“Shit, That Was Clever”: What The Rocky Horror Picture Show Cast Remembers After 50 Years

Fifty years is a very long time, but Barry Bostwick, Nell Campbell, and Patricia Quinn still remember plenty about what it was like to make The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of pop culture’s most iconic cult movies. Encompassing nearly all genres at once — musical, comedy, drama, sci-fi, horror — the film depicts one very wild night “over at the Frankenstein Place,” as young lovers Brad (Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon) encounter the wild Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) and his party guests/servants, including Magenta (Quinn) and Columbia (Campbell).

Sitting down with Bostwick, Campbell, and Quinn at a recent press day, I’m curious what they remember about the filming of the movie, given how long ago it took place. The answer ends up being plenty, as they don’t hesitate to recall at least one accident that occurred on set. “When they had the stand-in for Eddie on the motorbike, racing ’round the laboratory, he fell off the the slope and crashed over,” Campbell says.

“Did he break something? A leg or an arm?” Bostwick tries to remember.

“His reputation,” Campbell cracks.

Adds Quinn, with Magenta’s same deadpan drawl: “He died.”

Her co-stars laugh at that. Campbell continues. “And then of course, when darling Jonathan Adams had to come crashing through the wall in his wheelchair — he died too.”

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Campbell then tries to remember if Quinn also crashed through a wall at one point in the movie, in the scene where Magenta announces that “Dinner is prepared.” Quinn didn’t, but she does fondly remember hitting the giant gong. “That’s the first time I really thought about doing that,” she says. “Shit, that was clever.”

Rewatching the movie after all this time — especially after its rise as a touchstone of midnight cinema beloved by a massive international community — brings with it the realization of how young and scrappy a production it was, filled with an unexpectedly alive feel. That looseness is a credit to director Jim Sharman, who first brought Richard O’Brien’s original creation to the stage in 1973 before taking on the job of the film adaptation.

That’s the biggest piece of luck Rocky Horror had going for it, Campbell believes — “the fact that Richard O’Brien chose Jim Sharman to hand his 12 pages of script and say, ‘Can I sing you a few songs from this musical I’m writing about Frankenstein?’”

Key to that stroke of luck is that at the time, Sharman was a theater director whose 1972 staging of Jesus Christ Superstar was a huge success in London. Meaning, as Campbell puts it, that “he had clout.” And after reading O’Brien’s early Rocky Horror treatment, Sharman used that clout to tell those running London’s The Royal Court that he wanted to use their Theater Upstairs space to put up the play. By threatening to pull out of a planned production of Sam Shepherd’s The Unseen Hand, he got them to say yes.

Remembering the movie’s theatrical roots casts a fresh light on its overall unruly nature. One scene that’s always stuck out to me is the staging of “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me,” which Janet sings to the newly-made Rocky (Peter Hinwood), unaware that Columbia and Magenta are watching on their own TV, laughing and having their own fun.

The scene is filled with loose, casual touches, like Columbia painting Magenta’s toenails, and Campbell attributes their ease together on screen to the fact that Campbell and Quinn had originated these roles in the theater production, making them intimately familiar with both the characters as well as each other. In the stage version, Magenta and Columbia actually sing the song’s chorus — the film features them more as side commentators, playing around with, in Quinn’s words, “hair dryers and things” in their pajamas. “I do make her paint my toenails,” she adds.

Aside from changes like that, what was it like being a part of the project’s transition from stage to screen? “I know that Tim [Curry] felt that he had to tone down his performance. I think he hit the perfect note,” Campbell says, before turning to Quinn. “Did you feel you had to tone Magenta down?”

Once again, a dry-as-the-desert response from Quinn: “Never.” For Quinn, she felt it was “just a carrying on of the same. But I didn’t have the responsibility of Tim Curry with all those songs and things.”

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (20th Century Fox)

Bostwick, meanwhile, didn’t appear in any stage version of the show before getting cast in the movie — and, he says, he didn’t have to audition. “They just gave me the part. They begged for me,” he says. “But apparently Susan got paid more than me.” He turns to his co-stars. “Did you know that?”

“No,” Campbell says, “But then again, she had to audition.”

“Better agent,” says Quinn.

That said, Bostwick notes, “nobody got any money” for appearing in Rocky Horror. He’s only mildly exaggerating. “I got 2,500 pounds,” Campbell says. “Peter Hinwood was paid a hundred pounds a week. Tell that to the producers and 20th Century Fox.”

That wasn’t the only area where the production proved to be low on cash: The Rocky Horror team only had one soundstage at Bray Film Studios for its interiors, but production designer Brian Thomson (“brilliant,” in Quinn’s words) saw the nearby Oakley Court country house and immediately knew he wanted to use it for filming the exteriors. “They’d taken the lead off the roof, and everything was going into disrepair because [the owners] wanted the land,” Quinn says. “They wanted it to fall down. And [Thomson] said ‘We’re going use that.’”

The appeal for Thomson was in part the house’s history as a location for Hammer horror films — despite its disrepair. According to Quinn, “That was the most ingenious thing. I mean, without that house, what would we have been? The house saved our lives, really.”

A remarkably large percentage of those who worked on The Rocky Horror Picture Show are still with us today, but one notable exception is Michael Lee Aday, otherwise known as Meat Loaf. Campbell remembers him as “the most incredible talent and an absolute darling,” who had previously played both Eddie and Dr. Scott in the Los Angeles stage production that preceded the movie’s filming.

Eddie/Dr. Scott is a common double-casting for the theatrical version, Campbell adds, “and Meatloaf wanted to also play Dr. Scott in the film. But Jim said no.”

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (20th Century Fox)

Bostwick remembers that “he and I were in New York together as young actors, auditioning for the same things — you know, Hair. He liked to say that he turned down the part of Rump in Grease, and I asked the director after many, many years, ‘Did he actually turn it down?’ And he said, ‘No, we never would’ve cast him because he’s such a showboat. You can’t take your eyes off him.’”

In Meat Loaf’s case, his showboating worked to the movie’s advantage — especially given Eddie’s limited screen time. In fact, his performance in the movie aligns nicely with the other cast members’, an impressive high-wire act.

Bostwick says that he “would get notes from Jim Sharman saying ‘Pull it down a little bit,’ because he was trying to keep everybody on the same reality level. With just a slight bit of tongue.”

“We weren’t hamming it up,” Campbell says. “All of our characters were playing it for real.”

The Rocky Horror Picture Show will be celebrating its 50th anniversary with a nationwide tour, a new 4k theatrical and home video re-release, and a new vinyl release for the soundtrack.