“It was so strange,” he said. “I was actually having a massage, and the guy who was giving me a massage said, ‘I’m worried about you. I think we should call a doctor.’ I felt fine. I had no symptoms I was aware of. I wasn’t in pain.”
Curry found out he’d had a stroke after being admitted to the hospital, and immediately thought about his dad, who’d suffered a fatal stroke when Curry was 10. “I was scared,” he said of his reaction to learning he was following in his dad’s footsteps.
Afterward, Curry had brain surgery and rehabilitation. “I had to learn how to speak again,” he said. “That was very weird. I hated not being able to speak.” In addition, the left side of his face became paralyzed. “My face kind of went sideways,” he said.
Of his role as a mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, “the sweet transvestite, from Transsexual, Transylvania,” as he so memorably sang in Rocky Horror, Curry said that role helped others who might have been afraid to be different.
“He had a lot of power — Frank. He gave a lot of teenagers permission to be different and i’m very happy that he did have that power,” Curry said.
The actor has a new memoir, Vagabond, but told Mankiewicz he prefers hat some secrets stay secret, so the book isn’t a tell-all. “One of the keys is to not encourage an identity,” he said. “I’ve tried to nurse that. I have protected that and continued to.”
Curry also opened up about his mom, who he believes had bipolar disorder. She exhibited frequent mood swings and could be cruel to her son, Curry said. Despite his success, she “didn’t make much of it,” he said. “She was scared of it. She said to me later that ‘I thought your head was going to grow too big.’ She would have preferred me to operate under the radar.… [But] I never did. I didn’t give a shit about the radar.’”
He also doesn’t wallow in sadness. “I don’t admire self-pity much — another legacy from my mother, I guess,” he said. “It’s one I am thankful for. ‘Why are you so important that we have to pity you?’” he said, laughing.
The actor, now 79, added that he isn’t afraid of dying.
“I don’t fear death. I try to avoid it,” he said, laughing. “I think we all do, but I suspect that in the end, I will welcome it. I think it may be very comforting to go bye-bye, and I want to earn it,” he added with another laugh.
Ever since the Disney–Fox merger, I consider Dr. Frank N. Furter — Tim Curry’s iconic Sweet Transvestite from the Rocky Horror Picture Show — to be an official Disney princess (fight me), so it’s only appropriate that Orlando is celebrating the film’s 50th anniversary like a royal jubilee. This Sunday, a screening at Dr. Phillips Center will feature stars Barry Bostwick, Nell Campbell and Patricia Quinn with the local Rich Weirdoes shadowcast, whom I recently watched while bouncing around in my moving seat during Pointe Orlando’s bonkers 4DX screening. They’ll also be at the Plaza Live on Halloween, and a live Rocky Horror cabaret is coming to downtown’s Darkroom at The Dust on Oct. 26.
Among the many releases associated with the anniversary — including a restored 4K release of the film and a book of Mick Rock photographs — is the unauthorized documentary Sane Inside Insanity, available on streaming and screening Oct. 17 at Fort Lauderdale’s OUTshine Film Festival. Director Andreas Zerr spent nearly a decade researching Rocky Horror and pursuing elusive interviewees, so you’d expect him to be a superfan, but when I interviewed him via video from his home in Hamburg, Germany, the opposite turned out to be true.
“I’m not a Rocky Horror fan myself. I never was, and I doubt that I will ever be,” says Zerr, who first encountered RHPS on VHS as a teen. “I liked the music, but Rocky Horror per se did not actually appeal to me. It did not speak to me like it spoke to other people in the community especially, so I forgot about it for 30 years.”
Then, 10 years ago, Zerr heard a Rocky Horror song on the radio and began wondering what happened to the people involved. “I started to investigate with the intention of more like a 30-40 minute feature, [but] the deeper we dug within the investigation we researched, the more interesting the story became.”
Richard O’Brien — who wrote the the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show, co-wrote the screenplay for the movie version, and appeared in it as Riff Raff — didn’t participate in Zerr’s film, but Sane Inside Insanity dives deeply into his creation’s birth and makes a convincing argument that the original London show that launched the entire phenomenon was a team effort. “Without Sue Blane’s costumes, without Brian Thompson’s set design, without Richard Hartley’s [musical arrangements], without Jim [Sharman] directing it and giving his input, I think the show would have failed after a week,” Zerr says.
Zerr notes that modern mountings of the musical — such as the never-ending European tours and a limited run coming next spring to Broadway’s Studio 54 — have rewritten the original show to make it more like the movie, because “people going to the show after the film cult has evolved are expecting more to see the film live on stage than the original stage play.” His film documents these big-budget productions’ popularity with audiences, while also eulogizing the scrappy punk-rock lark buried beneath the bombast.
“It’s much more business now, which might be a good thing for some, and might be a bad thing for others,” says Zerr, adding, “People who have seen the Stones in a 100-person bar in the ’60s would say the same thing about the Rolling Stones now playing Wembley Stadium.”
The other major thread in Sane Inside Insanity is the unique relationship between Rocky Horror and its interactive audience, which became a worldwide community. The soul of these segments is the late Sal Piro, founding president of the official Rocky Horror Picture Show Fan Club.
“To see his emotions and what he feels for Rocky Horror, even almost 50 years after seeing it the first time, that was very precious for us and also his sister,” says Zerr. Piro, who passed away in 2023 shortly after recording his interviews, was “the bearer of the torch,” before passing the torch on to Larry Viezel, current club president, current club president and my friend since we met at a convention in 1993.
“People yelling stuff, throwing stuff, saying stuff back to the screen, was kind of amazing for me,” Viezel recalls of his first exposure to the movie at Cinema 35 in Paramus, New Jersey, where we performed together during college breaks. “I had a great time, and I thought I’d never go back again … and it’s kind of been 33 years ever since.”
That first convention we attended inspired Viezel to host his own in upstate New York. “No one said, ‘No, you can’t do that. No, you shouldn’t do a convention,’” says Larry. “I was 18 years old, a stupid college sophomore at the time, and I had 500 people descend on Albany.”
After staging a successful series of cons and amassing a massive memorabilia collection, he found that stars of the film were actively seeking him out. “There was a point where I crossed the threshold from just being a guy that did Rocky Horror, to being the Rocky Horror guy.” Although he’d been helping run the fan club since 2012, Viezel didn’t take the top role until the pandemic, when a BBC reporter wanted to know his title. “I called Sal, and I asked him, ‘What do you think I should call myself?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Larry, I don’t give a fuck, call yourself the president.’”
One thing that Zerr, Viezel and I all share is a debt of gratitude to costumer Sue Blane, who is “to blame” (according to callback lines) for giving our projects essential support. Zerr’s very first interview was an “amazing” afternoon with Blane, who “gave us a lot of insights, which actually triggered the production as you can see it now,” by sharing contact information for other key players. Similarly, Blane was the guest of honor at an Orlando convention Viezel and I produced in 2001, mere days after 9/11. Instead of canceling, she showed up for the fans; that event led to the Rich Weirdoes’ two-decade run at CityWalk.
Although RHPS’ influence can be felt in everything from 4D theme-park attractions to immersive art installations, “It’s impossible to create something like the phenomenon of Rocky Horror again, even if you try, because it’s lightning in the bottle, and you cannot create a cult,” says Zerr, attributing the fandom’s unique evolution to an era predating internet and cable TV. “I think real people being around you … and real people in front of the screen … are the missing ingredient which you cannot reproduce by advancing technology.”
Even more important for Zerr is the sometimes life-saving impact Rocky Horror left on the LGBTQ+ community that first embraced it. “It spoke to the people who saw it as first-generation fans, and it triggered something [during] a time when homosexuality was illegal in some states in the United States,” says Zerr. “We’re trying to highlight what it meant for the people in the ’70s and ’80s, for their sexuality, and what kind of safe haven Rocky Horror provided for them.”
That safe haven seems more necessary now than ever, so it’s ironic that Viezel likens Rocky Horror’s storyline — and the experience of its first-time viewers — to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.
“That’s what keeps it going: It has become a rite of passage. You go into this movie an innocent virgin, as it were, and you come out somewhat corrupted by this film. And I think that that cycle repeats itself,” says Viezel. “I’ll never go back to that first time I saw it, which was amazing, but there are new and different kinds of amazing that this show is continuously showing me.”
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Oh Rocky, has the Dr. Phil got a shadowcast for you.
To mark a half-century of the seminal, genderfluid, glammy midnight monster musical, Rocky Horror Picture Show screens at our most lavish downtown venue.
Probably no rice-throwing during this one — though there will be a prop bag handed to each attendee — but to make up for it, special guests from the 1975 film version will be in the castle: Barry “Brad” Bostwick, along with accidental gothic style icons Nell “Columbia” Campbell and Patricia “Magenta” Quinn.
7:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 12, Walt Disney Theater, Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, 445 S. Magnolia Ave., drphillipscenter.org, $46-$300.