Filmmakers prevail over abuse of courts

JUDGE RULES AGAINST MAN BEHIND CULT FAVOURITE

This week, Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul Schabas published his decision in a legal contest between Tommy Wiseau, mysterious creator of the so-bad-it’s-good cult movie The Room (2003), and a group of Ottawa film buffs who made a documentary about Wiseau and his magnus opus. Schabas’s harsh ruling against Wiseau, which awarded the Canadians US$550,000 in compensatory damages and an unusual US$200,000 in punitive damages, is a lucid defence of free expression, the right to criticize and fair use of copyrighted material.

I find myself treating it almost as art, trying to find its place in the bizarre garden that descends from the seed of Wiseau’s movie. There is The Room itself. There is The Disaster Artist (2017), the critically acclaimed “biographical comedy” about the making of The Room, which was based on a written memoir (2013) by Wiseau’s friend and colleague Greg Sestero. There is the documentary, Room Full of Spoons, directed by (former) Room obsessive Rick Harper.

And now, as a footnote to it all, there is Schabas’s decision, which documents, and in the end punishes, some pretty horrible abuse of legal process by Wiseau. (There’s also the footnote-to-a-footnote you are reading.)

Room Full of Spoons was completed in January 2016 after five years of work. Harper and his friends Fernando Forero McGrath and Martin Racicot had met Wiseau at a 2011 screening of The Room in Ottawa, and were initially encouraged by him. Toward the end of their production, in 2015, the team decided it was probably safest to try to get Wiseau’s permission to use clips from The Room in their own movie, which features interviews with Wiseau’s cast and crew, some anthropological footage of worldwide Room showings that have developed their own zany traditions, and investigation into Wiseau’s personal background. They are responsible for cracking the enigma of his European accent.

In response to their inquiries, Wiseau demanded varying amounts of money, which might have been fine, but insisted on creative control of the documentary, which wasn’t. The final cut of their movie includes about seven minutes of footage from The Room, and they decided, on the basis of informal legal advice, to plant their flag on fair dealing doctrine and go ahead.

But in trying to exhibit Room Full of Spoons at festivals, they found themselves subject to pre-emptive publicity attacks and legal threats on behalf of Wiseau, which led to cancellations. Eventually Wiseau, with the release of the Disaster Artist movie imminent, hired a team of high-powered lawyers. They managed to obtain a temporary injunction — granted ex parte, without the defendants presenting a case — against further showings of the documentary. Harper and his friends had hoped to benefit from the release of The Disaster Artist, showing their documentary to the same audiences (if possible, at the same theatres).

By his own account, Wiseau, having sold his “life rights” to actor-director-producer James Franco, had a financial interest in The Disaster Artist. (At a minimum, Franco’s picture gave new impetus to The Room’s commercial earnings.) Justice Schabas observes that Wiseau had “strong representation” in the injunction hearings — strong enough to bamboozle not one but two Ontario judges into sustaining the injunction — but he soon, on the pathway to trial, found himself whirling through a “revolving door” of Canadian lawyers “that he was unwilling to pay.”

The judge infers that Wiseau had initial help from the producers of The Disaster Artist, who may have wished to suppress the demystifying revelations in Room Full of Spoons. In any event, the Canadians irretrievably lost their chance to tie their documentary to 2017’s renewed interest in Wiseau. (Note that this is the sort of harm injunctions are meant to prevent, not facilitate.)

Wiseau’s suit is a trash bag crammed with torts chosen willy-nilly. Aside from violating Wiseau’s copyright in The Room — a copyright whose existence Wiseau did not even manage to establish firmly — Harper et al. were alleged to have violated Wiseau’s moral rights of authorship, to have misappropriated his personality, to have passed off their work as Wiseau’s, and to have perpetrated “intrusion upon seclusion.”

After sorting through these claims, and finding merit in none, Schabas concluded that Wiseau’s behaviour had been “oppressive and outrageous;” that his negotiations with the Canadian filmmakers had been conducted in self-evident “bad faith;” that he had repeatedly tried to delay and impede the trial he himself had sought; and that in general the court had heard nothing but nonsense from him. Wiseau even made a clumsy attempt to withdraw his suit on the eve of the trial, with the declared intention of rebooting the whole process elsewhere. Note: judges dislike this. Intensely.

The judge has done his best to make Harper, Forero McGrath, Racicot and their business partner Richard Towns whole. (“This assessment of damages,” writes Schabas, “involves some guesswork, but ... it is what I must do in such circumstances.”) If they can collect, and they never make another dime from Room Full of Spoons, they will have done all right financially.

But their main interest has always been in having their movie seen. And I don’t know if they are first-class filmmakers, but it definitely sounds as though they are crackerjack reporters. Their film should have the chance to earn what it deserves from the marketplace. Watch for it.