At a midnight screening in a Los Angeles multiplex,
the atmosphere hovers somewhere between rambunctious and mildly terrifying.
Whenever a framed photograph of a spoon appears on screen, which it frequently
does, audience members throw fistfuls of plastic cutlery. They also perform
skits, at one point gathering at the bottom right of the screen and shouting,
”Down here, Tommy!” anticipating the moment when the face of the lead actor,
Tommy Wiseau, looks in their direction. And they comment loudly on blurrily
shot scenes (”Focus!”) or inadequately introduced characters (”Who the f— are
you?”).
Late-night showings of cult films such as The Rocky
Horror Picture Show and The Big Lebowski are known for their rowdy and strange
behavior too. But people who go to see Rocky Horror and Lebowski think those
films are good. Tonight’s movie, an obscure, five-year-old drama called The
Room, holds a different place in the hearts of those present at West
Hollywood’s Laemmle Sunset 5. ”It’s absolutely terrible,” says Chris Bonk, a
talent-agency assistant who has seen the film more than 15 times. ”The script
is not the best. The acting is certainly not the best. The music is horrible.”
The Room has even infiltrated the halls of cinematic
academia. ”It is one of the most important films of the past decade,” says Ross Morin, an
assistant professor of film studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.
”It exposes the fabricated nature of Hollywood. The Room is the Citizen Kane of
bad movies.”
If The Room is the Citizen Kane of bad movies, that
makes Tommy Wiseau the Orson Welles of crap. Wiseau — who speaks with a thick,
Schwarzeneggerian accent — directed, wrote, and produced the film. The muscled
auteur also plays the cuckolded Johnny, and, when not exposing his ivory rump
in the film’s sex scenes, gives a performance that’s both heartfelt and
berserk. In one scene, a vein-poppingly distraught Wiseau howls the line, ”You
are tearing me apart, Lisa!” The moment — a favorite of Room fans — is
reminiscent of both James Dean’s ”You’re tearing me apart!” howl in Rebel
Without A Cause and Marlon Brando screaming ”Stella!” in A Streetcar Named
Desire. At least it would be, if those actors had chosen to play their parts as
deranged Austrians.
After some prodding, Wiseau
does let slip a few personal details. ”I used to live in France, a long time
ago,” he says. ”Then I moved to New Orleans — I have family there. Then I moved
to Bay Area. I work for hospital, I work for the city. But I always wanted to
be an actor.”
Wiseau got his directorial feet wet with a short
film, Robbery Doesn’t
Pay, and then, in 2002, shot The Room in L.A. and San Francisco. The filmmaker has
always refused to discuss where he got the movie’s $6 million budget, but he
now hints that at least some of the money came from a clothing import business.
”I tell you a little bit, but that’s it,” he
says. ”We import from Korea the leather jackets that we design here in America.
If you work, you have to save money, right? I didn’t get money from the sky. I
was preparing, let’s put it this way.” The shoot was marred by the
constant departures of cast and crew members. ”It was just mayhem,” recalls Dan Janjigian, who
plays a drug dealer in one of the film’s peculiar plot cul-de-sacs. ”You could
come in and it would be a completely different cast and crew. It was crazy.”
Wiseau himself initially denies that he had problems with his behind-the-camera
team — ”I was very happy with everyone” — but then admits that he did come into
conflict with individuals who tried to tamper with his work. ”Some of the crew
members, it’s correct, we changed three times basically,” he recalls. ”Because
they tried, for example, to change the script. They say, ‘This is the way to
do, etcetera, etcetera.’ I say, ‘No!”’ However, according to one cast member
who requested anonymity, the script was indeed altered during the shoot: ”It
was actually a lot longer. There was stuff that was just unsayable. I know it’s
hard to imagine there was stuff that was worse. But there was.”
Wiseau insists he always intended The Room to be
partly comedic, and that the movie’s perceived faults — including the
out-of-focus scenes — are deliberate. ”Let’s assume we did everything perfect
way,” he hypothesizes. ”You will be asking this question? No, no.” However,
another anonymous cast member has no doubt that Wiseau is merely making the
best of an extremely bad job: ”I don’t have anything to say about Tommy as a
person. He is a nice guy. But he is full of s—. He was trying to put together a
drama. It was basically his stage to show off his acting ability.”
The Room opened at a handful
of cinemas in L.A. on June 27, 2003. The director, who self-distributed
the movie, offered a free soundtrack CD for ticket buyers, and promoted the
film with a TV and print campaign that compared The Room to the work of
Tennessee Williams. Wiseau rented a billboard on Highland Avenue, which
featured a close-up of his glowering visage, and submitted the film to the
Academy Awards, without success. Cast member Robyn Paris recalls the film’s
premiere screening as ”a big deal. Tommy rode in a limousine. There was a
spotlight set up. It was pretty packed. Everyone in the theater was crying with
laughter.” Not everyone found the film so amusing, however. Variety critic
Scott Foundas noted that it ”may be something of a first: a movie that prompts
most of its viewers to ask for their money back — before even 30 minutes have
passed.” Foundas also called Wiseau ”a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes
Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny seem the apotheosis of cinematic
self-restraint.”
Tommy Wiseau insists that he ”really doesn’t know”
how the film fared at the box office on its initial release. However, one industry source states that the combined gross
from the two-week run at two theaters — the Laemmle Fallbrook and Fairfax — was just $1,900. Michael Rousselet, a young screenwriter who
seems to be Patient Zero of the film’s cult, says he first caught the movie at
an ”absolutely empty” theater. ”It was like our own private Mystery Science
Theater,” he says. ”I was calling friends during the end and saying, ‘You have
to come to this movie.’ We saw it four times in three days, and on the last day
I had over 100 people there.” Soon, screenings of The Room were thick with both
laughter and cutlery. ”The spoon thing probably started during the fourth screening
with my friends,” says Rousselet. ”I was like, Why is there a spoon in the
picture frame? Every time it came up, I’d scream ‘Spoon!’ So we brought
spoons.”
Wiseau says that he received ”almost a hundred”
e-mails thanking him for the film. ”That’s when I say, ‘Let’s just show The
Room once a month, midnight screening,”’ he explains.
Wiseau regularly attended these events and answered
questions. Sometimes he recited Shakespearean sonnets. Wiseau released The Room
on DVD in December 2005, and produced another, promotional, DVD that featured
fans of the film at screenings praising the Room experience. And he continued
to pay for the billboard, which, as the years passed, became a local landmark
until Wiseau finally gave it up in the fall of 2008. ”People started coming up
to me randomly in L.A. and saying, ‘Were you in The Room?”’ says Paris. She
wasn’t the only cast member to achieve a degree of fame thanks to the film.
When Greg Sestero, who plays Mark, attended a screening a year after the
movie’s release, he says he was ”mobbed” by fans. Juliette Danielle attended
the second-anniversary screening and encountered fans dressed as her character.
One even wore a prosthetic neck piece in homage to that scene in which it
appears Lisa is about to endure a freakish compound fracture.
By the time the film’s third anniversary rolled
around, in 2006, word of The Room had spread through the comedy scene. ”I was
at Paul Rudd’s house a couple of years ago, and he said, ‘You have to watch
this,”’ recalls Rudd’s frequent collaborator and Role Models director David
Wain. ”Within two minutes, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is my favorite thing I’ve ever
seen.’ I’ve watched it over and over and over. We’ve had a lot of fun thinking
which character we’re going to play when we do our shot-for-shot remake.” Rudd
also showed the film to Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, who in turn
recommended it to the show’s star, Kristen Bell. ”I watched it in my trailer
with my mouth agape the entire time,” she recalls. ”I knew I would never be the
same. We tried to reference it on Veronica Mars as much as possible.” In one
example, during a May 2007 episode of the show, a character mentions ”the new
Rocky Horror,” where ”people throw plastic spoons at the screen.”
David Cross became intrigued by The Room while
filming the 2004-05 season of Arrested Development. ”Will Arnett and I would
always see the billboard and be like, ‘What the f— is that thing?”’ he says.
”Will Googled it, and then we would often watch the trailer.” Soon, the pair
were cracking each other up by repeating Wiseau’s signature line: ”You are
tearing me apart, Lisa!” Then, at the 2005 Screen Actors Guild awards, Cross
noticed a familiar figure. ”I was like, Holy s—, Tommy Wiseau’s here!” he says.
”I was kind of drunk, and kept following him. I was literally finding every
excuse to be next to him wherever he was in the building. He was getting
weirded out by me.” Eventually Cross made the pilgrimage to see The Room
itself. ”The idea of a participatory thing doesn’t sound like fun to me,” he
says, ”but I really, really enjoyed it. It’s not like there’s one or two or
three things that are bad about it. There are several hundred. I don’t think
Will ever saw it,” Cross laughs. ”What a f—ing a–hole he is!”
Cross recommended the film to Eric Wareheim and Tim
Heidecker, stars of the Cartoon Network’s bizarre late-night sketch
extravaganza Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, who became similarly
obsessed. And Rudd, Bell, and Hill practically transformed the set of last
April’s comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall into a Room convention. (”Paul and
Jonah and I were talking off set and Jonah kept snickering,” says Bell. ”And
I’m like, Am I being pranked? Finally, I look down, and Paul is wearing a
silk-screen picture of Tommy Wiseau on his T-shirt.”) Meanwhile, Rudd and Wain
conspired to slip Room references into Role Models. ”There were all sorts of
ideas,” says Wain. ”Like someone in the background going, ‘You are tearing me
apart, Lisa!’ But Role Models was such a crazy process — we were kind of
writing it as we were shooting — I don’t know if any of them ended up in the
movie.” It seems like the comedy community is now divided into two camps: those
who have fallen in love with The Room, and those who are about to. ”It’s
ridiculous that I haven’t seen this,” says Adam McKay, Will Ferrell’s longtime
writing partner, and the director of Anchorman. ”I’ve been told by a dozen
people that I have to go. I’ve got to find the next showing.” Wiseau’s film has
even become a verb. ”When we do a take, and it seems bad, a comment about The
Room is often made,” says Joe Lo Truglio, who played the jolly knight in Role
Models, and is yet another fan of The Room. ”’Dude, your heart was in the right
place, but the acting wasn’t. You Roomed it!”’
Wiseau followed up The Room with 2004’s Homeless in America, a
loose but rather moving documentary about the plight of Los Angeles street
dwellers. ”I wanted to show people that this exists,” he says, with such
sincerity that you want to hug him. ”Because I myself did not know. My God!”
Wiseau is currently ”very, very busy” working on a number of future projects,
including a sitcom called The Neighbors, the pilot for which he has already
shot. And his fame among comedians has started to pay dividends. Wiseau
recently filmed a sketch for the next season of Tim and Eric Awesome Show,
Great Job! ”He kind of took over the set,” recalls star Wareheim. ”He would
yell, ‘Rolling! Sound! Speed! Action!’ You could tell he had this feeling that
he was a master of cinema.”
Meanwhile, the cult of The Room grows. Increasingly, the Laemmle Sunset 5 shows
the movie on two screens, due to demand. Fans have begun to re-create scenes
and post them on YouTube. Wiseau is mulling the possibility of turning the film
into a Broadway musical and would like to dub it in French and Spanish for a
possible European theatrical release. He also, ambitiously, wants to screen The
Room at the Staples
Center, which has a seating capacity of 20,000. ”We live in America. So
everything is possible!” he says.
Wiseau is mum about whether
he will see any profit from the film, though it seems doubtful. According to
one billboard industry expert, the signage on Highland probably cost in the
region of $5,000 a month, comfortably more than the gross box office of the midnight
screenings. And one source close to the production admits that the movie
”hasn’t cleared expenses.” Wiseau himself attests that he is ”an artist.
I really don’t like to talk about money.”
His secrecy has been key to the film’s success. (As
Wain puts it, ”Part of the fun is guessing: Who is this guy? Where is he from?
Why did he shoot on a greenscreen instead of going up on a roof?”) His Ed
Wood-like innocence and enthusiasm for moviemaking has helped as well: Rudd
declined to talk about The Room for this article because he didn’t want to
”mock somebody else’s stuff.” And Lo Truglio later got back in touch, concerned
that he had been too harsh about Wiseau. ”It is a guilty pleasure in every
sense of the word,” he says of the movie.
Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter whether the
comedy in the film is intentional or accidental. Wiseau always planned for The
Room to provoke a reaction and entertain, and it has certainly done both those
things. And how many other independent filmmakers can claim to have entranced —
and even influenced — such a roll call of comedic luminaries? ”Anything that
I’ve seen that many times seeps into my subconscious,” says David Wain. ”In the
same way that Steve Martin or Woody Allen movies became part of my vocabulary,
that’s what happened with The Room. I’m laughing just thinking about it!”
The fact is that Wiseau has succeeded where so many
big-screen hopefuls have failed. He has made his mark. True, it may not be
quite the one he intended. But he has proved, without a doubt, that there is a
place — that there is room — in Hollywood for Tommy Wiseau.
Don’t Just Sit There…
Throw rice! Sing scales!
A guide to the rare and rabid world of participatory film.
1.
The Sound of Music (1965)
The L.A. hills are alive with the sound of you-know-what
at the Hollywood Bowl’s sing-along.
2.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The granddaddy of cult films — one that encourages
reenactments, rice-throwing, and cross-dressing.
3.
Showgirls (1995)
This much-reviled film got new life as a midnight movie
in 1996: Audience choreography and mimicry of the camp dialogue ensued.
4.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Fans at vodka-fueled ”Lebowski Fest” events dress in
costumes both obvious (”The Dude”) and bizarre (a giant Creedence tape).
5.
Laughs From Underground
From Jerry Lewis to an animated Jesus, a look at some
other cult obsessions among comedians.
6.
The Day the Clown Cried
In the ’90s, comedian Patton Oswalt held readings of
this infamously terrible Holocaust drama, until one of the producers sent a
cease-and-desist order.
7.
The Spirit of Christmas
Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s short — commissioned by
a Fox exec as an animated Xmas card — was a Hollywood hit and helped score a
deal for South Park.
8.
The Aristocrats
For years, comedians have amused themselves seeing
who can tell the filthiest version of this joke, which was commemorated in the
2005 doc of the same name.
9.
The Foot Fist Way
Will Ferrell loved this comedy so much that he helped
it to get distribution. Fist fan Judd Apatow cast star Danny McBride in Pineapple
Express.
Celebrity Fan Club
These comedic all-stars are just some of the
Hollywood insiders who see genius in the badness of The Room:
Kristen Bell, Actress
David Wain, Director (Role Models)
Jonah Hill, Actor
David Cross, Actor-Comedian (Arrested Development)
Paul Rudd, Actor
Joe Lo Truglio, Actor (Role Models)
Tim Heidecker, Actor-Director (Tim and Eric Awesome
Show, great job!)
Eric Wareheim, Actor-Director (Tim and Eric Awesome
Show, great job!)
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