The VHS trailer for THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

Believe it or not, until 1990, you didn't have the option of seeing ROCKY HORROR at home, making rehearsing for the midnight shows virtually impossible unless you had a raggedy, third-generation bootleg.  The film's long-awaited release on VHS was controversial, partially because die hard fans feared that this would be the end of the midnight movie circuit (it wasn't), but also because the VHS wasn't released at a sell-through price, causing thousands of fans to shell out $90 for a VHS tape.  But, heck, at least there was a new mini-documentary on the tape.

Watch This Thing - 1978 Student film mini-documentary on THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW at the Biograph Theater in Chicago

If you lined up all of the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW documentaries end to end, you'd have a, well, a very lengthy thing indeed.  But this particular 5-minute doc is one of the earliest, made by Columbia College student Jim Doherty in 1978, emphasizing the RHPS fandom at Chicago's Biograph theater, and is certainly a fascinating time piece of midnight movie fandom in the Chicago area.  The Biograph is notable as the theater in which Dillinger was shot in 1934, and is no longer showing films today.  (I do, however, have great memories of seeing the likes of Jack Hill, John Waters and Doris Wishman there for screenings.)