I can’t bring myself to watch The Room in its entirety. I barely made it through this one scene.
It’s a B movie with delusions of Oscars. Professional enigma Tommy Wiseau wrote, produced, directed, financed, and starred in the film, which has acquired a so-bad-it’s-fascinating cult following. It seems it’s best viewed with a lively crowd.
To get the flavor of the thing, watch the Honest Trailer. (It’s first up in the compilation below.)
You can also take a look at the movie’s IMDb page and watch the trailer there.
Based on this sampling, you might assume an early version of AI generated this script, but the movie came out in 2003. Something else is responsible for its creation.
Fortunately, we have The Disaster Artist to portray the uncanny origins of The Room. The 2017 movie stars James Franco as Wiseau. Franco, who also directed, won a Golden Globe for his performance, and deservedly so. His brother Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, an aspiring actor who befriends Wiseau and gets a major role in this epic failure.
Sestero also wrote the nonfiction book that inspired the movie (with coauthor Tom Bissell). The book’s full title is The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made.
The result is a well-written, expertly acted movie about a notoriously bad movie. Sestero serves as our main viewpoint character, which is a good call since he’s about a million times more relatable than his eccentric friend. Greg is just a decent guy chasing his dreams even though he’s not especially talented. You want him to somehow pull it off.
We meet Greg and Tommy as they meet each other in an acting class. Greg’s performance lacks confidence. He’s afraid to let loose, and the teacher criticizes his timidity. And then Tommy attempts to show him how it’s done.
Tommy is not afraid. He gives a performance that’s fearless, uninhibited, and atrociously awful. Nevertheless, Greg admires his boldness and, hoping to learn something, introduces himself after class. An unorthodox friendship develops between the two, leading Tommy to suggest that they move to Los Angeles and share the apartment he already has there.
The inept Tommy attempts to make it in LA, and it’s painfully awkward to watch. He’s just so confidently clueless, blissfully unaware of what he doesn’t know. And he’s such a bizarre man. You might think James Franco is embellishing, but judging by the footage I’ve seen of the real Wiseau, no. If anything, Franco makes him more sympathetic.
Greg’s story is painful to watch for different reasons. Whenever he starts to make some headway, Tommy is always lurking nearby, ready to drag him back down while claiming to have his best interests in mind.
Tommy eventually decides to make his own movie, despite not knowing how to do such a thing. The Disaster Artist is at its best when it takes us behind the scenes of The Room and shows us what happens when a guy with no clue or skill has total authority.
Unearned confidence makes Tommy a tyrant who won’t put up with any criticism of his artistic vision. He’s cruel and manipulative. He spies on people and doesn’t even care about keeping his cast properly hydrated. (By the way, the real Wiseau cameoed in The Disaster Artist and participated in the marketing.)
And yet, impressively enough, Franco manages to humanize him just a bit in the end, when The Room debuts and an audience watches this “film with the passion of Tennessee Williams,” as the tagline calls it. It’s Tommy’s soul laid bare. And people laugh at it.
But as they laugh, they have a genuinely great time watching this terrible movie. The audience is sharing a memorable, enjoyable experience, one that nobody could have crafted deliberately. Tommy, despite himself, somehow delivered that. It’s not the reaction he wanted, but he rolls with it. It’s oddly uplifting.
Tommy doesn’t redeem himself. He’s not exactly the redeemable sort. He’s still terminally strange, and the real Wiseau would go on to create other strange projects, none of which achieved the cult status of The Room.
But within all of this, there’s a lesson: Having too much fear can hurt us. Having no fear can hurt us. But a little fear here and there can serve us well.