Greg Sestero of ‘The Room’ to appear during Studio 35 screening
As a movie is being made, no one can know for sure what the final product will be like or how it will be perceived by the public.
Maybe the movie will be instantly beloved; maybe it will be just as swiftly dismissed. Or maybe the movie will, slowly but surely, find its fan base.
A case study can be found in the stillsurprising afterlife of the 2003 independent production “The Room,” which barely registered among audiences during its initial, highly limited release but gradually found a set of fans who embraced it as one of the most misbegotten movies ever produced.
“It’s like having a child,” said co-star Greg Sestero, who will greet fans, sign autographs and participate in a Q&A before a screening of “The Room” on Sept. 24 at Studio 35 Cinema and Drafthouse. “You never know what it’s going to come out to be.”
Speaking with The Dispatch recently from his home in Southern California, Sestero added, “What we learned with ‘The Room’ is you never know, 20 years later, if people might be talking about your music or your film, but you’ve just got to go out and make it.”
Audiences — at least those with an appreciation for the boldly bad in cinema — have certainly not forgotten about “The Room,” which stars writer-director Tommy Wiseau as a lovelorn San Francisco banker named Johnny. A love triangle forms between Johnny, his girlfriend Lisa (Juliette Danielle) and his pal Mark (Sestero).
But who watches “The Room” for the plot?
Thanks to its clunky production values, off-kilter dialogue and sometimesham-handed acting, the movie gradually picked up steam as a midnight-movie attraction. Fans can recognize each other merely by quoting specific lines from the script, such as “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” or “Oh hi, Mark.”
“It’s just a bunch of people watching
something over and over and over again,” said Eric Brembeck, owner of Studio 35. “It’s that communal kind of thing about it that makes it so cool.”
Wider recognition followed with the publication of Sestero’s 2013 memoir of the making of the movie, “The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside ‘The Room,’ the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made” (subsequently adapted into a film directed by James Franco, who starred as Wiseau).
“You can’t really call it a bad movie because people are still watching it and loving it all these years later,” said Sestero, 43. “You just have to accept that there’s something in it that’s unique and different that people still want to revisit.”
Sestero’s involvement in the film was far from a foregone conclusion: The upand-coming actor signed on to work in a behind-the-scenes capacity. Then Wiseau,
whom Sestero had gotten to know while both were in an acting class some years earlier, cajoled him into appearing on-screen.
“It was the night before filming that Tommy said, ‘If you don’t do this role, it’ll be the biggest mistake of your life,’” Sestero said. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure.’”
For a while, taking the part appeared to be something of a mistake. Insisting that the actors abide by a script that only occasionally reflected plausible human behavior, Wiseau presided over a shoot that was often unpredictable.
“Every day was a surprise,” Sestero said. “Crew was fired; cast members quit. We shot a scene in the alley, and then Tommy said it wasn’t dramatic enough. We needed to shoot it on the rooftop.”
When the movie finished, Sestero assumed that the door had closed on “The Room.”
“When it was first shown a theater in L.A, Tommy paid for the theater to play it for two weeks,” Sestero said. “(The theater) had a sign up that said, ‘No Refunds.’”
By 2009, though, the unapologetic oddness of the movie had drawn some prominent fans, something Sestero became aware of when he was contacted by a reporter from Entertainment Weekly.
“He wrote a huge article about (the movie), talked about all the celebrity fans, like Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, all these guys that had gone to see it for years,” Sestero said.
Surprisingly, Sestero says that he has only seen “The Room” in its entirety about four times. He prefers to simply chat with audiences about their thoughts on the film — and its inimitable weirdness.
“I’m as fascinated by their opinion and their experience as they are of mine,” he said. “I’ve never spent time in Columbus, but I’ve heard it’s such a great city. I’m really looking forward to it.”
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