Rice rains down from the balcony, slices of toast sail across the aisles, and toilet paper streamers drape the seats of the Prytania Theatre most months in Uptown New Orleans, all in service of a ritual that has been running at the 220-seat house since before Hurricane Katrina. The occasion is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, screened with a live shadow cast acting out the film in front of the screen while it plays behind them, and the mess is the point.
The tradition traces back five decades to the film's 1975 premiere, which flopped commercially before New York City audiences transformed midnight screenings into interactive parties, turning Rocky Horror into one of the longest-running theatrical releases in history, according to NOLA.com. That callback-and-prop culture actually began in April 1976 at the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village, where patrons started shouting lines at the screen and bringing props to transform what had been a box-office disappointment into an enduring midnight-movie staple, according to Village Preservation. In December 2005, the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry.
A Shadow Cast Keeps the Tradition Local
At the Prytania, the local shadow cast, the Well-Hung Speakers, performs live Rocky Horror scenes most months, per the same NOLA.com account. Milo Malone, an actor with the troupe, said the show gives people a chance to explore their identities, a point that resonates with the film's story of newlyweds who end up at the castle of an eccentric, gender-bending scientist, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, originally played by Tim Curry. The film's themes of sexual and gender fluidity have long been part of why the show draws devoted audiences back night after night.
The theater holds one or two Rocky Horror screenings with a live shadow cast most months, but October is different: the Prytania hosts up to eight productions and assembles roughly 1,500 prop kits, usually filling the shows to capacity. Props include rice, toast, playing cards, plastic gloves, newsprint, noisemakers and toilet paper, deployed at specific cues, such as rice thrown when Janet and Brad marry and toast tossed when Frank-N-Furter raises a glass. NOLA.com reports that attendance tends to climb around the start of the school year and during Pride, and first-time attendees are known in Rocky Horror tradition as “virgins.”
A Theater That Nearly Didn't Survive
The Prytania's survival is its own story of endurance. The building opened at its current Uptown location in April 1927 at a cost of $100,000, according to New Orleans Historical, making it the oldest operating movie theater in New Orleans and the last remaining single-screen neighborhood cinema in Louisiana. When former owner Landmark Theatres decided the Prytania was no longer profitable, the building's then-owner filed a demolition permit in December 1996, with equipment already on site. In an 11th-hour deal, buyer Chris Riley purchased the building and 75-year-old local theater operator René Brunet Jr. signed on to run the venue, saving it, as reported by Very Local.
Brunet, whose family had operated New Orleans movie theaters since the early 1900s, was a fixture at the Prytania well into his 90s, personally introducing weekly classic movie screenings and co-authoring the 2012 book *There's One in Your Neighborhood: The Lost Movie Theaters of New Orleans*; he died at age 95 in August 2017. His legacy sits within a much longer local film history: New Orleans' movie exhibition dates back to June 1896, when a temporary motion-picture exhibition took place at West End Park; Vitascope Hall opened one month later as the nation's first permanent indoor movie theater, launching a neighborhood theater culture that once included more than 100 venues across the metro area.
Decades of Devotion, One Prop Box at a Time
For regulars, the ritual has become personal history. Ray Paternostro first saw Rocky Horror performed with a live shadow cast on Halloween night 1998 at Zephyr Field in Metairie, when the Transylvanian Electric Company staged a live production following a special Halloween broadcast of The Simpsons, per NOLA.com's reporting. Paternostro has since attended at least 500 live Rocky Horror productions and keeps his own collection of props in a cardboard box. Thom Lavoie, who first saw the show three years before this September, attended his sixth Rocky Horror performance that month, part of a sold-out midnight screening that ran until around 2:30 a.m. on September 6, after which Esperanza de Leon cleaned rice, party hats, beer cans and empty candy boxes from the theater.
The Prytania screens Rocky Horror on 70mm film, and theater manager Eric Ramstead said the show brings people together. The tradition of audience antics around the film stretches back decades in the New Orleans area; in 1985, Jim Harrington threw rice at a photographer during the seventh anniversary of Rocky Horror at the Sena Mall theatre in Metairie. The film is also woven into the city's literary identity: protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly nearly got kicked out of the Prytania in John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1980 novel *A Confederacy of Dunces*. Decades on, the Prytania's intimate, single-screen setting still gives the ritual its charge, keeping a half-century-old tradition of controlled chaos very much alive in Uptown New Orleans.
