V03-T10b Little Black Dress

.....Had I adhered to my original schedule for this blog, I would have been entering this post and the last long before the cast of "Glee" did their 'Rocky Horror' episode. Predictably, the contingent of the professionally indignant yammered to one another about the sexual subject matter. Just as predictably, they were completely silent about a prior episode in which the sole wheel-chair bound student sings a slowed-down version of "Dancing With Myself", the Generation X/Billy Idol song about masturbation. It doesn't take much to read between the lines of that song, but if you're stupid enough to believe that teenagers wouldn't have sexual feelings if they didn't hear songs about them, then you're stupid enough to assume that teenagers with a physical handicap don't have sexual feelings at all.

.....But we're here to talk about eine kleine herren with a different preoccu-...PA-tion.

Volume 3: A KINDER, GENTLER ZERO TOLERANCE, track 10b

• 02:27 "LITTLE BLACK DRESS" (Richard O'Brien, Richard Hartley)
• performed by: The Cast of "Shock Treatment"
• original source: LP SHOCK TREATMENT ODE/Warner Bros. LLA 3615 (US) 1981
• and my source: the same

.....The film adaption of the musical play "Rocky Horror" was a flop as a first run feature, but became a roaring success as a midnight movie starting the following spring and continuing for decades until home video killed the theaters in which it played. Once Hollywood (or more specifically, 20th Century Fox) discovered that there was a previously untapped market for repeated viewings of movies on the fringe (such as "Pink Flamingos" and "El Topo" before their own RHPS) they decided to create a cult film for that market and simply bypass what would be the normal first-run national release and go straight to the midnight circuit. The flawed logic behind that decision assumed that because they perceived these films to be losing money in their initial releases but lucrative in the second lives, that more profits were to be made by eliminating the first stage. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it ignores the fact that the second stage is only more profitable because the bulk (but not all)of the movies' production costs were covered in the first stage. Despite the difference in content and presumably audiences between cult films and blockbusters, the economics of distribution thirty years ago was the same for both. 'Profits' is just the name for what you make after the costs are covered. If that happens all at once, it's a blockbuster. If it happens over the long term, it's a cult film.

.....Seeking a sequel to "Rocky Horror", the studio approached Richard O'Brien and Richard Hartley, who set out to do just that. Logistical problems in reassembling the original cast and other delays prompted so many compromises that O'Brien began to realize that he would never get the sequel he wanted. Instead he opted for an original story and hoped to pitch it as the sequel that perhaps the studio wanted. Hence, "Shock Treatment"(1981), with some characters from RHPS played by different actors and some actors from RHPS playing different characters. In this particular number O'Brien and Patricia Quinn once again play incestuous siblings (Cosmo and Nation instead of Riff Raff and Magenta) but Janet Weiss Majors (she has since married Brad) is played by Jessica Harper, a veteran of "Phantom Of The Paradise". Also on hand is Australian Barry Humphries as Viennese game-show host Bert Schnick. He is better known as to Americans as Dame Edna Everage.

.....I have long suspected that "LITTLE BLACK DRESS" was a "Rocky Horror" outtake. It could fit neatly between the scene in which Frank uses the Medusa ray to turn his prisoners into statues and the Floor Show sequence where he appears in drag. It's the only part of the movie noticeably lacking transition, which the song could provide. According to the commentary of the 2006 DVD the song "BREAKING OUT" was indeed intended for some incarnation of "Rocky Horror", but "LITTLE BLACK DRESS" isn't mentioned there or in the two mini-documentaries included as bonus material.

.....More from the movies in the next post.