by Tom Bissell
By now I have seen The Room at least twenty times. I know I will watch it again soon. I am probably watching it right now. “Bad” and “good” are incapable of capturing how I feel about The Room. Sometimes I think about Wiseau’s thespian-berserker charisma. Other times I think, Why football? Why a rooftop? Why a drug dealer? Mostly I think about how everything that captures Wiseau’s directorial interest flies straight into the lessons-learned headwinds generated by a century of filmmaking.
A collaborative medium such as film is structurally designed to thwart people like Tommy Wiseau—and, indeed, during The Room’s production, Wiseau fired the entire crew four times over. Yet anyone with the know-how, perseverance, and fanaticism to not only conceive but write, cast, direct, produce, and distribute a film should be versed in the prevailing aesthetics of his time, if only to reject or subvert them. Wiseau tried to make a conventional film and wound up with something so inexplicable and casually surreal that no practicing surrealist could ever convincingly ape its form, except by exact imitation. It is the movie an alien who has never seen a movie might make after having had movies thoroughly explained to him.
As you watch and rewatch The Room, categories melt away: Is this a drama? comedy? joke? none of them? all of them? Every filmmaking convention across which it stumbles is sundered. Take the convention of the exterior establishing shot. According to the grammar of film, such a shot is used to indicate the passage of time and a spatial relocation to another site within the film’s world. That is not how things work in The Room. At one point, we are at Johnny’s birthday party. Wiseau cuts away to an exterior establishing shot of what appears to be an office building. The viewer assumes—no, believes, given how thoroughly films have trained us—that the next shot will take us inside that office building. The next shot shows us that we are still at the party.
Wiseau understands the placement and required tone of certain conventions but not at all their underlying meaning. What makes him interesting is the degree to which his art becomes a funhouse-mirror version, an inadvertent expose, of a traditional film. He shows, however accidentally, that the devices and conventions we have learned to respond to do not necessarily solve or even do anything. More than any artist I can think of, Wiseau proves Northrop Frye’s belief that all conventions are, at heart, insane. Or, as I overheard someone say as I left Cinema 21, “Maybe this is what originality looks like now.”
What does it say about contemporary American culture that the Rocky Horror Picture Show of our time is not a likeable exercise in leering camp and butt-shaking grooviness but a brain-stabbingly earnest melodrama distinguished by what it is unable to provide? Why are so many people responding to this megalomaniacal feat of formal incompetence? Is it the satisfaction of seeing the auteur myth cruelly exploded, of watching an artist reach for the stars and wind up with his hand around a urinal cake? Some viewers clearly relish this aspect of The Room, but others come away from the film strangely exhilarated. In an entertainment culture in which everything from quiet domestic dramas to battling-robot fantasias is target-audienced with laserlike precision, The Room is as bereft of familiar taxonomy as a bat from Mars. In an entertainment culture in which bad and good movies alike have learned to wink knowingly at their audiences, The Room is rivetingly unaware of itself or its effect. In an entertainment culture in which “independent filmmaking” is more of a calculated stance than accurate accounting of means, The Room is a film of glorious, horrifying independence.
Tommy Wiseau is not, in any sense, an easy interview. I got in touch with him through his website, after which a man named John, the “administrator” of Wiseau Films, requested that I write up all the questions I intended to ask Wiseau during our interview. I emailed back a long and, I hoped, thoughtful email explaining why I did not work that way and why I preferred to meet and simply have a conversation. Unmoved, John, whose bludgeoned English (“Does your peace is for print or/and on line viewing?”) bore a telling resemblance to that of one T. Wiseau, emailed back a request to submit my interview questions beforehand. I made another, equally thoughtful argument as to why I did not want to do that. John responded with another, identical request to submit my interview questions. So I did. A few days later I was apprised of the time and place where Wiseau and I would meet.
Although the address John gave me turned out to be wrong, I managed to find the appointed Beverly Hills delicatessen. Wiseau, riding shotgun and exactly on time, pulled up to the deli in a silver SUV, a THEROOMMOVIE.COM decal on the rear passenger-side window.
His flyaway hair looked as though it had been soaked in printer ink and I had not seen skin so pale outside of Edmonton, Alberta, in February. His lips were nearly colorless, his jaw as large and square as a shovel. He was wearing a heavy green jacket that looked too warm for Los Angeles in September, dun-colored cargo pants with a complicatedly studded belt, and combat boots. The overall effect was that of a vampire who had joined the Merchant Marines. Wiseau took off his jacket once we sat down, revealing a black tank top identical to one Johnny dons briefly in The Room.Wiseau had been in anatomy-model shape at the time of The Room’s filming; he remained so today.
One of my first questions concerned the mysterious John. I asked Wiseau if he was “a young Hollywood-assistant-type.”
“You may say that,” Wiseau said. “He’s doing... freelance. He has limited hours.” He laughed, all but admitting the ruse.
After some initial chitchat, I asked Wiseau if he had any friends he could put me in touch with. Someone, I said, who could help me fill out the personal side of Tommy Wiseau.
“I have dozens of friends,” Wiseau said. “But this is your job. It’s not my job to suggest.”
“But I don’t know your friends.”
“I’m not here to say ‘Talk to this person about me.’ That’s nonsense.”
This was, I told Wiseau, fairly standard procedure.
“I’m against that. You know, this is your... you’re a journalist.”
“But I’m not a private investigator.”
“You don’t need to be a private investigator. You can go to screening, you can talk to many people about The Room, about me, whatever.” He shrugged. “You can go in so many different angles, if you ask me.”
By this Wiseau meant one angle, as he refuses to answer any questions about his personal life. Nevertheless, I made a few anemic lunges. The intensity of the scorn the film heaps upon Lisa—and, it must be said, women in general—has led many to assume that The Room is Wiseau’s revenge upon a former lover. When I asked about this, Wiseau replied with the same answer he had given many journalists—that The Room is a perfect mirror of human experience and that in everyone’s life there are many Lisas and Johnnys and Dennys, etc.—but he did claim that he used to be married and had once lived in San Francisco. That was as deep as he was willing to let me go.
“I speak French,” he said. “I speak, you know, another language, and English, and I understand some other languages.” This “another language” was, no doubt, that of his native country, which I pressed him to reveal. When he refused I began throwing out former Communist bloc states. Romania? Hungary? “Wrong, actually,” he said, laughing once again. He did admit, or seem to admit, that his homeland was “a few countries,” which led me to guess he was from the former Yugoslavia. “I’m an American,” he said, “and I want to be treated as an American. Bottom line.You may say whatever you want. I think we are entitled to our privacy in America.”
America is among Wiseau’s major talking points: “We are Americans,” he toldme, “andwe cherish our freedom.” Americanness is also the central, and centrally unexamined, theme of The Room. Wiseau cast himself within the film as a hunk of Johnny Americana, with no corresponding recognition of how absurdly ill fitting this role actually is. Whenever the film’s Johnny throws a football, you do not see Johnny What you see is the ungainly shot put of an eastern European who did not grow up throwing footballs. This is the most longingly human aspect of The
Room and, not at all coincidentally, the hardest thing to laugh at.9
The two most-asked questions about Wiseau concern his age and the origin of the personal fortune he used to fund The Room. As to the first, his Wikipedia page lists his age as forty-one, though he looks as though he is in his early fifties. “I am thirty-something,” Wiseau told me. As to the source of his money, one uncorroborated story has to do with Wiseau’s vaguely sinister-sounding involvement in some sort of Asian-market clothing-import concern—Chinese jeans, possibly? According to Wiseau, his involvement in imported garments was straightforward and artisanal: ”I used to design jackets, leather jackets, a long time ago. I’ve been designing, selling, whatever.”
Whereas the precise truth about Wiseau’s past is never going to be as interesting as the rumors (my second favorite: Wiseau is an erstwhile Serbian warlord; my favorite: Wiseau is a cyborg from the future), his evasiveness bizarrely extends into the most mundane matters, as when I asked him about whether he had made contact with any of his celebrity fans, which include Paul Rudd, David Wain, Jonah Hill, David Cross, and other members of the Hollywood humorati. Wiseau’s answer: “If I say I met a big director, I’m not dropping any names—I’ve met everybody, for your information—so if I met, let’s say, one of the big directors, who’s from New York, just to give you a clue. He has a business in Santa Barbara. You see, you can assume who is the person, because there’s only one.”
I had no idea who or what he was talking about. But surely, I said, there were actors, directors, or writers he drew particular inspiration from?
“Again,” he said, “I don’t want to drop the names. Because you’ll be blogging about it.” All I eventually wrung from Wiseau was that he admired the work of Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean, and that he had recently seen Twilight and was seeking investors in a vampire film he wanted to shoot in Austin, Texas. At this news, I confess, I restrained myself from writing a check payable to Wiseau-Films then and there.
The critic Robert Hughes once said, “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” I thought about this maxim more when once during my lunch with Wiseau. When he talks about his work, the explanations range from more or less normal (“The Room was done to provoke the audience. That’s the bottom line”) to puzzling (“And you see, in entertainment, we have such a limited presentation. You have comedy, you have drama, you have melodrama, and that’s about it, basically”), to incomprehensible (“You see, black comedy is related to melodrama, leans toward melodrama, but it’s not melodrama. That’s the difference. So it’s realism, if you really think about it. Melodrama is not real”), but they are always Jesuitically certain. I tried, several times, to formulate a humane way of asking Wiseau how he felt to be locked out of all artistic time and space, but he could not answer because he, of course, fails to see it that way. The things I wanted to know about The Room could never be addressed by Wiseau, the Intentional Fallacy made flesh. The Room, as a work of art, must remain a mystery—at least to its creator, who not only views The Room as mainstream entertainment but himself as a potential diamond mine for future mainstream entertainment, constantly letting it be known that he is “open for any projects.”10
Wiseau, who by his own admission is as demanding and finicky as Samuel Beckett, told me in one breath that he is prone to firing anyone who deviates from his vision (“I deal with it in a very simple way. I say, ‘You see the door there? Go through the door and don’t come back”’), and in the next said, “If the studio decided to hire me, for example, I will say, ‘Sure, tell me what to do. I’m ready.’” When I said I imagined he would have a hard time working within traditional studio confinements, Wiseau disagreed. “I can make millions,” he said. This hard-nosed and eccentric control freak is also a craven sellout. The contradictory tension between these selves would surely drive mad anyone who was aware of them. I believe that Wiseau could make a studio film. Or at least I believe that he believes he could, and I am probably not alone among Wiseau’s fans when I say would happily watch anything he commits to film—other than that.
When I asked Wiseau about his fan base, he said, “Talking to the fans is fun. I’m thrilled by it. I really enjoy it.” Hundreds if not thousands of people around the country have worked to get The Room into theaters and promote it on their own time. Did Wiseau have intense feelings of gratitude and connection to those people? “Oh, yeah,” he said, leaning back. “Absolutely” He mulled over this for a moment. “That’s a pretty interesting statement, what you’re saying right now. That’s correct. People want to be involved with promoting The Room, for some reason. For nothing, basically.”
“And that’s weird,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
“It is, but I’m very happy with that.”
As to the discordant matter of negative reviews, Wiseau attributed all such reactions to The Room to “tripping” critics and reporters, none of whom “understand that, by design, any movie has to entertain people.... They think they hurt me because they say something negative. No, they hurt themselves because they’re not true to the audience.” For the first time during our talk, Wiseau became agitated. “This is what I’m furious about,” he said. “The people writing, they don’t know anything about acting. They don’t understand the concept that entertainment is something that you take from yourself and give to people, and let people decide what they want to do. And there’s nothing wrong when people say, ‘Oh, yeah, I don’t like your movie, but I like this little shot.’ Or, ‘Oh, you have a heavy accent.’ But you have people who actually go the extra mile and say, ‘I hate it.”’ He shook his head. “Why do you write about it if you hate something? Why spend so much time? Because you’re not honest with yourself. Because, no, you’re not hating. It’s because I, as a director, opened certain doors for you, and you don’t want to be there. That’s why.”
Wiseau’s contention that his critics do not want to be in the room to which The Room leads is correct, but, in a perfectly Wiseauian move, correct for reasons he does not and probably cannot recognize. We are all of us deeply alarmed by the Wiseauian parts of ourselves, the parts of us that are selfish and controlling, that crave attention at any cost, that imagine ourselves as superlatively gifted, that arrange all sources of light—whether literal or metaphysical—to be flattering. To watch The Room is to see that part of ourselves turned mesmerizingly loose. During lunch, he was heroically without shame as he described his plans to turn The Room into a Broadway show (“It will be musical. People say it’s comedy, but I don’t care what they want to say”), a cartoon (“based on the same characters—however, they will be approached for kids”), and a video game (“You can be Johnny, you can be Lisa, you can do whatever you want to do... like play football, for example”). He then startled me by saying, “My idea has always been that I want ninety percent of Americans to see The Room. That’s the idea I have.”
I looked at him. “Ninety percent?” I asked, if only to make sure he did not say “nine percent.”
“Ninety percent. Absolutely.”
At this I all but laughed in his face. “Good luck.”
“Because ten percent, you see, it’s the kids, and it’s R-rated, and they’re not supposed to see it.”
“You want every adult to see it?”
“I think so, yes. That’s the goal.”
“I don’t think everyone has even seen Snow White.”
“I’m not concerned with other movies. I’m concerned only about The Room at this time. If that’s your analogy, that’s fine with me. But yes, absolutely, we will eventually beat Snow White.”
“Bigger than Snow White!”
He grew preposterously thoughtful. “It’s not a question of bigger. Every American should see The Room.”
“You realize,” I said, “how ridiculous that sounds.”
“No,” he said, “it’s not at all.”
A month after our meeting,
I attended a midnight Halloween screening of The Room in Los Angeles, to which Wiseau showed up in a state of inebriation somewhere between Richard Yates Drunk and Keith Richards Stoned. He delivered an impenetrable speech to the several hundred people waiting in line, attempted to return to the safe confines of the Laemmle’s Sunset 5, found that he had been locked out, made the best of it, threw off his jacket, and proceeded to play football with a few audience members. At one point he launched an impressively long bomb that hit a young woman in the face. (Several of her friends assured her that this was, in its way, an honor.) During the pre-screening Q&A, he seemed particularly angry and defensive about a recent Los Angeles Times profile of him, and lashed out at one audience member who asked him to recite one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which Wiseau has previously been happy to do. He abruptly ended the Q&A when he was asked for his views on health care reform. The whole ordeal was so crushingly sad that during the screening I barely laughed. At one point in the film, Johnny is sitting on the edge of his bed after Lisa has announced her intention to leave him. When Johnny says, in a childlike falsetto, “I haven’t got a friend in the world,” I confess to having felt a pre-lachrymal tickle in the back of my throat.
Whether Tommy Wiseau is evolved or stupid, brave or blind, his work makes me and thousands of others feel catastrophically alive. Whatever he tried to do, he clearly failed, and whatever he succeeded in doing has no obvious name. (Sincere surrealism? Sincerealism?) But The Room’s last remaining ritual of audience participation might be for everyone to imagine seeing one’s most deeply personal attempt at self-expression razed by a hurricane of laughter. Most of us, I think, would fare more poorly than Wiseau. That night in Los Angeles, he was as famous and well loved as he has ever been and nevertheless seemed like an unfortunate cultic animal we had all come together to stab at the stroke of midnight. We were laughing because we were not him, and because we were.