DVDFILE: How did you get involved with the ROCKY HORROR project? Was this something you went to them about, or did they come to you?

David Britten Prior: I've had a pretty good relationship with Fox DVD over the last year and a half. We've had a couple of successful projects. I believe ROCKY HORROR they came to me with, actually. It was one of the things they were thinking of doing something with... They called up with a list of a couple of titles and ROCKY HORROR sounds interesting, so off we went.

DF: Did you start out with a proposal of features like you have on previous projects?

DBP: Fox had a lot of their own ideas about what they wanted to see. A lot of it was, of course, material from the 20^th Anniversary laserdisc. And then they wanted to know on top of that, what else could I do. So I put together a list of ideas that I had. And then other ideas just came up, as they so often do, as we were going along. So Fox, bless their hearts, was very supportive in letting me kind of find stuff as we went through the process of gathering all the materials.

For example, the black and white opening was an idea that I had after I was combing through all the interviews, all the VH1 interviews. I saw this piece with, I think it was Richard O'Brien. Susan Sarandon mentioned it too, but it was Richard O'Brien's interview when he was talking about an early plan to open the film in black and white. And I was like, "That's a pretty simple but interesting option to offer on the DVD." Kind of, "Here's what that might have looked like." Of course, they never did shoot it in black and white, so we couldn't actually go to any original source. So what we did is kind of recreate the first 20-some minutes in black and white, just as an idea, just to say, "Here's what that might have gone like." And that came up at the eleventh hour. It was really, really late in the game. But we managed to sneak it in.

DF: When you started out on the project, were you already a fan of ROCKY HORROR?

DBP: Sure, yeah. I've known all the songs since I was a teenager. My girlfriend in high school was berserk about the movie and the stage show, and she had all the albums and everything. And I'd seen the film theatrically, with the whole midnight audience a couple of times, maybe two or three times over the years. I wasn't dressing up in fishnets, and going out every weekend, but I was very aware of the movie and was a fan, particularly of the photography and of Tim Curry's performance, and the songs. I wasn't one of the rabid, die-hard convention goers, but I was definitely a fan.

DF: What kind of ideas did you bring to the project to add to what Fox had in mind?

DBP: ROCKY HORROR was, in a way, the first interactive movie experience - even though it didn't really start out that way, it became that way when the fans picked it up. DVD being an interactive format at home, it wanted to have some kind of interactive presence on the DVD. Part of the idea was just trying to get as much interactivity and try to use the DVD format to its fullest in the presentation of the most interactive, or at least the first interactive movie. That was the general approach, and then the rest of it became, how do we implement that, given the material. You're talking about a movie that's coming up, what is it, 25 years old? So the materials are kind of hard to track down sometimes, and things like that. So I really didn't know what we were going to be able to get our hands on. In the end, I'm really happy with how it came out.

DF: The other movies you've been working on have been relatively new...

DBP: Well, "new" is a relative term. Something like FIGHT CLUB or TITUS is a different story, because that's so new that the materials are just right on hand. Everybody kind of knows where they are; they haven't had a chance to get misplaced yet, or lost, or whatever. But even something as recent as the late '80s, can be almost impossible to track stuff down, just because of the way things go in vault systems, and personnel changes, and all of the things that go into archiving material. It's just sometimes very, very hard to keep track of that stuff. You would think that something from the late '80s / early '90s would be relatively easy to get a hold of, but you'd be surprised.

DF: Right, I've heard some pretty bad stories about stuff that was lost.

DBP: Yeah, thrown away, all kinds of things like that.

DF: Did you find that a challenge then, with time constraints and the fact that it's been 25 years?

DBP: I think in that sense, because it's as old as it is, we got pretty lucky. Also, the people at the Fox archives are extremely helpful. I've got nothing but the utmost praise for them, the people that are running it now. For one thing, they're safely guarding the stuff that they've got. [With] the newer films they're keeping, hopefully this problem will disappear, because people are now more aware that those assets are, you know, that they're assets, that they're something that can be reused, that there's an afterlife, that there's a use for them in years to come. I think early on, studios really didn't think... I mean, you read stories about how, during the silent days, they would take raw negative and dump it in the ocean, because they figured, "Well, it's finished its run. Who ever wants to see this stuff again?" So that attitude is changing. In the same respect, I've gotten a lot of help tracking down older materials.

Rocky actually didn't present any serious problems. There was a box of stuff in one of the vaults that wasn't labeled. The old regime from the '70s had just thrown a bunch of stuff in a box and not bothered to say what any of it was. So we threw some of that stuff up on the telecine and transferred some of it, and it turned out to be nothing really special, but we did manage to get a handle on the material that probably no one's had since '75, or whenever.

DF: So there was some film material?

DBP: Yeah, they were just the scenes that were on the thing, the stuff that was on the laserdisc, the alternate takes and things like that.

DF: From those elements, I got the impression that the original sound recordings and film reels are long since lost.

DBP: Well, I don't know, exactly. I wouldn't want to say yes or no, because I'm not sure about that. I think the important materials, the actual negative and the sound rolls [still exist]. Actually, the sound rolls still exist because we built the 5.1 track out of them. The film is still there, but there may be some trims here and there that are lost. I'm not really positive.

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