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Daily Inspiration Quote by Tim Curry

"One of the best things that ever happened to me was Rocky Horror being a total flop in New York as a play. I mean, it was a disaster, and it was the night of the long knives as far as the critics were concerned"

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Failure is doing Tim Curry a favor here, and he knows it. Calling Rocky Horror "one of the best things" that happened to him is a neat inversion: a flop becomes a pressure cooker that forces the work to mutate into the thing it was always better suited to be. Curry frames the New York run not as an unlucky break but as a clarifying event, the moment the polite theater ecosystem rejected something too unruly, too sexual, too camp to behave.

The phrase "a total flop" is delivered with the breezy candor of someone who has processed the humiliation into useful lore. Then he twists the knife with "disaster", turning showbiz understatement into dark comedy. "The night of the long knives" is the punchline with bite: a grand, historically loaded metaphor applied to critics doing what they always do - consolidating power by declaring a work dead on arrival. Curry isn't just complaining. He's exposing the theater's gatekeeping machinery, how reviews can feel less like evaluation and more like a coordinated execution.

The subtext is pragmatic: the flop freed Rocky Horror from the expectations of "a play" in New York and pushed it toward its real destiny as a cult object, built on audience participation and misfit community rather than critical permission. Curry positions himself as both survivor and co-conspirator, laughing at the supposed arbiters of taste because the audience, eventually, got the last line.

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TopicFailure
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Tim Curry on Rocky Horror Failure and Artistic Liberation
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Tim Curry (born April 19, 1946) is a Actor from United Kingdom.

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