April Fool’s Day Weekly Reader Special: The Disaster Artist:
My Life Inside The Room, The Greatest Bad Film Ever Made by Greg Sestero and
Tom Bissell; A Hilarious and Surprisingly Heart-Warming Story About Bad Film Making
But Good Friends
By Julie Sara Porter,
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: There are bad films and then there’s The Room. Not since the
full nightgown ladies wrestling in Manos: The Hand of Fate. Not since Ed Wood
and Coleman Francis showed their directing skills or lack thereof in Plan 9
from Outer Space and Beast of Yucca Flats respectively. Not since John Wayne stunned audiences with his portrayal of Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. Not since Jennifer
Lopez attempted to seduce Ben Affleck with “It’s turkey time, gobble gobble” in
Gigli. Not since Elizabeth Berkeley bared her breasts in Showgirls. Not since
Madonna attempted to act in…well anything except Evita have so many people looked
at a film screen wondering “What the heck did I just watch up there?”
Allegedly
a film about a love triangle between a man, Johnny his “future wife,” Lisa and
best friend, Mark it is instead a two hour experiment in bad filming with
terrible camera angles, scenes that make no sense, wooden or hammy performances, and lines that
are bad beyond belief. (“Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!” “YOU ARE
TEARING ME APART, LISA!!!”)
However as many fans of The Room and its
writer/director/producer/star, Tommy Wiseau know, it’s not just a bad movie, it’s
an experience more akin to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. People attend
midnight showings and call back lines, throw spoons at the screen, and
generally have a good time at a movie that instead of quietly fading away and
having its performers suffer career nothingness, Wiseau and Co. are held up as cult heroes and The Room has
obtained a second life as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.”
Wiseau’s best
friend and The Room co-star Greg Sestero (who played Johnny's best friend, "Oh hi Mark.") captured the making of this
disaster-piece in his book The Disaster Artist, which is a hilarious account of
how not to make a movie but is also at heart a moving testament to a loving
friendship between Wiseau and Sestero.
Wiseau and Sestero met in the late ‘90’s in a San Francisco
acting class. Sestero had dreams of being an actor ever since he was young and
penned a sequel to Home Alone and mailed it to director, John Hughes. (He
marveled that instead of giving him a standard rejection letter Hughes wrote “Believe
in yourself, have patience and always follow your heart.”) He had the looks and
interest, accepting roles as extras (including in the movies, Patch Adams and
Gattaca) and taking acting classes but he lacked the confidence and nerve to
truly pursue his interest to the fullest.
Then one day at the acting class of
Jean Shelton, in walked a student that had plenty of confidence and nerve.
After watching Wiseau mangle a Shakespearean sonnet, Sestero found him “terrible,
reckless, and mesmerizing.” Sestero became determined to do a scene with Wiseau
after he saw him ham up the famous “Stella” scene in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Sestero got his scene partner and cinematic history was made for better or
worse.
The book develops the duo’s friendship, both the bad and the
good aspects of it. Sestero was constantly perplexed by Wiseau’s oddities such
as never revealing any details about his personal life like his country of origin
(his last name Wiseau is French for bird but his accent suggested possibly
Eastern European origins) or revealing where he got his fortune (which included
owning apartments in both San Francisco and Los Angeles and a fashion business
called Street Fashions U.S.A.).
He had peculiar irritating habits that made him
an impossible roommate such as staying up all night listening to tapes to learn
English and lose his distinct accent. (“You think its good do you is not
something that the average native English speaker would say,” Sestero dryly
wrote. “(Wiseau) should have been learning to say, ‘I’d like a refund for these
tapes please.’”)
Nevertheless Wiseau retained an optimistic nature that encouraged
Sestero through discouragement and a devil-may-care personality that lived
moment by moment. (He encouraged Sestero to go several hours out of their way
to accompany him on a pilgrimage to visit the road where James Dean died and
eat at a diner owned by a former friend of Dean’s.)
Humor is developed as
Wiseau sometimes comes across as the proverbial “Best Friend/Roommate From Hell,”
an odd but essentially good-natured lovable weirdo. Wiseau is the type of
person that would invite such odd theories about his origins such as whether he
is an alien or a vampire and those theories are almost believable. (Any future
Men in Black production has to feature him in a cameo as “a celebrity/extraterrestrial”
ala Michael Jackson in Men in Black II. It is law!)
However there are darker aspects to Wiseau’s character that
border on mental instability or at least severe psychological or neurological disorders and Sestero
does not shy away from revealing them.
He became
possessive and jealous when Sestero made new friends or received acting roles
like the lead in Retro Puppet Master. He
sent Sestero a Christmas greeting in Romania while Sestero was filming Puppet
Master (which he did not tell Wiseau where the filming was going to be nor
where he was staying.)
He invaded his friend’s privacy by opening his mail and
interfering with professional phone calls. Wiseau also had vivid dreams of
Sestero killing him though Sestero’s writing suggested he feared the same from
him. Sestero sometimes described Wiseau as “a life draining vampire” who sapped
his friend of energy because of his emotional potentially unstable nature.
Sestero’s friends and family members warned him of Wiseau’s
behavior. One friend in particular took Sestero to see the movie, The Talented
Mr. Ripley in which Matt Damon played a con artist who seduces, murders, and
impersonates his best friend (Jude Law) to help Sestero make obvious
connections between the movie and his friendship with Wiseau.
Most people
probably would have taken the hint, booked themselves into the nearest shelter,
and told Wiseau via a restraining order to hit the highway, but Sestero was not most
people. He reasoned, “My mother tried to
convince me not to go back to L.A. She failed. My hippie friend tried to
convince me not to go back to L.A. He failed. Patricia Highsmith, Matt Damon,
Jude Law, and Anthony Minghella tried to convince me not to go back to L.A.
They failed.” (Which I don’t believe was their objective for writing,
directing, and starring in The Talented Mr. Ripley, but what do I know?) Back
he went to L.A., Hollywood, and “Tommy’s Planet.”
Wiseau’s behavior in his friendships is nothing to his
behavior in filming The Room. His excitable, unpredictable, unbalanced behavior
increased during the making of the film.
Oddly enough The Talented Mr. Ripley
played inadvertently into the creation of The Room. (Matt Damon and Jude Law can
rest easy knowing that.) At the 1999 Golden Globes in which Ripley won various
awards including Best Actor for Damon and Best Supporting Actor for Law, Wiseau
and Sestero were stuck in traffic watching the limousines go up and down the
streets. Wiseau was dejected, “I know they don’t want me. I know they don’t
want guy with accent and long hair. So I show them. I show them what I can do…..I
write my own play. I’ll do my own project and it will be better than everybody
else….People will see my project and you know what? They will not sleep for two
weeks. They will be completely shocked you watch.” Which proved once and for all
not only that Wiseau possessed misguided precognitive abilities but Fate had a
sick twisted sense of humor.
The chapters that dealt with the making of The Room show one
comedic blunder after another so much so that it was a miracle that the movie
got made let alone released. (No doubt due to Wiseau’s admirable but very
bullheaded persistence).
Technical filming mistakes abound such as Wiseau
filming in both film and digital causing the visual quality to be haphazard at
best. Wiseau insisted that an alley set be built inside their rented studio
even though a perfectly fine alley was standing right outside waiting for its
film debut. (Wiseau’s reasoning: “Because we do first-class production. No
Mickey Mouse stuff.”) As an actor, Wiseau was unable to remember his lines: you
know the lines that he actually wrote such as “I did not hit her. I did not. Oh
hi, Mark.”
Besides his lack of ability at filming, Wiseau was volatile
and abusive with his cast and crew. Crew members got fired right and left, some
after arguing justifiably over the unstable production. Wiseau tormented his
cast such as his original pick for the character of Mark, an actor he called
Don (but was really named Dan) whom Wiseau cast but did not film in an attempt
to convince Sestero to play the part which he accepted.
He was also verbally
abusive towards Juliette Danielle, who played his future wife, Lisa. He reduced
her to tears by mocking her appearance such as her acne ridden back.
An acquaintance of Wiseau’s, Markus shot behind-the-scenes footage allegedly for a documentary
but was in reality so Wiseau could spy on his cast and crew talking about him
behind his back.
Not to mention the fact that no one quite knew in filming
what The Room was about. Carolyn Minnott who played Lisa’s mother, was confused
about a line in which she announces that she has breast cancer but no other
reference is made about this revelation. (“It’s a plot twist,” Wiseau
not-so-helpfully said.)
A subplot involving Johnny and Lisa’s young neighbor,
Denny and a drug dealer named Chris-R was shot with an action scene which Mark
and Johnny subdue the drug dealer and somehow are able to arrest him, even
though neither of them are law enforcement officers. (Days and hours were
wasted filming the “Chris-R” scene according to Wiseau’s changeable moods over
various details such as whether Chris-R has a gun and drops it or holds onto
the gun causing lots of retakes and hours of unused celluloid.)
Despite being a catalog of ineptitude, The Disaster Artist
is not an attack against Wiseau. In fact, Sestero clearly admired his friend’s
drive to create his own movie and distribute it to the world.
This is prevalent
where Sestero reveals some aspects that he had gleaned from various
contradictory conversations with Wiseau and documentation about his past.
(Revelations that Wiseau had discredited but Immigration documentation and
subsequent research by others had later verified.)
Sestero described Wiseau as
a lonely boy from an Eastern European country (documentation since the book’s
publication suggested that it was Poland) who longed to move to America and be
a part of the Hollywood world that he saw on screen.
According to Sestero’s account, Wiseau moved to France where
he took menial jobs, was arrested in a drug raid where he was abused and
threatened by the police, and possibly became a male prostitute.
He eventually
moved in with his aunt and uncle in New Orleans where he still encountered loneliness and got his heart broken by a woman who the book implied may have
been the inspiration for Lisa, Johnny’s manipulative “future wife".
He
eventually settled in San Francisco where he sold jeans, yo-yos, and toy birds,
and acquired the name Thomas Pierre “Tommy” Wiseau. (How he got his fortune to
finance The Room still is not revealed and to this day no one knows. The book
suggests various possibilities such as money laundering, inheritance from a
wealthy mentor, or mob money-but nothing is outright stated keeping that aspect of Wiseau’s
life as a mystery even still.)
When Wiseau announced at the premiere of The
Room “This my movie. This my life” Sestero and The Reader have no doubt about
it. The Room was a difficult awful filming experience but it was a labor of love from someone who loved movies
and would have given anything to be a part of them.
There is also warmth between Wiseau and Sestero’s
friendship. It is clear from the beginning that Sestero and WIseau filled a
need for each other. Sestero’s writing implies that he would have never had the
nerve to move to Los Angeles to pursue his acting dream if he hadn’t met Wiseau
and the strange eccentric man had not encouraged him to follow his dream.
Even
more so Wiseau would never have had someone that understood his eccentricities
and drew him out of his self-imposed isolation if he never met Sestero.
Like many well-known friendships like Sherlock Holmes and
Dr. Watson (and their current actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin
Freeman) or Of Mice and Men’s George and Lennie, Wiseau and Sestero are better
together than they are apart.
This is very paramount when in one chapter in
their pre-Room days, Wiseau was depressed about Hollywood
rejections and he disappeared leaving behind a voice mail message that he was “on
a highway to Hell,” and wondering what it would be like to die young like James
Dean. Sestero worried about a possibly suicidal Wiseau and wanted to call
anyone to find out where he was. He realized he knew no one, no other
friends or family members who knew or cared where Wiseau was. Sestero was aware
that he was not only Wiseau’s best friend: he was his only friend. (He
eventually reunited with Wiseau who wrote his screenplay for The Room possibly
a cathartic experience for both of them.)
The Disaster Artist is the type of book that makes The
Reader laugh but also warms their heart. It also warms their heart even more as
Wiseau and Sestero lately have disproven F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that “there
are no second acts in life.” They received a second act because of the cult
success of The Room and its fans hailing it as an unintentional comedy cult
phenomenon, which they willingly embraced. Recently things have turned around
for Wiseau and Sestero giving them a third, possibly a fourth act.
The book for the Disaster Artist was not only a best seller
but the film version directed by James Franco and starring him and his brother,
Dave was a box office success but also an Academy Award nominee for
Best Adapted Screenplay. (However the film’s star has eclipsed lately because of
sexual abuse allegations towards Franco dismissing its status for any other
Oscar consideration.).
In an even more ironic twist, before the Oscars, Franco
won the Golden Globe for Best Actor and called Wiseau to the stage to accept
the award with him. (Possibly, this ceremony caused a traffic jam and some irritated young budding filmmaker despaired about how Hollywood doesn’t want him or her and planned their own screenplay in defiance). Wiseau has obtained the Hollywood success
status that he longed for and things have definitely come full circle for him
and Sestero.
The Dynamic Duo are still friends and continue to make movies including an
upcoming one called Best F(r)iends that has some early positive feedback. There might be good performances and a good movie out of them yet.
