The Beginning of Audience Participation Reprinted with permission - "Creatures of the Night" by Sal Piro

The first time I saw the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW was at the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village, late in January, 1977.

ROCKY had already been playing there for nine months, but I did not know much about it. Some girls I met at a party who'd seen the show on Broadway told me of it, and so did my friend, Michael Kester. He had seen the film nineteen times and could not stop raving about it. It didn't seem unusual to me that Michael had seen a movie so often. After all, I had seen many of my favorites more than twenty times.
But that Michael, with whom I shared a passion for music and film, had seen the RHPS so very many times impressed me, and I began to be curious about it. I still never dreamed that I would go to this film-any film-more than 1300 times.

The American premiere of the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW was at the Westwood Theater in Los Angeles, in late September of 1975. Even though it played in a few test market cities, the film was considered a failure and did not get a wide release and was shelved.

Then, on April Fools' Day, 1976, Tim Deegan, a young advertising executive at 20th Century Fox, persuaded Bill Quigley of the Walter Reade Organization to replace the midnight show at the Waverly Theater with the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. The Waverly had already been a mecca for midnight movies and had had two very successful runs, of El Topo and Night of The Living Dead. The manager of the Waverly, Denise Borden, was fascinated with the film and she began her own personal hype campaign, with photos in the box office window and a theater telephone recording that stated, "This is a film not to be missed."