Fifty-one years. That's how long it's been since a low-budget musical about a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania stumbled into theaters, flopped, and then quietly became the most important midnight movie ever made. Hello! just put together a rundown of where the Rocky Horror cast is now, and I devoured the whole thing, because this is one of those rare films where the behind-the-scenes story is somehow as long as the movie's own afterlife.

The obvious headline is Tim Curry. Frank-N-Furter remains one of the most imitated performances in cinema history, and Curry spent the next few decades being the best thing in everything from Clue to Legend to a career of voice work that basically raised a generation. He suffered a stroke in 2012 and uses a wheelchair now, but he's still working, still doing conventions, and still apparently delighted when fans show up in full Columbia cosplay. The man never stopped being game, which tracks completely with everything you see in that performance.

Susan Sarandon went from playing Janet, a role she reportedly took partly because of the singing, to an Oscar and five decades of being one of the most reliably great screen actors alive. Barry Bostwick kept working constantly, and if you know him best as the mayor in Spin City, you already know he aged into perfect sitcom dad energy. Patricia Quinn and Richard O'Brien, the people who literally created the whole thing in the first place, have spent their lives as the film's keepers, showing up at screenings where people yell at the screen like it's a religious rite. It is.

What gets me about this movie isn't the longevity, exactly. Plenty of old films have anniversaries. It's that Rocky Horror built the participatory screening. The rice, the newspapers, the callbacks, the shadow casts performing in front of the screen while the movie plays behind them. Every interactive screening of anything, from The Room to Sing-Along Grease, is standing on ground this movie broke in the mid-70s at the Waverly Theater in New York. The studio had given up on it. The audience refused to.

The Hello! piece runs through the rest of the ensemble too, Little Nell, Meat Loaf, Jonathan Adams, and it's a nice reminder of how many working actors got folded into something that outgrew all of them. Nobody on that set in 1974 thought they were making a cultural institution. They thought they were making a weird little London stage transfer with a low budget and a poster that would become a dorm room staple for the next half century.

I've done the full audience-participation screening exactly once, at a theater that did it right, with a live shadow cast and a bag of props handed out at the door. I fumbled half the callbacks and had a fantastic time anyway. That's how you're supposed to see it, and if you've never gone, put it on the list for October, because somebody near you is absolutely doing it.

Fifty-one years of doing the Time Warp. Not bad for a movie that died at the box office the first time around. Do the jump again if you get the chance.