Doing the time warp

The son of Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien has made a film about the immortal monster his father produced. BY RUSSELL BAILLIE

- 

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, the inevitable but remarkable 50th anniversary documentary about the gender-bending glam-rock musical that became a record-breaking cult movie, starts not in London's West End where it all began, or at a midnight screening in New York, or Los Angeles where it still continues.

It starts on a leafy street on a nice day in Hamilton, New Zealand. There, Richard O’Brien and son Linus are visiting the Rocky creator's childhood home.

A kindly neighbour pops out to say they've always called the place “the Rocky Horror house”. “Do you really?” laughs O’Brien, “stop it.”

Then it's off into the city to visit the site where O’Brien once worked as a barber before getting on a boat to England, and the bronze statue of him as Rocky character Riff Raff now standing guard outside the Waikato Museum.

But Linus isn't there as his 83-year-old father’s driver. He's the director of the film. It's a role he was born for - he was a baby when his father wrote the show, while mum, Kimi Wong, was out appearing in the London production of Hair. She would also appear in the Rocky Horror musical and movie before she and O'Brien divorced in 1979, by which time Linus had started at a series of boarding schools, his fees paid for by Rocky Horror. Being the son of Riff Raff had its perks.

He, too, ended up in music, as an international techno DJ, and producer with his own London studio and record shop. But with the 50th anniversary looming, three years ago he took his idea for a film that covered not just Rocky Horror’s origins but its enduring appeal and the community of fans it has sustained, to his eventual producers. They said yes, if you direct. After all, he first saw the original London show as a 4-year-old, where he got to sit in the balcony among the technicians and operate the lights above the proscenium arch. Who better to shine a new spotlight on Rocky?