“I’m sorry, I’m losing my mind,” Tommy Wiseau said to
me seconds after I shook his hand in the lobby of the Four Points Sheraton in SoHo two Sundays ago.
That was more believable than most things he would go on to tell me that
afternoon.
It had taken a series of attempts to set up a time to
talk to the filmmaker about his new sitcom, The Neighbors—a sort of Three’s
Company meets The Office meets a meat cleaver meets a lobotomy type-scenario. Andrew Buckley, the
producer of and actor in The Neighbors, was also apparently its publicist. When
I got to the 4 p.m. appointment Buckley had set up, he was sitting with a
writer from the Huffington Post, who’d also been slotted for that time.
About 15 minutes later,
Wiseau shuffled into the lobby. He wore black Oakley wrap-arounds, a black tank
top with a star on it under an aquamarine dress shirt, and jeans that looked
like they’d been bought distressed and had grown more distressed over time.
From his belt hung a wallet chain, and from his neck, a dog tag with “T.W.”
painted on it. He apologized profusely for the overlap, and I told him
it was OK.
“Could you get him a water for while he waits?” Tommy
asked Raul Phoenix,
whom he introduced as his assistant. Phoenix also acts in The Neighbors.
Half an hour passed. Then Buckley fetched me to join
the three of them in their circular booth in the Sheraton’s San Marino
Ristorante. The lighting was a little too bright; the place felt like it could
become run-down any minute, like a restaurant in a mall that’s about to start
dying. The carpeting reminded me of that in the conference room of the Austin
Holiday Inn that I once judged a child beauty pageant in.
I didn’t expect to see the cold water in front of
Wiseau on the table. Wiseau’s public life and career have been defined by the
marvelously nonsensical 2003 movie The Room. The actor Greg Sestero chronicled
his time on the set of The Room in the 2013 book The Disaster Artist,
co-written with Tom Bissell. In it, Sestero asserts: “Whenever Tommy is in a
restaurant, he always orders a glass of hot water.” I expressed my surprise.
“Yeah, I drink a hot water,
too. You see it’s behind right here,” he said, motioning to the ledge behind
me. “That’s my tea.” And then, in a manner that suggested an
extraterrestrial attempting to mimic laughter he just heard on American
television, Wiseau unleashed a “Haw haw haw haw.”
“You want a cold water?” Wiseau offered. There was
already a full glass in front of me, too, and I was still hydrated from the 20
ounces of Aquafina I had just downed on the Sheraton’s dime. I was swimming in
water, thanks to Tommy Wiseau’s efforts.
Drinking water is a motif in The Disaster
Artist—Sestero and Bissel allege that Wiseau at one point threw a water bottle
at actress Brianna Tate’s head, yelling, “Nobody in Hollywood will give you
water!” after she had complained about having none to drink. Another actor’s
absence from the set to get a drink of water allegedly set Wiseau off: “This
was a mistake: Brianna had already established that water was an issue
guaranteed to make Tommy go berserk.”
On that Sunday, he merely seemed concerned about my
hydration. Or something. Wiseau contests much of The Disaster Artist, anyway. The night
before, at an event at the
Landmark Sunshine theater to commemorate the 11th anniversary of The
Room, he told an audience that he disagreed with “50 percent” of The Disaster
Artist. I brought up that estimate in our conversation, and he barked back in
his not-quite-Austrian/not-quite French/not-quite Russian/not-quite-of-this-world
accent, “Correct! Fifty percent!” That is his number and he’s sticking to it.
One thing Wiseau wanted me to know he disagreed with
in The Disaster Artist
is “three student...did the crazy stuff, that they had guru.” I had no
idea what that meant. I still don’t. Chunks of thoughts fly out of Tommy
Wiseau’s mouth, sometimes too fast to account for every one and circle back
around. Because said circling almost always leads to different chunks of
thoughts, you have to pick and choose as the piles start to build around you.
What exactly Wiseau was thinking when he wrote,
directed, produced, and starred in the film remains perplexing, as does how he
secured the movie’s reported $6 million budget. He claims The Room was intended
as a “black comedy”; virtually everyone with intact senses begs to differ. Sestero and Bissel
write, “Tommy Wiseau intended The Room to be a serious American drama, a
cautionary tale about love and friendship, but it became something else
entirely—a perfectly literal comedy of errors.” Even if that’s true of the
movie as a whole, there are hundreds of other decisions made in The Room that
defy explanation, particularly one that simple. Ambiguity of intention is the
cornerstone of effective camp. It plants the conversational seeds in one’s head
that will flourish later when he or she congregates with others to celebrate a
film’s one-of-a-kind awfulness.
That ambiguity has served The Room well since its
initial two-week theatrical run that began June 27, 2003. Wiseau says he ran
The Room for two weeks so that it could be eligible for the Academy Awards,
although the Oscars actually only require a run of seven consecutive days. “We
actually, on database [IMDb, probably] I don’t know if you check or not, but we
didn’t won anything, but I’m proud of it,” he told me. “Ha ha ha ha ha!”
The story goes that toward the end of that run, it
picked up some steam when a screenwriter named Michael Rousselet saw it, recognized its
unique hilarity, and implored his friends to check it out. A 2008 Entertainment
Weekly piece on The Room’s phenomenal following calls Rousselet “Patient Zero
of the film’s cult.” Almost six years after that article shone a spotlight on
an underground phenomenon, that cult is thriving.
I stood among the
congregation that Saturday (September 27) in a line that extended from the
Landmark Sunshine on Houston, wrapped around to Forsyth, and went more than
halfway down the block. The rowdily nerdy group had amassed for a
aforementioned midnight-screening event that included not just a showing of The
Room, but also the premiere of The Neighbors. The presentation would play
simultaneously on five sold-out screens. According to Buckley, it did the same
the night before, and he thinks Sunday’s 10 pm screenings were also all sold
out too (“Nobody showing up at 10 was going to find 2 seats next to each
other”). Repeated requests to verify this information with Landmark went
unanswered.
I was only in one of those theaters, but I think it’s
safe to assume that in each and every one, during each and every time, the
11-year-old movie was met with the same sort of participatory rapture that I
witnessed.
Though I had first watched it at a friend’s apartment
years before, I’d never been to an actual midnight screening of The Room. I
appreciate The Room’s utter incoherence (especially via Wiseau’s almost always
dubbed dialogue), but it’s nowhere near my favorite bad movie. That distinction
goes to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which is readable as a sharp satire, on
top of being delirious nonsense. The Room is not even up there with Jaws: The
Revenge for me (the shark roars, I rest my case). The Room is regularly
amazing, but its dragging pace makes it a chore to get through.
But the audience participation brought to my
attention dozens of details I had missed (lead actress Juliette Danielle’s bulging,
Giger-esque neck muscle, for one). During the midnight showing, two guys in
their 20’s led the receptive crowd through the participation protocol. They
threw spoons to salute the weird framed stock photos of spoons that show up
periodically, ran to the front of the theater to position themselves right in
Wiseau’s wonky eye line at one point (“I’m right here! I’m right here!”), and
relentlessly mocked Danielle’s appearance. One wore a blonde wig (to mimic
Danielle’s character Lisa), the other a black one in reference to Wiseau. After
the movie outside the theater, the fake blonde told me he’d seen the movie “a
lot of times.” The one in the black wig, who would eventually identify himself
as Nikolai Vanyo, told me he’s seen The Room 150 times.
They were both sharp kids. To summarize the appeal of
The Room, the kid in the blonde wig said, “It’s told from a perspective that’s
absurd and alienating. The whole idea is he’s perfect, and women are all awful.
No matter what the movie’s going to be, anything coming from that perspective
is going to be pretty fucking hilarious.”
At one point, I brought up The Rocky Horror Picture
Show, the definitive audience-participation cult movie.
“If anything this is, like, replacing it,” said
blondie. “I mean, obviously it’s not going to replace it. Rocky Horror is good
in a lot of ways, and it’s really enjoyable as a movie itself. [The Room] is, I
think, more of an elaborate celebration of the crowd participation. Rocky
Horror has that, but this is almost exclusively about the crowd. It’s such a
wild experience. It’s unique in so many ways. For one, you’re breaking down the
whole concept that the movie theater is a place for you to be silent and to be
respectful of a film. You should be, but when it’s The Room, it’s an entirely
different experience. It isn’t like watching a movie. It’s a whole other kind
of thing.”
After I got home and looked up the kid via the name
he gave me—Miles
Guthrie—I realized I had been speaking to Miles Guthrie Robbins, the 22-year-old son of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Susan Sarandon.
Vanyo and Robbins were less enthusiastic about The
Neighbors, which screened before The Room that night. Vanyo described it as
“kind of unwatchable” and Robbins agreed it was “rough” in contrast to The
Room. The Room may be incompetently executed but it’s polished enough to
reflect at least part of the small fortune that was sunk into its making.
Wiseau says he shot a pilot for The Neighbors back in
2004, though he told me Sunday that what he screened last weekend he shot
“three weeks ago.” Most of it was shot over a three-day period at the
Wiseau-Films Studio in Los Angeles. The episode presented a series of cornily
kooky vignettes that all took place in a Los Angeles apartment complex. Wiseau
plays two roles—a resident (for which he dons a blonde wig) and, I guess, a
landlord or super or building manager who hangs out in the office, fields
questions and concerns, and punctuates every scene with, “What a day.” The
screened episode featured multiple characters attempting to borrow $20, a busty
blonde named Philadelphia who appears in a bikini throughout (played by Karly Kim, who’s
regularly ridiculed on The Dirty), and an extended plot about the missing
chicken of a hysterical resident named Cece.
I asked Wiseau about the chicken storyline. “You
know, I want to be vegan,” he began. He was eating a piece of salmon at the
time. I expected he would explain it as a reference to The Room’s script’s
multiple uses of “chicken” as an epithet (cheap cheap cheap cheap cheapcheap).
He did not. Instead, Wiseau rambled through a playful sort of activism (“We
have American culture and I think we have a chicken like always I think the
chicken always, like, get beat up…So I say to myself, no, let’s make a star of
the chicken let’s see what happen”) and a curiosity about the emotional lives
of our potential fowl friends (“Who say that the animals they don’t have sort
of thinking, but maybe they do, I don’t know”).
He told me that Buckley has been tasked with taking
care of the chicken when they aren’t shooting. I asked if Wiseau had bonded
with the chicken. “Oh yeah, we all do. Next question.”
“Move on, next question,” was a repeated refrain. He
delivered it in a blasé way that felt studied, like he was saying it because
that’s what stars say in interviews. In the same way that The Room is a
facsimile of a movie trying desperately to convince you that it is real, Wiseau
seems to be a facsimile of a movie star. From behind the Oakleys that he never
removed (he is supposedly very self-conscious about his right eye’s droop) and
with box-black hair pulled into a ponytail with tendrils framing his head,
Wiseau “Next question”-ed his way through the interview.
Sometimes he deployed it to end his own tangents: “At
the end of the day, who say that the truth prevail? I don’t know somebody say
that. Maybe I say it right now. Ha ha ha. Move on, next question.”
Sometimes it was to evade—I asked Wiseau about
groupies and getting laid as a result of The Room and he told me he wouldn’t
answer that. I pressed. “No I can’t,” he said. “I take my fifth because that’s
not fair. Move on, next question.”
He was similarly closed off
to discussing his upbringing, which he says happened in New Orleans via his
aunt and uncle. I asked about his aunt and he snapped, “Yeah, she was like a
church-oriented person. Move on, next question.”
Wiseau is elusive about his
origins—he says IMDb misreports his age (the site says he was born Oct 3, 1955,
which would make him 59 as of last Friday), but he won’t say by how much.
“Well, who cares about age? I feel like I’m 20 today.” During the brief
audience Q&A that took place between The Neighbors and The Room the night
before, someone had asked if English was his first language. “No, I speak
Martian,” he said. “Yes it is. No more about that.”
He even grew cagey with me when I asked him about his
existential state. In an essay on Vice by James Franco, who will direct the
film adaptation of The Disaster Artist and play Wiseau in it, Franco describes
Wiseau as a “lonely little boy who wants love.” I asked Wiseau about that analysis,
and he discussed Franco’s choice to end his piece with a French phrase (“Tommy
c’est moi”), his plans to work with Franco beyond The Disaster Artist (“We on
the same page with James Franco”), Richard Gere’s nudity in American Gigolo
compared to Wiseau’s own ass-bearing in The Room, and the fact that Franco is a
“nice guy.”
OK, but is Wiseau a lonely little boy?
After more long-windedness about the creative process
being at times a necessarily solitary one, Wiseau finally revealed that he
would not be so revealing as to actually answer that question as completely as
he could.
“I don’t want to be too specific because it’s my
life, but I can give you little bit that I’m not that lonely,” he said. “I
mean, I have friends around me and I do exercise, I do all that stuff. But
sometimes actors need to be lonely.”
Waiting for the subway on my way over, while brushing
up on my notes and rereading my research, I had realized that Wiseau benefitted
from the same ambiguity that The Room does—his mysteriousness and bizarreness
only make him more fascinating. He really could be an alien, for all we know. I
was not only at peace with the idea that I would be able to pry very few hard
facts from Wiseau; I realized that doing so would be a disservice not just to
him but for everyone who delights in his charmingly enigmatic ways.
At times, I wondered if he was even capable of having
a candid conversation. He sometimes appeared to have the limpest of grasps on
facts. A few minutes into our conversation, he referred to me as,
“Richard…right?”
“Yeah, Rich,” I told him.
“OK, Richard, sorry,” he said. He would never refer
to me by name again.
I read to him a long passage from a 2012 GQ interview
with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim about their attempt to get The Neighbors
on Adult Swim. In it, they allege that Wiseau requested too much help from them
in terms of development and directing. To me, Wiseau would go on to claim the
opposite—that they were too involved and wanted their names above the title as
in “Tim & Eric Present…” He also claims that their motivation for saying
such things is that they are jealous that he commanded a bigger crowd than them
in London.
I finished reading the section by saying, “And then
Eric says, ‘He refused to budge.’“
“Who, me?” Wiseau responded.
“Yes, it was all about you,” I had to explain.
The best I can do to verbalize what I think is up
with Tommy Wiseau is to say that Tommy Wiseau exists on his own vibration. I
don’t know how or why his brain works the way it does, but I have weird faith
that he ably transmits what is going on inside. His gift is articulating
precisely how inarticulate he is. And so, appreciating him and mocking him
happen simultaneously. That means that when he addresses a crowd of fans, as I
watched him do the night before in that theater, those people are cheering out
of both sides of their mouth.
“I don’t mind,” he told me when I asked about being
laughed at by his ostensible admirers. “I always say you can express yourself.
Have fun. That’s the idea behind it. Behind The Room.”
Wiseau is at the mercy of interpretation, but, then
so are all of us ultimately. You can know yourself and project that as honestly
and lucidly as humanly possible, but at the end of the day , your legend is
passed on and preserved by others. You do not get to write your own obituary.
The Room is often referred to as “the Citizen Kane of
bad movies.” Sestero and Bissell refer to it as “the greatest bad movie ever
made” on the cover of their book. I asked Wiseau what he thought of The Room
being considered bad, and he once more waded through swamps of ideas before
arriving at an answer—references to Sestero, New Orleans lingo, Indiana
accents, New York manners. Finally, about four minutes later, he gave me an
answer.
“People say bad movie,” he said. “It’s about how you
define. How many bad movie I saw in my life? Probably dozen. But I will never
say it bad, but you know, if I have a conversation, I say, ‘Hey I didn’t like
it. This is my style.’ But some people say the same movie was it, it’s a bad
movie. And some people say, ‘Oh, it’s a shitty movie.’ Whatever they want to
say. So again, it depends on how you express yourself. I don’t consider The
Room bad movie.”
I asked Wiseau why he does what he does, and the
answer approached what felt like genuine earnestness.
“Well, you know, I wanna change the world,” he told
me. “I think The Room it will change the world. And I would say if a lot of
people love each other, the world will be better place to live. What I mean by
that? That I’m just saying like, ‘Oh, OK, let’s do love, let’s do sex,
whatever’? No, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying, have respect for
each other. Look at New York today. I been in New York six times already here,
back and forth. Change, right? I think New Yorkers much nicer people than I
remember first time. I don’t know why. Same in Bay Area, for example. You go to
San Francisco and see all the bicycles, you know? We change. And I think we
change in positive way. I think The Room is like a growing also. People change
with The Room.”
And then the next thing he said required me to bite
my cheeks to keep from laughing in his face, a technique I used to use when I
worked at VH1 and would interview people who appeared on reality TV
competitions.
“Screening The Room midnight eliminated crime in
America,” he said, unknowingly drawing blood from me. “Look at how many young
people—you been young, I mean we still young, whatever—go in the street, you
know, walking on the street, nothing to do, go see The Room,have fun. Let’s
assume you don’t see The Room, you don’t have The Room, you walk on the street,
grab the rock, and by accident you hit somebody, you know? Accident happen, get
‘em arrested, go to jail, whatever. Instead, you see The Room. So high
probability crime, high probability…you know what I’m saying?”
I mean, I recognize all of those words, yes.
Wiseau has his sights set on major networks for The
Neighbors. He told the crowd at the screenings I attended, “If you can blog
about The Neighbors, send email to ABC, CBS, etc., say, ‘Hey, we want to see
The Neighbors by Tommy Wiseau on TV.’“ The amount of episodes he has already
shot is “potentially three, five, something like that.” I suggested that the
show isn’t quite polished enough for the restrictive world of network TV, and
that a less mainstream route might work better—perhaps Netflix (he says he had
a one-episode deal with Adult Swim, but wants to push for a better deal...I
think that’s what he meant, at least). He didn’t like that idea.
“Again, that’s what we talk about ABC, CBS, The
Neighbors,” Wiseau told me. “And hopefully they will knock at my door. We see
what happens. Move on, next question.”
Eventually the questions ran out. The water never
did, though—before I left Wiseau asked if I wanted to take my water “to go,”
but I declined. Was he being kind or nurturing or fixated or inadvertently
thematic or merely just living in the moment and saying the thing that came
into his head? I couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter anyway. I’d had my fill.
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