THE ROOM (2003) and The Disaster Artist (2013)

It’s really tough for a movie to achieve greatness simply by being bad, but The Room has managed to do so, and has remained a staple of pop culture ever since it was first released in 2003, discovered by some film students and passed around on DVD and at midnight showings for ten years. It’s not merely bad, but monumentally mediocre. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it rises below mediocrity. And it has skyrocketed its writer/director/producer/star, Tommy Wiseau, to the same kind of cult status held by Ed Wood.

See the movie once, and it’s a remarkable achievement of awfulness. But see it after reading “The Disaster Artist,” an account of the making of the film written by co-star and line producer Greg Sestero, and it becomes an odd sort of victory tale. Wiseau, whose attempts to become a Hollywood actor had all failed, decided to bankroll and direct his own movie. And he did it. It’s not an inspiring rags-to-riches story. Wiseau was no struggling artist by any means, but an entrepreneur with seemingly unlimited funds. He had enough money to buy--not rent--two cameras with which to shoot his opus. He had enough money to pay the two or three crews he needed to hire after so many threw their arms up and quit. He had enough money to build a green-screen set of a rooftop in a parking lot, rather than simply film on a rooftop.

The Room is the culmination of a fight against not the boundaries of money, but the boundaries of talent. Wiseau had no directing experience, no writing experience, and little acting experience, and it shows. But here is his movie, as he conceived it, as he wanted it.

Wiseau plays Johnny, a good American boy (with an unexplained thick European accent) with a good job, who takes good care of his fiancee Lisa (Juliette Danielle). He even pays the tuition for Denny (Phillip Haldiman), a young boy who lives in his apartment building. Little does he know that Lisa actually hates him, and is cheating on him with his best friend Mark (Sestero).

Wiseau claims to have been inspired by Tennessee Williams for his screenplay, and it sometimes does feel like a poor man’s gender-reversed Streetcar. Williams’s plays usually did identify with genuine but put-upon characters who are eventually beaten down by the society they’re thrown into; “sympathy for the fragile people,” he called it. But I think even Williams might have been a little queasy about the unfettered worship that Wiseau lavishes upon his own character. He takes great pains to show us that Johnny is such a decent, nice, honest man who’s preyed upon by his witch of a girlfriend. Blanche Dubois may not have deserved what she got, but she was never meant to be perfect.  Johnny is a veritable superhero.

Most of the film is set in one apartment, with characters entering and exiting on a whim. A few perfunctory locations--a rooftop, an alleyway, a coffee shop--are concocted, but in no scene does the setting really matter. In fact, the only location that actually contributes to the plot is a now-legendary 19-second scene set in a flower shop, which tells us all we need to know about how Johnny is portrayed.


The heart of The Room and its badness lies mostly in the writing. At the time he wrote it, Wiseau very clearly had a less-than-firm grasp on the English language, and as a result everyone in the film talks like an ESL student. Characters spout botched idioms that Wiseau likely insisted be kept as written: “Hey Denny, two’s great but three’s a crowd.” “Hey Mark, XYZ.” “Just give me five [minutes].” It must be the optimistic view of America from someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain that leads Wiseau to make his characters sound so cool, hip, and passive: “Don’t worry about it” is probably the most spoken line in the film. That also must have led to the prominent use of footballs in the film: not the sport of football, but merely the act of throwing them around as a source of bonding among men (a scene in which Johnny and his friends don tuxedos and pass a football around is inexplicable).

The bad writing also leads to some unintentional greatness. Plot strands are introduced and then immediately dropped. Lisa’s mother (Carolyn Minnott) has one of the film’s most memorable moments when she makes a severe revelation early in the film that is never, not even once, mentioned again. One actor (Kyle Vogt) leaves the film at the midpoint and is clearly replaced by another (Greg Ellery). A scene on the roof involving a gun and a drug dealer named “Chris-R” (Dan Janjigian, who according to Sestero was the only actor having any fun on the set) comes out of nowhere and is never referenced again (though the film faithfully follows the rule that a gun introduced in the first act must be fired by the third).  In a masterstroke of lazy writing, most scenes begin with characters greeting other characters.


The acting is, well, not that bad. Wiseau for the most part hired professional actors who took the film seriously on screen, even as they knew what a turd it was. Danielle does what she can with a thankless role, and is a trooper through numerous gratuitous steamy love scenes which require her to disrobe frequently but are mainly there to show off Wiseau’s physique (for some reason). Sestero tries hard as well, though like all the other actors he struggles with Wiseau’s goofy dialogue. He is required to shout the weirdest line in the film (“Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!”) and his heroic conquering of that piece of linguistic mush is recounted in detail in the book. All things considered, he nails it.

I think my favorite player is Mike Holmes, who plays Mike, a friend of Johnny’s and Lisa’s who for some reason goes to their apartment to make out with his girlfriend (Robyn Paris). Mike is the “comic relief” character, and in his several scenes has obviously been directed to “be funny.” A scene in which he does nothing but retell what happened in his previous scene is side-splitting.

Even Wiseau isn’t a terrible actor; though he reportedly struggled quite a bit with dialogue on the set, his acting isn’t bad in any way that isn’t the fault of his writing or directing. He throws himself into the role headfirst. It’s clear he’s trying to emulate the emotional power of, say, James Dean, which explains why he pirates a famous line from Rebel Without a Cause, which has been made infamous by this film on its own.

The Room may be a legendary bad movie, but it is no failure. By all accounts, it is exactly the movie that Tommy Wiseau wanted to make. Is he troubled that no one else seems to take the film at face value like he does? If a movie is this widely enjoyed, can it still be bad?

Don’t worry about it.