Right now, somewhere, people are buying tickets to a movie that opened in 1975 and has never left theaters. This episode explores The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a science fiction musical horror parody that bombed so badly its Halloween rollout in New York was scrapped, then became the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history. We trace its origins to an out-of-work actor in a cold London winter, a 60-seat room called Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre, a working title of They Came from Denton High, and a six-year run at a 500-seat theater before an American record producer brought it to Los Angeles and then Broadway.

We go behind the miserable $1.6 million film shoot at an unheated Victorian manor used in Hammer horror films, where the lead actress caught pneumonia and actors wore wet corsets day after day, and reveal how a cost ...