On a chilly, snowy evening in January 1977, Sal Piro waited in line outdoors the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village to see “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the primary time. A campy science-fiction/horror musical whose characters embrace the cross-dressing mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, it had been growing a following for its Friday and Saturday midnight showings for a number of months.
Mr. Piro didn’t know a lot in regards to the movie, which follows a pair (performed by Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick) as they search assist at Frank-N-Furter’s fortress after their automobile will get a flat tire. But he was impressed that one among his mates had already seen it 19 occasions.
“So we got in line, made friends with some of other people on line and, once inside, we were both amazed and gobsmacked and under its spell,” the songwriter Marc Shaiman, a pal who was with Mr. Piro that evening, recalled in an electronic mail.
Mr. Piro remembered his pleasure at seeing the large disembodied purple lips that open the movie with the tune “Science Fiction Double Feature”; the infectious “Time Warp” dance; and Tim Curry’s dramatic entrance as Frank, singing “Sweet Transvestite.”
“Image followed image and the impact on me was tremendous,” Mr. Piro wrote in “Creatures of the Night: The Rocky Horror Picture Show Experience” (1990), one among three books he wrote or co-wrote in regards to the movie. “I began living the movie as it unreeled.”
Fans like Mr. Piro quickly turned fanatics. Showings become excessive workout routines in viewers participation. They dressed because the characters. They shouted feedback at the display. They danced within the aisles in the course of the musical numbers. They threw rice at the marriage scene.
Mr. Piro’s love of the film lasted the remainder of his life. In the spring of 1977, he based the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” Fan Club with a number of mates, who selected him as their president. He would in the end see the movie some 1,300 occasions.
He was nonetheless the membership’s president — and the face of the “Rocky Horror” fan universe — when he died on Jan. 22 at his house in Manhattan. He was 72.
His sister, Lillias Piro, mentioned the trigger was an aneurysm in his esophagus.
Mr. Piro is credited with serving to to show the “Rocky Horror” mania that began at the Waverly right into a broad phenomenon that unfold to different theaters, in New York City and all over the world.
He organized occasions with members of the movie’s forged and despatched out newsletters conserving followers updated. He coordinated followers’ performances at theater showings, the place he would head to the stage to introduce the movie with a chant that started “Give me an ‘R’” and finally spelled out “Rocky.”
“He was a very honest guy, you believed in him,” Lou Adler, a producer of the movie, mentioned in a telephone interview. “He didn’t have ulterior motives. The fan club wasn’t a business or a means to something else, but to make it the very best for the fans, because he was one of them.”
In 2010, to have a good time the discharge of “Rocky Horror” on Blu-ray, Mr. Piro led a “Time Warp” dance with 8,239 individuals in West Hollywood, Calif., which Guinness World Records licensed as the largest such dance ever.
(*72*) Francis Martin Piro was born on June 29, 1950, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Paul, was a building employee, and his mom, Eileen, was a waitress.
Mr. Piro attended Seton Hall University from 1968 to 1972, the final two years at the college’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology, however he didn’t earn a level.
He taught theology and directed performs at Roman Catholic excessive faculties in New Jersey for 3 years earlier than being laid off in June 1976. He spent that summer time because the drama director of an all-girls camp earlier than shifting to Manhattan to pursue a profession as an actor.
He waited tables and obtained some roles — after which got here “Rocky Horror.”
Before it was a film, “The Rocky Horror Show,” written by Richard O’Brien, had opened in 1973 as a stage musical in London. It turned a smash hit there and had a short run on Broadway two years later.
The movie flopped in restricted launch in September 1975, but it surely was revived in early April 1976 because the midnight present at the Waverly.
And then got here Mr. Piro, Mr. Shaiman and an increasing group of like-minded followers who turned a part of the early vanguard of viewers participation. For Mr. Piro, speaking again to the display introduced again recollections of 1961, when he was 10 years outdated and watching “Snow White and the Three Stooges” at a theater.
“I remember that just as Snow White was about to bite into the poisonous apple, a voice from the theater warned audibly, ‘You’ll be sooorry!’” he wrote in “Creatures of the Night.”
Mr. Shaiman, the long run Tony Award-winning composer and co-lyricist of “Hairspray,” mentioned that he and Mr. Piro, mates from group theater in New Jersey, felt compelled to shout their feedback at the display as soon as others started.
“Sal & I, both HUGE hams, knew we had to join in,” mentioned Mr. Shaiman, who added that he had seen the movie greater than 70 occasions.
Mr. Piro, Mr. Shaiman and others within the small group who noticed “Rocky Horror” early on would be the topic of a scripted film, primarily based on “Creatures of the Night,” to be filmed this summer time.
“It’s hard to think of making the movie without him,” Adam Schroeder, one of many producers, mentioned by telephone.
Mr. Piro’s involvement in “Rocky Horror” was consuming, but it surely wasn’t a paying job. Over the years, he wrote greeting playing cards, a column for The Fire Island News, the three “Rocky Horror” books and the questions for a “Rocky Horror” trivia sport.
He had a handful of film and TV roles — he performed a “Rocky Horror” M.C. in a 1980 episode of the sequence “Fame” and a photographer in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again” (2016), a made-for-TV remake of the unique movie.
From 1991 to 2014 he labored at the Grove Hotel, within the Cherry Grove group on Fire Island, first because the leisure director of its Ice Palace nightclub after which because the supervisor of each the resort and the nightclub. He additionally wrote and directed theatrical reveals for the Arts Project of Cherry Grove.
In addition to his sister, he’s survived by two brothers, James and Joseph.
Mr. Adler mentioned that he noticed Mr. Piro at a movie occasion final month at IFC Center, because the Waverly, the place “Rocky Horror” turned a success, is now recognized.
“He said to me we’re both reaching ages where something might happen to either one of us,” mentioned Mr. Adler, who’s 89. If that occurred, he mentioned Mr. Piro requested him, “Who’s going to watch over Rocky?”