Franco mines cult ’ bomb’
THERE are bad movies, and then there is The Room, a spectacularly bizarre independent drama from 2003 starring, written, financed and directed by Tommy Wiseau, a uniquelooking and accented man of ambiguous age and origin.
The Room tells the story of a San Francisco banker, Johnny ( Wiseau), whose fiancee Lisa and best friend Mark have an affair. And it is bafflingly awful – scenes are out of focus, plotlines are left dangling, soft- core sex scenes leave you cringing and the dialogue sounds downright alien.
Film critic Scott Foundas wrote at the time that the “Pic 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”.
And yet, The Room, which a film professor called “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”, took on a life of its own. It became a cult favourite of the midnight movie set, who treat it as a Rocky Horror Picture Show- like event ( there is shouting, spoonthrowing and walkouts).
It spawned a popular book about the making of the film co- written by Greg Sestero, who played Mark, and now a feature film about the whole ordeal, The Disaster Artist, directed by and starring James Franco as Wiseau. But as easy of a target as The Room might be, The Disaster Artist is not a spoof or a parody – it is a sincerely told ( and incidentally very fun and funny) story about two outsiders, Sestero and Wiseau, who move to Los Angeles with dreams of stardom and no idea how to realise them.
“For us, it was a relationship story,” said Michael H. Weber, who cowrote the script with Scott Neustadter.
Franco also wanted to make it a classic LA film with all the trimmings – the bad diners in the Valley, the creepy agents, the naivete, the auditions that go nowhere – the things he remembers from being a struggling actor in LA around the same time Sestero moved there with Wiseau in 1998.
He cast his younger brother, actor Dave Franco, as Sestero. It’s the first time they’ve acted together in a significant way.
“I’ve tried to get him into a lot of movies. Some of them he just didn’t vibe with. And there was a point in his career where he wanted to get out from, I guess, my shadow, or just create his own identity apart from me,” said James Franco. “I just thought: This is the one. This is the one we should do together ... we have the perfect dynamic for this.”
James Franco is unrecognisable, behind the prosthetics, Gene Simmons hair, eccentric costumes and vaguely Eastern Europeansounding accent required to play the enigmatic Wiseau.
The Disaster Artist has been getting positive reviews ( it’s currently clocking in at 96 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes) and awards buzz.