How a Terrible Film Became a Cult Hit
At the end of “The Disaster Artist,” the novice filmmaker Tommy Wiseau puts on a tuxedo and attends the premiere of his movie, which he believes is a masterpiece as profound as anything in cinematic history. (He is its director, producer, screenwriter and star.) Unfortunately, the film, “The Room,” is a flat- out awful compendium of excruciating dialogue, incoherent plot twists and strangely wooden yet melodramatic acting.
The audience is puzzled, then horrified, then delighted, and right before our eyes Tommy (James Franco) has to perform a tricky bit of emotional jiu jitsu, jettisoning his delusions and accepting that if the public loves his film, it’s only because it is so terrible. That’s the subtext of “The Disaster Artist,” a based- on-a-truestory movie now in global release.
How do you handle it when the movie that you meant to be one thing turns out to be a different thing?
“The Room” was made for something like $6 million of Mr. Wiseau’s nebulously obtained fortune. It opened in 2003, in a theater in Los Angeles that he had to rent himself, and made $1,800 its first weekend.
But word spread that it was a camp classic — an amalgamation of absurd non sequiturs, continuity problems and characters of dubious motivation who come and go for no particular reason, in the service of a story involving a cheating girlfriend, a betrayed friendship and a lot of scenes of guys tossing around footballs. Now it plays to packed, “Rocky Horror”-style interactive audiences around the world.
At its center is the slight, longhaired, black- clad Mr. Wiseau, who has spent the intervening years promoting the film, and maintaining the carefully constructed aura of mystery that swirls around him.
Despite being the subject of the new movie as well as the 2013 book on which it is based (also called “The Disaster Artist” and written by Greg Sestero, Mr. Wiseau’s “Room” costar, along with Tom Bissell), Mr. Wiseau remains hard to figure out.
“People don’t understand me as a person,” Mr. Wiseau said. He sounds exactly the way Mr. Franco does in the film, with idiosyncratically mangled syntax and a sui generis accent that is vaguely Eastern European, but that he refers to as Cajun.
In “The Disaster Artist,” Tommy indignantly refuses to tell Greg ( played by Mr. Franco’s younger brother Dave) anything personal about himself, including his age, how he made his money, or why he insists he is from New Orleans when he is so obviously from someplace else.
Asked these same questions now, Mr. Wiseau is slightly less vague, but just as irritable. “It’s not important, and Number 2, it’s a personal question,” he said. “Long story short, I grew up in Europe a long time ago, but I’m American and very proud of it. Do you have any questions about the movie?” For years journalists have tried to pin down these specifics, with what appears to be some success; IMDB.com now says he was born in Poland in 1955. As for his fortune, he said it came from his leather-jacket and real- estate businesses.
The Tommy of “The Disaster Artist” seems just shy of being certifiably crazy. He’s erratic and demanding and grandiose and insecure, all at once. Greg serves as his non-insane foil, remaining relatively normal despite what appears to be his poor judgment in assisting and starring in his friend’s film. It’s hard to understand what drew them together, but, the real Mr. Sestero said, Mr. Wiseau gave him a way to fulfill his dream of becoming a star.
Mr. Sestero has a new film due in 2018 that stars Mr. Wiseau as a strange mortician and himself as the strange-in-a- different-way homeless man who together embark on various crime and cadaver-related escapades. It is called “Best F(r)iends.”