.
There is another theater on the other side of town that does midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Those kinds of places are also cheap.
This is an intriguing anti-endorsement; I was too cool for Batman when this came out, but I feel like I have to watch this now haha.
I actually lived near a movie theater that got bought out by someone very weird and ostensibly rich, and they just played bad movies to jeer at and mock, and every... Friday was Rocky Horror Picture Show night. I think the small town I was in revolted and raised money to then buy that guy out, but man what a time. Surprised they didn't screen this steamer lol, is all I'm saying.
I am very confused by your response. I listed a bunch of different *common* definitions of "what is a woman" and showed that *all of them have flaws*. It's the idea of "common sense language" that I'm opposing here, because the reality is much more interesting than such simple definitions.
I am also not labelling *you* transphobic at all. It was quite obvious that you are not, even before you stated you are a trans woman. Fun fact: myself, gender fluid. (Huh, first time I've said that in a pubic forum with my name on it…)
When I wrote:
> Quite a lot of transphobes focus entirely on women, thus ignoring how their own rules end up forcing trans men to end up in women's-only spaces.
This sentence is not about you. It's a much more general observation, noting what is wrong with *the public discourse*, specifically that transphobes insist on certain definitions which end up with outcomes that they themselves are dissatisfied with.
> RHPS
While I also watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show in my teens (late 90s), that film (1975) predates me by so much, I wasn't sure if they used "transvestite" to mean "cross dressing" or "transgender". Where I first used the word "transvestite" to your objection, I meant specifically what is also called "cross dressing", because I was talking about *outward appearance in public*, and clothes are the outward appearance in public.
That and hair, I guess. My hair is long enough I've had at least one straight guy get half way through a wolf-whistle before noticing a beard. At least, I assume they were straight, given the appearance of a beard was simultaneous with them stopping.
"I've seen Rocky Horror Picture Show at least five times, and I'm still unsure if it's a "good" movie"
Well, at least it wasn't so bad that he balked at watching it one more time
I have been living in Germany for over 20 years now, and never once have I seen somebody clap at a movie. I mean, it makes more sense to clap after your airplane lands, at least that will make the pilots and flight attendants feel good, but who are you clapping for in a cinema? The projectionist (who's probably not even there anymore?).
Having said that, there is a kind of "continuously showing movie" in Germany where the audience is very much encouraged to react during the film: there is a cinema in Munich that has been showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show continuously for over 40 years (not non-stop though), where people sing along, throw rice, dance etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Lichtspiele https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/museum-lichtspiele-wie-muenchen-die-rocky-horror-picture-show-feiert-1.3545614
Kids these days.
Meanwhile in the 70s:
> [The Rocky Horror Picture Show] soon became a hit as a midnight movie, when audiences began participating with the film at the Waverly Theater in New York City in 1976. Audience members returned to the cinemas frequently and talked back to the screen and began dressing as the characters, spawning similar performance groups across the United States. At almost the same time, fans in costume at the King's Court Theater in Pittsburgh began performing alongside the film. This "shadow cast" mimed the actions on screen above and behind them, while lip-synching their character's lines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocky_Horror_Picture_Show
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0073629/
- Little Shop of Horrors (1986) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0091419/
This was one of the things that came up when Amazon bought MGM because MGM pre-Amazon takeover had one of the most-used "rescreening" programs of all the (former) major studios. As soon as the Amazon purchase completed, Amazon shut down a lot of MGM film distribution, including just about all of its rescreening efforts. Amazon only just announced (presumably at shareholder pressure) building a new film distributor and starting to move the large MGM back-catalog back out beyond the Prime fences.
Similarly, when Disney bought what used to be 20th Century Fox, they immediately changed the economics of their classic rescreening programs (as Disney's "Vault" procedures have always been anti-rescreening). That was said to have directly led to breaks in long runs of Rocky Horror Picture Show specifically as Disney's price changes made it tougher to keep it running in some cities that had previously run it regularly for decades. (Of course, that timing was around 2020 so in most cases that wasn't the only excuse to break such traditional people gatherings.)
(ETA snark: it's almost like copyright terms are too long and rent seeking too easy on cinema classics.)
> The distributor is irrelevant nowadays. Today, Disney’s role is to curate.
Again, that's laughable nonsense. If I want to stream a Marvel movie, Netflix' curation is irrelevant, because you can ONLY find it on Disney. That's not curation, that's distribution.
> If the content is high quality, word will spread, people will share links to it, and everyone will have the opportunity to see it. This was not the case before the internet.
This isn't true - Rocky Horror Picture Show? That's the just the first one that comes to mind. There are so many cult classics from the 60s-80s.
> There are 8B people in the world, there is no way everyone has time to watch everything. There will be a filtering mechanism for everyone.
Right now it's whoever owns the exclusive license for a piece of content. That's my entire point - consumers aren't choosing the winners, content owners are.
> Lets Critical thinking, and less open questioning, more authority, follow the rules, do not question "The Experts", do as your told (but only what those in Authority tell you not your parents) etc.
People have been saying this about schools since forever.
FWIW your anecdotes don't match mine. My public school stories are all about learning critical thinking, being allowed to think way outside the box, and being rewarded for questioning authority.
One time we got new math books in that were horrible. Obvious errors everywhere. The teacher gave us extra credit for spending the day finding math errors in the book.
9th grade European History started off with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
In 10th grade sex ed students got to vote on a movie. Nerds and Goths teamed up, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show.
In 3rd grade, a group of students opted stayed inside during recess and construct hot wheels courses (tracks and ramps) out of whatever classroom supplies we could find laying around.
10th grade parents day, my genetics teacher tricked parents into extracting frog sperm from a solution and playing with it. The students were nonplussed, we'd been working with DNA for quite a while by that time.
12th grade final report, I wrote a paper on the future of LED lighting, where I rewrired some incandescent flashlights into LED flashlights (obviously back before LED flashlights where a big thing).
8th grade final report, 30 page history of video games starting in 1970 and up until the mid 90s.
7th grade debate class, Rome VS Greece, on the side of Rome we argued that "Greece doesn't get to take credit for philosophers it had put to death."
8th grade math class, we just went and full on learned college level stats.
6th grade, I read the book Druids. For those not aware, it has sex in it. Quite as bit of sex in fact. Good bit of historical fiction though, I learned about the Romans invading England!
Fuck all that mass-media social programming propaganda. Murder and violence are "okay," while sex and sexuality are "bad."
I'll walk around naked, look at women, and hookup whenever I damn well please. Sex is awesome, bodies are beautiful, and no shame is necessary for either.
Films that cannot be made in modern America:
- Laura, les ombres de l'été (1979)
- Lolita (either)
- Pretty Baby (1978)
- Caligula (1979)
- Rocky Horror Picture Show
- Monty Python and The Holy Grail
- Nymphomaniac I or II
Partially, there is great sanitization of Western films to be accepted by foreign censors.
Theaters require a license to show a movie.
Disney does not generally grant licenses to theaters to show its films second-run (meaning after their initial box-office run) except as part of re-release initiated by Disney. They make extremely limited exceptions to this policy; the Rocky Horror Picture Show is basically the only film in the Disney/Fox vault that they allow to show second-run.
In this case, the theater announced they were going to show Black Panther without actually bothering to get the license ahead of time, and Disney did not make an exception to their policy.
Concerts and festivals are made more enjoyable by the shared energy. Other than concert movies and maybe Rocky Horror Picture Show, I struggle to think of movies where I’d rather walk on sticky floors to see it with 100 other coughing, talking, texting, etc humans than at home in a decent home theater.
Stand Blade Runner next to nearly any action, super hero, or "science fiction" movie made after 1999, and Blade Runner wins or ties, every time. For several reasons.
But it's not enough to just be better than the cotton candy fluff of recent movies, since that's not a real competition. It's a solid movie that stands on its own, even despite some quirky flaws in the delivery and editing of the performances.
It's not Rocky Horror Picture Show, where you and your friends have a party, and participate. It's more of a sleepy, quiet time movie like Taxi Driver. Like Taxi Driver, and any other classic movie, it gets better with repeated viewing, as more details tie together.
It's not a mind blowing movie, but for it's time, it dealt with a lot of new themes in extremely subtle ways, without excessive treatment. The future was cast as a recognizable, ordinary reality, taking on a tone that really only draws a cult following, but warrants substantial appreciation.
Movies like this don't get made anymore because risking a budget on cult appreciation doesn't land well in a pitch, especially amid the modern environment of implicit piracy, if it's fair to label shared viewing as such.
Whether it was the first movie to feel vaguely cyberpunk-ish or not, doesn't matter much anymore, but Blade Runner had a deep gravitational pull that influenced visual concepts of the near future well into the late nineties.
Without a sequel, all of the open-ended background trivia that was never elaborated upon, left open a whole universe to imagine, and this is where the cultural resonance ties in. The people who enjoyed the movie were left free to speculate about what really went on in the off world colonies, given the curiousities revealed by film.
I wish more movies were like Blade Runner. It's a rare item. It's not a movie you watch once. It's not a blockbuster. It's not a movie you turn off, when it finds it's way onto your TV, however that manages to happen.
> the "class clown" that hoots and hollers at the appropriate time
This is exactly why I don't like theaters. I go to enjoy the movie, not have a shared social event. The extend of the 'social' aspect is my wife or friend next to me maybe getting an ear whisper, but even that is rare. If I want a shared social movie event I'll go watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Edit: I also grew up playing Oregon Trail
The list of good movies is incredibly long, but IMO most are just that good movies are not really in the running for best movie. Take Life Is Beautiful it turned a 20m budget and 10x that at the box office in large part because it's a good movie, but not really 'the best'. Rocky horror picture show is a very different move though again popular, but not really in the running for 'the best movie of all time'.
So, while I don't think you can get a definitive list, you could get 7/10 on most peoples top ten lists out of perhaps a few hundred movies though I suspect significantly less than that.
As someone who's seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a movie theater many times (with audience participation, of course), that sounds like a lot of fun
Such BULLSHIT.
This is a meme that comes up every few years like clockwork. Unfortunately, this one, like others before it, just shows how little people know about Hollywood. I guess it doesn't matter, as it makes for great link-bait. So maybe they know more than they let on, but dumb it down to "mean" people and "dying" industry. Yet, if that were the case, no one would want to take it over. The industry is, however, closer to a zero sum game than not. Offers to be a "partner" are offers to "take" some of the revenue.
There are two "modes" of entertainment (I am not counting learning or socializing, which are separate): "games" and "story-telling". I've pitched ideas on a cross-over between the two (over ten years ago), but really the two are very different, right down to how the brain behaves in each mode. Music is interesting because it doesn't take our full attention -- it would interesting to see other entertainment that had that same quality.
But anyhow, that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities in the space, or opportunities for other ways to spend our time.
Take music, for example. Drive a brand that curates indie music, and let people invest in the bands (real money), drive that band to their friends, and eventually take a token of their success some day (a 360 deal, not just records, but everything including merchandizing, live performances, etc -- that way each band can determine the best mix, which may be all album sales or free music distribution). Early fans have skin in the game, bands that pick up fans get money to accelerate their reach, and everyone can have fun in the process since they are all partners.
And as far as time, think of teenagers and college students (and 20 somethings), hormonally driven to socialize. It was a huge catalyst for AOL (chat rooms), Friendster/MySpace/HotOrNot/Facebook, etc. Later in life there are children, and the need for everything to be all about them, understand them, get away from them. But competition for time is such an open thing, that it seems out of scope unless it is a form of entertainment, even if it is entertaining, like sex.
It would be nice to get people to vote on movie selections so a theatre could get it and show it knowing that there is an audience. I'd love to see "Go!" again. There is a business idea for you.
So instead of "killing Hollywood", I'm going to see Rocky Horror Picture Show in PacHeights next weekend. It is not an iSomething, it is not virtual, it means real warm bodies and a preset schedule. See ya there!