The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made – by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell
As you can probably tell from the very long title, actor/producer/writer/cultivator of lovely beards Greg Sestero has written a book, and it’s all about the production of the legendary terribrill cinematic experience, The Room. So awful is The Room, that you could conceivably call Tommy Wiseau a worse director than Ed Wood, but so beloved is it that it’s cult following, midnight screening rituals, and influence on pop culture rivals The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I’ve been a fan of The Room for many years now, ever since, when searching on YouTube for James Dean’s anguished “You’re tearing me apart!” scene from Rebel Without a Cause, I stumbled across a vampiric, potentially Eastern European gentleman, scrunching his face up like he’s suffering the worst constipation of his life, crying out “YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, LISA!” I was instantly entranced, and sought out other clips, like the famous rooftop scene (“O hai Mark!”), a character casually declaring she has breast cancer, and many, very disturbing sex scenes. Eventually, I got hold of the entire masterpiece that was The Room, and 20-plus viewings, 2 Edinburgh Fringe Festival screenings, and innumerable gifs on tumblr later, I still get the same giddy excitement as on that first watch.
The book zigzags between two stories, the story of The Room, and the story of a 19-year-old Greg Sestero’s ambition to make it in Hollywood, and his developing relationship with the mysterious Tommy Wiseau. The chapters involving The Room are titled with snippets of Wiseau’s unique dialogue, such as “Leave Your Stupid Comments in Your Pocket” and “People Are Very Strange These Days”. (Excellently, the very first chapter is entitled “Oh hi, Mark!”.) It’s these chapters where most of the book’s humour can be found, but also a lot of the horror, especially regarding the way Wiseau treats his cast and crew. He opens the set to all cast and crew when filming his excruciatingly long sex scene with 21-year-old Juliette Danielle, he forces Carolyn Minnott (Lisa’s mother, Claudette) to work in stifling heat until she collapses, and two entire crews quit on him amidst production. Tommy Wiseau is very much the clueless monster of the tale in these chapters.
It is the other story of the book that serves to humanise Wiseau, and it’s here that Sestero and co-author Tom Bissell’s writing really excels. Sestero never once dismisses or apologises for Wiseau’s more questionable behaviour, and we see through his eyes what a negative effect prolonged exposure to Tommy Wiseau can have on a person. But he had to be friends with Wiseau for a reason, and this reason is clear to see in Sestero’s narrative. He shows us all of Wiseau’s many positive qualities just as frequently as his negative side: hiss motivation to succeed at all costs, his willingness to help Sestero get set up in LA, his utter devotion to his ill-advised craft. Being friends with Tommy Wiseau is probably a nightmare, but we can see why Sestero sticks with it in these flashes of generosity, humour and determination.
One of the best, and simultaneously, the most troubling moments of the book comes when a friend of Sestero’s takes him to see The Talented Mr Ripley. Sestero’s reaction to this film is one of shock and fear. Could he be the Dickie Greenleaf to Wiseau’s Tom Ripley? Is Tommy’s increasing obsession with Greg and his life going to reach the film’s fatal levels? When Sestero later takes Tommy to see the same film, wondering if Tommy will see something of himself, he instead sees his path to Hollywood stardom, to write his own melodrama that will make America “not sleep for two weeks”. He goes so far as to write a role for Sestero, Mark, named after Tom Ripley’s portrayer, “Mark Damon”. Yes, The Talented Mr Ripley is the reason The Room exists. With the many links Sestero makes between the two films, and also Sunset Boulevard, by prefacing chapters with quotes from both, you have one heck of a triple bill.
Sestero and Bissell’s book is a laugh-out-loud comedy of errors on how not to make a movie. It is also a coming of age tale for a young actor struggling to make it, a twisted story of obsession, a heart-warming tale of friendship against impossible odds, the determination of a self-made man, and on some level, a love story. It touches on everything that makes up the output of Hollywood cinema. Essentially, Tommy Wiseau’s story is the story of Hollywood, just not in the way he planned.
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