The strange tale of the worst film ever made
‘The Room’ is a movie so dire it has earnt a cult following – and has now inspired an acclaimed biopic of its maverick director. Adam White reports
Hollywood has a rich history of filmmaking so bad that it inspires its own fervent fandom, from the cosmic madness of B-movie auteur Ed Wood’s 1959 sci-fi Plan 9
from Outer Space to Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 stripping saga
Showgirls. But there is no film quite so uniquely terrible – or so feverishly loved for its terribleness – as The Room, which has been dubbed “the
Citizen Kane of bad movies”. A spectacularly incompetent low-budget production that seems to aspire to Tennessee Williams melodrama but comes off like a particularly bizarre soft-porn film, the 2003 tour de force was the work of one Tommy Wiseau.
A flamboyant, vampiric-looking eccentric, for all that he may be a man devoid of good taste and skill, he will forever be remembered for creating a masterpiece of junk.
In the years since its paltry initial release at a single downtown Los Angeles cinema, The Room has developed the kind of obsessive cult following unseen since The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
One of its most famous fans, James Franco, Hollywood star and renaissance man, has now turned the story of The
Room’s genesis into a film of its own, called The Disaster Artist, which has received rave reviews in America and even generated talk of an Oscar nomination for Franco – an ironic state of affairs considering the source material.
To explain in words the story of The
Room can’t do it justice. Wiseau, the dominant force lingering over its every frame, plays Johnny, a distractingly earnest banker engaged to be married to a secretly duplicitous femme fatale who is sleeping with his best friend.
However the film soon collapses amid an array of sub-plots and side characters, elements that drop in and out of the narrative with impressive inelegance, be they a potty-mouthed drug dealer or uncomfortable allusions to sexual voyeurism. Numerous characters impersonate chickens. There are several gratuitous sex scenes, stocked with lingering shots of Wiseau’s buttocks (at his own insistence). Midway through a conversation with her daughter, an elderly woman casually reveals that she is dying from cancer. The daughter barely flinches at the news, and it is never mentioned again.
Almost as puzzling as the film is its maker. At the time a struggling actor, he self-funded the $6million (£4.5million) project in the hopes of making it his calling card.
Wiseau is known to shut down any discussion of his origins, his date of birth or how he accumulated so much disposable money, lending continued mystery to its source. It has been suggested his wealth stems from real estate investments and a successful discount jeans company, but neither have been confirmed. Likewise his birthplace: despite speaking in a marble-mouthed, vaguely European accent, he has repeatedly insisted he is from New Orleans.
Wiseau’s intentions with The Room remain a mystery too. He has claimed that it was always meant to be a comedy, but an unnamed cast member told Entertainment Weekly in 2008 that Wiseau was “full of s---,” and believed throughout its production that he was making a serious drama. It was only after Wiseau saw the reaction to The Room’s first screenings that he decided to cash in on its unique appeal.
The cult of The Room developed through word of mouth; during the initial release, LA film bloggers picked up on it and started encouraging others to go and experience it for themselves. Hollywood players like directors JJ Abrams and Edgar Wright soon followed suit, singing its praises, leading Wiseau to realise its marketable value, and start personally touring the film around the world.
More than a decade on, he continues to tour the film internationally throughout the year, hosting Q&AS, posing for pictures and selling personalised merchandise at each screening. The screenings have also grown in scope, morphing into interactive “quote-a-long” experiences in which fans recite much of the script’s most ludicrous dialogue right back at the characters delivering it, and toss plastic cutlery at the screen in reference to the framed photographs of spoons that litter every set in the film.
How to explain its unwarranted success? Well, from personal experience, watching The Room with an audience, all gleefully jeering and interacting with the events on screen, provokes some of the purest feelings of communal joy you will be likely to experience in the cinema, albeit of a kind founded on schadenfreude – a recognition that somebody who thankfully wasn’t us has produced something so spectacularly bad.
It’s not a surprise that James Franco was the man to shepherd the story of The Room to the big screen: the eccentric star has previously expressed a keen interest in trash culture, taking a recurring role in shoddy US soap General Hospital and bizarrely remaking low-grade TV movies of old for the cable channel Lifetime. He has also spoken of being drawn to Wiseau’s ability to turn what could have been a soul-destroying disaster into an unexpected career.
At times, The Disaster Artist resembles a very traditional David versus Goliath story, with Wiseau as the plucky underdog warring against a moneyed, elitist Hollywood. But the film doesn’t exactly paint him as a counterculture hero, either – he is shown to be argumentative and jealous of others’ success.
Franco conveys all those contradictions in what is a spellbindingly good, uncanny performance that is testament to the extensive preparation he did for the role: physically bulking up, listening to endless audio recordings to perfect Wiseau’s voice, spending two and a half hours in the make-up chair every morning having prosthetics applied to his face and, most committedly and surreally of all, directing the film himself while still in character.
Wiseau has so far refused to give the film his full backing, but did accompany Franco to its world premiere at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival. He told the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year that he is “not supporting [it] 100 per cent, just 45 per cent,” adding, “I give you five per cent extra because of James Franco.”
If Franco does receive awards, it will be an appropriately out-of-left-field resolution to Wiseau’s journey with The Room, which started off as a bitter showreel to capture Hollywood’s attention, and has now, in the hands of better-looking people with infinite fame and riches, inspired one of the best-reviewed films of the year.
Who ever said the American dream was dead?
It’s only a shame that Wiseau’s directing career hasn’t lived up its initial promise. A short-lived web series The Neighbours, in which he played a sinister building manager, strained to replicate The Room’s shoddy camerawork and limited budget, but lacked the heart that made his first film so oddly compelling. While it’s understandable that Wiseau would wish to capitalise on The Room’s unexpected success, he appears to have misunderstood our affection for it. The Room is terrible, but unconsciously so, in a way that is endearing. Deliberately engineering badness just isn’t as much fun.
The Disaster Artist is released on Dec 6
‘It was only after Wiseau saw the reaction to The Room’s first screenings that he decided to cash in on its appeal’