Franco finds art and heart in a bad movie legend
Actor’s new film pays homage to The Room, considered a great cinematic misfire
Four years ago, during the making of The Interview, the North Korea-provoking comedy that would go on to flirt notoriously with history in its own unpredictable, stranger-thanfiction ways, James Franco found the strange and vaguely Eastern European patois of cult movie icon Tommy Wiseau spilling out of his mouth.
It was a distinctive, stilted, impossible-to-place pattern of speech already well known to loyal fans of The Room, arguably the most celebrated cinematic misfire of all time. “Oh hai, doggie.” “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” Franco hadn’t yet seen The Room, the infamous 2003 indie melodrama written, directed and produced by Wiseau, who also starred in and financed the film so rife with bizarre scenes, stilted performances and baffling technical flaws that it became known as the Citizen Kane of bad movies — an honour even the most inept of film oddities haven’t come close to achieving.
But Wiseau’s peculiar cadence, his singular mannerisms, his drive to create and his voice — that voice — came alive as Franco read the 2014 book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside ‘The Room,’ the Greatest Bad Film Ever Made, the behind-thescenes chronicle of the making of The Room written by Wiseau’s confidante and co-star Greg Sestero with Tom Bissell. “Everybody had a Tommy accent — you just wanted to do it,” Franco said recently, slipping in and out of Tommyspeak while talking fondly and frankly of Wiseau. He perfected it by listening to audiotapes the real Wiseau made decades ago solely for himself, logging his most intimate thoughts. Now when the pair are together the actor finds himself talking to Wiseau in his Tommy voice.
“He’s still like, ‘What this accent, ha ha ha,’ ” Franco said and laughed. “There’s nothing I like doing more than the accent.”
Franco and producing collaborator Seth Rogen secured the rights to adapt The Disaster Artist with Franco directing and starring. They then set about tackling one of the film’s biggest challenges: Navigating the tricky line between having fun at the expense of the legendary shortcomings that earned The Room its raucous, cheering (and sometimes jeering) midnight crowds while doing justice to Wiseau, who by most accounts never intended his film to be a comedy. Rogen had seen the Room phenomenon up close more than a decade ago, joining the fervent fandom that cropped up first in Los Angeles then spread across the world as cult cineastes told their friends about the movie they just had to see. While making The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Rogen recalled, he caught a showing with his girlfriend and Jonah Hill on Paul Rudd’s recommendation. “And it just blew our minds.”
Diving into the man behind the myth to make The Disaster Artist required probing past the otherworldly persona, the cult-pop phenomenon of fervent fanatics shouting lines and throwing spoons at the screen, breaking down the wall of mystique Wiseau built over the years turning The Room into a heavily merchandised way of life, selling such diverse products as DVDs and custom-designed underwear on his website, TommyWiseau.com.
“The more we got into it and the story and the psychology of it, the most interesting challenge and the most interesting idea was, ‘What’s good about the movie?’ ” said Rogen, who co-stars as Sandy Schklair, the real-life script supervisor who tangles with Franco’s tyrannical Wiseau as the Room shoot drags on for months. “If it’s a bad movie, why have I seen it so many times — and if it’s a bad movie, why are we making a movie about it?”
The “bad movie” label is a complicated one to apply to a film like The Room, whose notoriety is intertwined with the mystique of its ec- centric creator as its success is inseparable from its failures. Under long Tommy tresses and transformative prosthetics, Franco brings depth, warmth and a sly hint of tragic selfawareness to his portrayal of Wiseau in The Disaster Artist, a performance that earned the actor an Independent Spirit Award lead actor nomination and, distributor A24 hopes, might anchor an outsider bid in several Oscar categories.
The Room and its enigmatic maker have lingered in the shadows of the Academy Awards for years. Wiseau and the film became the stuff of local legend when he emblazoned his own face on a billboard advertising the film with a mysterious phone number — then paid for it to stay up for five years, his pale raven-haired mug staring down defiantly upon the Hollywood he’d tried in vain his entire career to be a part of as an actor.
While Billboard Tommy blankly dared Highland Ave. motorists to see what The Room was all about, legend has it that Wiseau spent his own money to book the film for an Oscarqualifying theatrical run that never got traction.
Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber remember being puzzled and intrigued by Wiseau’s billboard during a trip to L.A. several years before the screenwriting team behind (500) Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars would be tapped by Franco and Rogen to adapt Sestero’s memoir.
Weber figured it for the latest immersive theatre experience. Or a costume store. Or a party hotline.
“I thought it was Gene Simmons,” Neustadter said. “If it was a movie, I thought, it wouldn’t still be up five months later, let alone five years!”
When The Disaster Artist came their way they flipped for the book, relating to Wiseau’s cinematic American dream.
“We were those guys,” Neustadter said. “There was a time when all we wanted to do was make movies and we didn’t know how we were going to do that . . . It spoke to us in a way that wasn’t at all about it being the bestworst movie. It was really a human story.”
“The goal was to make a movie that the superfans will love, but that has to play for people who’ve never even heard of The Room. Weber said. “Hopefully, even if you’ve never even heard of The Room you can identify with Tommy and Greg going after their dreams.”
A true Room devotee’s appreciation isn’t rooted in mean-spirited mockery of what it gets wrong but rather in celebration of what it achieves nonetheless — its very existence, for starters.
“I have a theory that the main character of The Room is the movie itself, and all the obstacles it has to overcome are bad directing, bad acting, bad lighting, bad writing,” said Michael Rousselet, widely credited as The Room’s first fan.
Is it wrong — or even truly possible — to ironically enjoy anything, even a “so bad it’s great” treasure like The Room? Film critic Luke Y. Thompson logged one of the film’s earliest positive reviews after first watching it on a friend’s DVD, then attending one of its initial showings.
“It’s on my 10 best of the decade list, because I truly believe it not only represents a decade where satire and truth blurred and broke, but also because there’s something brilliant about a movie that makes the wrong directorial choice every time there’s one to be made.”