Creating art out of disaster
THE DISASTER ARTIST
Starring: James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Jacki Weaver It takes a lot of time, money and effort to make the worst movie of all time.
TO understand the new movie The Disaster Artist, it helps to know a little something about another movie called The Room.
And to understand The Room, it helps to know a little something about its writer, director, producer and leading man, a chap named Tommy Wiseau.
And that’s when things get interesting.
You may have heard of The Room, a 2003 melodrama that in recent years has become an audience-participation cultclassic in the vein of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The story of Johnny — a man devastated by the discovery his girlfriend and best friend are having an affair — The Room is inept, verging on insane, in pretty much every department.
And nothing illustrates this more vividly than Wiseau’s performance as Johnny — it’s a whirligig of strutting and scenery-chewing utterly convinced of its own star quality.
Maybe that go-for-broke, wholly unwarranted confidence is what has drawn people to The Room over the years. It’s certainly not too hard to believe it’s what attracted James Franco to it.
Like Wiseau, Franco is something of a jack-of-all-trades. And even though he has an Oscar nomination and a handful of hit movies to his name, he doesn’t seem to have followed a traditional career path, preferring instead to tackle projects almost willynilly as an actor and a director.
He’s doing both in The Disaster Artist, directing the film and playing Wiseau in this adaptation of a memoir about the making of The Room by Greg Sestero, Wiseau’s close friend and co-star.
As the story begins, Greg (played by Dave Franco, James’ younger brother) is a model and would-be actor who can’t overcome his nerves and shyness in front of an audience.
Tommy, who attends the same acting class as Greg, has no such inhibitions. In fact, he seems to have no inhibitions at all, and Greg is bewitched by this strange man’s utter fearlessness.
It’s not too long before they’ve become friends, pledging to help one another make