The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
James Franco set out to make great film
Franco set out to make great film about worst movie ever made
If you’re like most people, you probably know James Franco best as the goofy comic actor from “Pineapple Express,” “This Is the End,” “The Interview” and the like, or the intense dramatic actor who earned an Oscar nomination for “127 Hours,” played Spider-Man’s best friend/nemesis in Sam Raimi’s movies and headlined an acclaimed James Dean TV biopic after getting his start on “Freaks and Geeks.”
Or maybe you recognize him as the hardest-working man in show business, popping up in all kinds of roles in all kinds of shows, from microbudgeted indie films and the soap opera “General Hospital” to his recent portrayal of twins in the HBO series “The Deuce.” Perhaps you also knew that Franco has attended some of the country’s finest universities and writes books.
You may not be aware, though, that Franco has combined all of those interests in a series of fine but little-seen adaptations of great American novels he’s directed and appeared in, including William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and “The Sound and the Fury,” Cormac McCarthy’s “Child of God” and John Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle.”
Well, it’s all true. And it makes you wonder, a little bit anyway, why this clearly cultured talent would want to direct and star in a movie about the worst movie of all time, “The Room.” But that’s what Franco’s latest feature
“I realized if I do this right I will have both a conventional Hollywood story of outsiders following their dreams and, at the same time, I will have a completely unique, bizarre Hollywood story unlike anything that’s ever been made.” — James Franco, director of “The Disaster Artist”
— “The Disaster Artist,” opening Dec. 8 in Northeast Ohio — is about, and unlike its subject, the new film is receiving rave reviews, as is Franco, for his portrayal of Tommy Wiseau, the totally bizarre character who made and starred in the 2003 calamity turned cult hit.
“‘The Room’ has been playing for 14 1/2 years, sort of like the new ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ but, like, even worse,” Franco, 39, says with a chuckle about the ineptly written, acted and directed tale of romantic betrayal that novice director Wiseau thought would be a Tennessee Williams-style, Oscar-contending drama.
Since its laughed-at premiere, Wiseau has agreed with the world that it is a so-bad-it’s-great comedy.
“People have a good time when they go see it,” Franco says. “There’s a great energy when you go to screenings of ‘The Room.’ People throw spoons and yell at the screen. But it doesn’t feel cruel. It doesn’t feel like, ‘Let’s just go laugh at how bad it is.’
“There’s actually a real warm, kind of communal spirit to those screenings,” he says. “And when the real Tommy shows up to them — I’ve seen him at screenings in Westwood — people love seeing him. He’s entertaining; he throws the football with everybody in line out front; he signs autographs and sells his Wiseau underwear. It’s a real fun, positive atmosphere.”
Unlike many of his Hollywood colleagues, though, Franco had not seen “The Room” when he got hold of a prepublication manuscript for “The Disaster Artist,” co-written by Wiseau’s longtime friend, fellow frustrated actor and eventual “Room” co-star Greg Sestero.
It recounted the two men’s friendship, from meeting at a Bay Area acting class and years of not finding work in L.A. to Wiseau’s self-financed, $6 million production of his baby. According to the book, Wiseau didn’t do anything right as a producer-director-actor and refused to take advice from the few professional crew members (out of some 400 people he hired for the little independent production) who stuck with him through a ridiculous eight months of shooting at a small Hollywood equipment rental facility, where Wiseau insisted on buying the cameras he needed (and ones he didn’t).
That narrative, more than the fan phenomenon that came after, convinced Franco there was a movie for him to make.
“When I was more than halfway through the book, I saw that there was a bigger story,” Franco says. “Greg and Tom Bissell wrote about what we expected, that ‘The Room’ was crazy and Tommy went into it headlong, not knowing what he was doing and without any perspective on himself. He thought he was James Dean when he was more like Captain Jack Sparrow. But to me, they used ‘The Room’ and Tommy’s passion for what he was aiming for as a way to talk about something universal. Which is following your dream, taking a huge swing, putting everything you have on the line financially, personally, creatively and emotionally.
“When I read that, I realized if I do this right I will have both a conventional Hollywood story of outsiders following their dreams and, at the same time, I will have a completely unique, bizarre Hollywood story unlike anything that’s ever been made.”
Franco approached Wiseau for his life story rights and was surprised to discover that the only actor the great auteur wanted to portray him — besides Johnny Depp, that is — was Franco, probably because he’d played Wiseau’s idol Dean.
Franco’s longtime comedy collaborator, Seth Rogen, who plays the only competent professional on “The Room’s” set in “Disaster Artist,” agreed to produce his friend’s film through his company that has gotten away with such mainstream movie murder as “Sausage Party” and the Sony hack-triggering “Interview.” Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, the team that wrote “500 Days of Summer” and “The Spectacular Now,” were brought on to adapt the screenplay, primarily for their skills at relationship dramas rather than comedy.
That was because Franco viewed “Disaster Artist,” at its heart, as a bromance between Wiseau and Sestero. The movie not coincidentally also marks the first time Franco has worked extensively with his younger brother, Dave, who really gets across Sestero’s affection for the maddeningly opaque Wiseau.
“My brother’s an incredible actor and I love him,” James Franco says of Dave Franco (“The Little Hours,” “Now You See Me”). “I think I asked him to do a couple of the Faulkner movies, and he didn’t want to do ‘em. That was partly because he was in a phase when he was establishing himself apart from me, but also, I think, he thought those projects were too weird for him. I don’t know.”
Well, there’s weird and then there’s playing Tommy Wiseau. With his long black-dyed hair, vampirish eyes, impossible-toplace accent and singular sentence construction, Wiseau is a show all to himself, all the time. Add that no one really knows where he’s from — he claims New Orleans; some think they’ve traced his origin to Poland — how old he is or where he got the money to make “The Room,” and you’ve got a facade of strangeness that Franco worked hard to both imitate and pierce to find the real man behind.
“One of the ironies that I love about this whole thing is that Tommy’s acting heroes are my heroes,” Franco says. “James Dean and Marlon Brando. I approached Tommy’s character the same way that I played Dean. I knew that there was a very specific outer aspect to the character: how he looked, how he moved, how he sounded. I needed to get that down. But I also needed to wed that outer life with an inner life, so that it wouldn’t be a caricature.”
Luckily for Franco, Wiseau had pretty much the entire behind-the-scenes production of “The Room” videotaped for what he expected to be an appreciative posterity. Sestero also provided Franco with 20-year-old minicassettes his friend taped of himself just driving around talking.
“That was just this incredible gift for an actor,” Franco says. “Not only could I hear Tommy’s voice in a relaxed setting, just talking to himself, but he was also talking about his life. Very personal things and very pertinent issues to the themes of our movie.”