FREE: The Official Rocky Horror Picture Show Novel

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This review is from: The Official Rocky Horror picture show movie novel (Paperback)
Edited and adapted by Richard J. Anobile from the screenplay by Jim Sharman and Richard O'Brien, "The Official 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' Movie Novel" allowed fans of the legendary midnight movie to give themselves over to absolute pleasure during the rest of the week in addition to playing the soundtrack album over and over again. In those dark days before videotape and DVD this movie novel was the best way of learning the script and figuring out new things to add to the audience participation element of the midnight madness.

Anobile was one of the pioneers in the use of the frame blow-up technique to re-create entire films in book form. I still have my copy of "Why a Duck?" which is how my best friend and I learned the best Marx Brothers routines when we were in high school and devout Marxists. Anobile also did movie novels for "Animal Crackers," "Mork and Mindy," "Battlestar Galactica," and "Alien." He does a good job of using photos and text to capture the rhythm and insanity of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." For example, when we get to "Dammit Janet," he groups pictures of Brad and Janet around one of Magenta and Riff Raff as the "American Gothic" couple so that their counterpoint of "Janet" to his lyrics is laid out appropriately.

You can tell song lyrics apart from the dialogue because everything that gets sung appears in boldface. The dialogue is presented in novel form so that characters are exclaiming, answering, agreeing and the like and you can always tell who is saying what (and how). I should also underscore that Anobile plays with the picture frames as well, so that they are not always rectangles: squares, circles, and other shapes are used as well. They are also sound effects added in the campy tradition of "Batman" the television series. This is a campy way of presenting a movie,