The Rocky Horror Picture Show turns 50 on September 26. As everyone worth their rice and toilet paper rolls knows, the Clinton Street Theater has been showing the participatory camp gem weekly for nearly as long—longer, in fact, than anywhere else on the planet (truly!). But what launched the lollapalooza, and what’s kept Portland’s Transylvanians lining up in glitter and fishnets to see the longest-running release in film history? Without further ado, I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey.

1973 The Rocky Horror Show, a stage musical about an unsuspecting couple’s sordid night in the home of a raunchy Frankenstein type, opens in London. The Guardian applauds Tim Curry’s “garishly Bowiesque performance as the ambisextrous doctor” Frank-N-Furter. Curry says later that Angela Bowie, David’s first wife, started the show’s famous callbacks: When handyman Riff Raff and maid Magenta are about to off Frank, she shouted, “No, don’t do it!” from the crowd.

1975 Once on Broadway, the show is explained to Americans. 

“‘The Rocky Horror Show’ is a kind of mixture between a horror and science-fiction movie, a rock show and a transvestite display. So you see there should be something for everyone to like.” 

—Clive Barnes, The New York Times, March 11

1975 Donning the same fishnets, heels, and plenty of leather, Curry reprises his role for the screen, starring alongside Susan Sarandon (Janet Weiss) and Barry Bostwick (Brad Majors) in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Jim Sharman, who directed the play, directs. Richard O’Brien, who wrote the original music, lyrics, and book, adapts the screenplay with Sharman and plays Riff Raff. The movie sees limited US release and falters terribly at the box office. 

1976 Distributor 20th Century Fox relaunches a second run of midnight screenings, starting in April at the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village. A cult blossoms. People dress up. Schoolteachers are yelling at the screen, calling Susan Sarandon a bitch.

1978 Lenny Dee, who’d turned a onetime porn cinema into the Clinton Street Theater with friends a few years earlier, catches a double feature of Rocky Horror and Brian De Palma’s rock musical Phantom of the Paradise at the Bagdad. “I liked Phantom of the Paradise better than Rocky Horror on the first viewing. But I couldn’t book it. So I booked Rocky Horror,” he says. “Lo and behold, all these people started showing up.”

Weekly ads run in The Oregonian advertising the midnight screenings, and in papers across the country. David Lifton, a notable KBOO disc jockey and one of Dee’s partners at the Clinton Street, emcees dressed up in “gaudy jackets,” Dee calls them. 

1979 Portland looks on, dubiously. Neighboring businesses enjoy the foot traffic but wince at the raucous crowds.

“WILD AND CRAZY! Freaky! Insane! Harebrained! Amusing! Hilarious! You’ll have to see it and judge for yourself. Not the Film, the audience.”

—Jinx Quinlan, Northwest Magazine, December 30 

1980 The town begins to understand. 

“Members of its loyal audience may feel like social outcasts most of the time, but watching ‘Rocky Horror,’ they can feel that the whole world is outcast from them.”

—The Oregonian, January 6

1983 Though it’s actually in April, the Clinton celebrates its five-year Rockyversary on Halloween. Despite ogling press, the theater’s manager at the time, Dave Milholland, assures a reporter that shows are substance-free and totally under control. “With such precautions and the force of tradition to go on,” the reporter’s dispatch ends, “he hopes it will run another five years.” 

1985 The ritual is growing more sophisticated. Crowds bring squirt guns, rice, and toast to perform coordinated bits in time with the movie. The O duly notes that each theater across the country carries its own swagger: “At the Clinton Street, a sort of ‘Clintonese’ is spoken from the opening scenes to the final credits.”

1986 Regional dialect honed and hordes of rabid devotees in tow, the loosely assembled shadow cast formalizes as the Clinton Street Cabaret, a kind of theater troupe with nearly 30 active cast and crew members and a five-person board of elders. 

1999 Eccentric film archivist Dennis Nyback and business partner Elizabeth Rozier buy the Clinton, which is slipping into disrepair. The “indefatigable run of The Rocky Horror Picture Show” will continue, Camela Raymond reports for the Mercury. And with some needed plumbing work and cosmetic upgrades, the community clubhouse is saved from becoming a brewery. Still, Raymond worries, “It’s hard to say how much time is left on the clock for a relic like the Clinton Street.”

2003 “You’d be hard-pressed to look at this place and call it a gem exactly,” opens a Willamette Week dispatch reporting another sale of the theater. New owners Seth Sonstein and Nicola Spechko, both film programmers, install a new heater and sound system, and the theater’s first-ever AC. “The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which has run continuously for 26 years,” will go on. 

2007 Kyle Horton (later the producer of the 76th term of the Clinton Street Cabaret) is 19 years old. Watching reruns of Rocky reunion shows on VH1 and MTV, he tells his friends, “I wish people still did that.” They tell him they’re about to rock his world.

2011 Horton joins the Clinton Street Cabaret. “All of a sudden…I wasn’t John’s kid. I wasn’t Lori’s kid…I wasn’t Derek’s brother. It was like, ‘Oh, this is my thing. I’m just Kyle here.’”

2012 The theater changes hands again. “Does this mean I’ll have to go more than 7 days in a row without seeing Rocky Horror Picture Show?” someone called “geyser” comments on the Mercury’s blog. Of course not, geyser. New owners Roger and Lani Jo Leigh say the screenings keep kids out of trouble, not seeming to fully comprehend the show’s gravity until they do. “I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve met who’ve told me that Rocky saved their lives,” Lani Jo tells the Mercury a year later. “They’re kids who are different—they don’t fit in at school and by having this cool, safe place to go where they can be themselves and not be judged or laughed at...that’s just huge. It’s so huge.” 

2018 Thee Countess Sinophelia, drag vampire, first visits the Clinton Street: “The underpants on the wall—the first time I went to the theater and saw those, I was like, ‘Wow, this place is like a church to Rocky Horror.’” 

2020 COVID shutters the theater in March. Nathan Williams, who emcees Rocky shows, screens the movie in the theater alone or for a few friends 54 Saturdays in a row, making the Clinton’s show the longest-running anywhere. “I was in a position to keep a flame burning,” he tells The Oregonian. 

In September, Williams organizes a live-streamed “telethon,” a string of performances by musicians and artists, and fundraises $20,000 for Clinton Street.

2021 The Clinton reopens after COVID closures on April 3 to a quarter-capacity crowd, and screens Rocky Horror at 9pm—to meet the 11pm curfew. 

2022 In April, a collective of fans and former employees—Aaron Colter, David Gluck, Tom Kishel, Morgan McDonald, Susan Tomorrow, and Steven Williams—buys the Cinton Street. Nobody wonders if Rocky will go on. Colter: “When we first started, I remember there was a bachelor party. These guys came in, and I was like, ‘Hey, you guys here for The Rocky Horror Picture Show?’ They were like, ‘Yeah!’ And I was like, ‘You know this is really for like, gay theater kids, right?’” 

2023 Local filmmaker and actor Thom Hilton, who went to the Clinton’s screenings as a teenager, begins hosting Rocky Horror for Virgins every other Saturday—scaled-back, one-man screenings for first-timers. He teaches adults, teens, and 10-year-olds how to do the Time Warp and cues when to shout “Hey, Ma. What’s for dinna?” before Meatloaf bursts through a wall on a motorcycle. 

2024 Thee Countess Sinophelia, at 53, joins the Clinton Street Cabaret in January, which launches her drag career (she knows that’s cliché). She begins hosting her own virgin night in August, alternating with Hilton. “When drag became a crime, that’s when I realized, ‘Oh, I need to get out there and read to some schoolkids.’ But this is my reading to those schoolkids,” she says. “This is my queer public service, is what I tell my husband.” 

2025 Barry Bostwick joins the Clinton Street Cabaret. Monday, October 27, at 7:30pm, the Cabaret does its thing—with flesh-and-blood Brad Majors!—at the 3,000-seat Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to celebrate the movie’s 50th birthday, besting its usual capacity of 222 by a lot. “We’re all human,” Horton says of the cast, “but we’re pretty freaking on it.”