The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  After we finished shooting, I drove around instead of going home. I had been a competent featured extra—nothing more, nothing less—but it was enough to feel like I’d done something real. I’d stood still and looked appropriately grief-hammered and Shadyac got exactly what he’d wanted from me. A few weeks before, I’d been ready to give up. Maybe I wasn’t crazy to need to do this.

  As if in validation of my reborn drive, a bunch of auditions came in at once, including one for Trip Fontaine in The Virgin Suicides, the character Josh Hartnett wound up playing. My audition tape was forwarded on to a Los Angeles casting director, who told my agent she thought I had something she could use down the line. Shortly after this, a San Francisco casting director whom I’d read for a few times brought me in for another part and said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but every time you come in here, you’re getting better. Keep it up.” But nothing happened and nothing kept on happening, and I could only live on the supportive words of a couple of casting directors for so long.

  You know you’re in somewhat dire personal straits when the best news of the month is that France has won the World Cup. On July 13, 1998, two days before my twentieth birthday, I walked into Jean Shelton’s class. I was still buzzing: France had won the World Cup! Why wasn’t anyone else as excited as I was about this?

  It turned out that someone was—my classmate Murad, a young French-speaking Tunisian guy. After class started, I heard Murad say, in a whisper, “La France a gagné.” France won. I had spoken French with Murad a few times and figured he was talking to me. I winched around in my seat but Murad wasn’t speaking to me. He was addressing, or rather trying to address, another guy to his left, who was sitting alone, several seats away. This guy had a rather piratical face and presence, with a sour expression and long, messy black hair. The pirate just stared at Murad. That France had won was evidently of no immediate concern to him. “Yeah, right,” the pirate said finally. “La France a gagné.” Then he looked back at the stage.

  It was such a strange reaction. His accent, at least from what I could hear, didn’t quite sound French, which he obviously knew and spoke. He looked older in everything but his attitude; he sat in his seat like a slouchy teenager in detention. The more closely I studied him, the odder he appeared. He seemed half comic book character, half hair-metal icon. Was this guy French? If so, why was he so indifferent about France’s victory?

  I had no idea how significant this moment would be in my life. This was the first time I saw the man who called himself Tommy Wiseau.

  three

  “Do You Have Some Secrets?”

  Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.

  —Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

  On the first day of The Room’s production it was my job to make sure Tommy got up and to the set on time. This would remain my job for the entirety of filming, during which Tommy was routinely three to four hours late. In my defense, Tommy’s interior clock is more attuned to the circadian frequencies of a bat or possum than a man. He typically goes to bed around six or seven in the morning and gets up at three or four in the afternoon. Yet he was insisting on morning shoots for The Room.

  After quitting my job at French Connection I parked my Lumina in Tommy’s driveway. I walked through his front door, which was ajar, and called his name. No answer. There was a kettle of boiling water on his stove, whistling away. I took the nearly empty kettle off and went upstairs. Tommy’s bedroom door was closed but I heard him make a few grumbly noises, one of which sounded like “Five minutes.” I went back downstairs and sat on his couch, where I found a note from him to me that said: “You will receive majority of candy (95%) when completion of production. I’m not Santa Claus.”

  “Candy” was Tommy’s unusually creepy slang for money. It was typical Tommy behavior to delay revealing an agreement’s fine print until after the handshake.

  After twenty minutes, I went back upstairs and knocked on his door. “Five minutes,” Tommy said again.

  I realized, sitting there on his couch, that there was a pretty significant loophole in Tommy’s payment plan: What if we never completed production?

  Tommy briefly appeared on the staircase, looking disheveled. “We take your car, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “But why?”

  “Because these people talk if they see my car.” He started heading back to his room.

  “We’re late,” I said. “When will you be ready to go?”

  “Five minutes,” he said.

  Soon I was lying down on the couch. Tommy’s plan was kind of ingenious when I thought about it. How better to incentivize my involvement in the film? How else to convince me to wait on his couch for an hour after he told me he’d only be five minutes?

  What was Tommy doing? Primping, getting dressed, getting undressed, reprimping, doing pull-ups, getting dressed, primping again, falling asleep. At one point I marched up the stairs to inform Tommy that he couldn’t be two hours late on the first day of filming his own movie. But before I could give him this blast of tough-love truth, Tommy walked out of his bedroom wearing white surgical gloves stained to the wrist with black hair dye. Tommy had actually decided to redye his hair before heading over to the set. I went back downstairs and started watching Spy Game. Tommy had hundreds of DVDs scattered all over the floor, though I’m not sure he watched many of them. By the time Spy Game was over, Tommy was ready to go. We were four hours late now—and we hadn’t even stopped at 7-Eleven for Tommy’s customary five cans of Red Bull. I think this could be deemed an inauspicious beginning.

  The Room was being filmed on the Highland Avenue lot of Birns & Sawyer, which over the last five decades had become a legendary provider of cameras and equipment to mainstream Hollywood film and television productions. Birns & Sawyer’s owner, Bill Meurer, had made the unusual decision to let Tommy use the company’s parking lot and small studio space because Tommy had made the breathtakingly expensive decision to purchase, rather than rent, all his equipment. This was a million-dollar investment that not even a large Hollywood studio would dare. Camera and filmmaking technology is always improving and anything regarded as cutting-edge will be obsolete within twelve months. Tommy’s purchases included two Panasonic HD cameras, a 35mm film camera, a dozen extremely expensive lenses, and a moving truck full of Arriflex lighting equipment. With one careless gesture Tommy threw a century of prevailing film-production wisdom into the wind.

  Probably the most wasteful and pointless aspect of The Room’s production was Tommy’s decision to simultaneously shoot his movie with both a 35mm film camera and a high-definition (HD) camera. In 2002, an HD and 35mm film camera cost around $250,000 combined; the lenses ran from $20,000 to $40,000 apiece. And, of course, you had to hire an entirely different crew to operate this stuff. Tommy had a mount constructed that was able to accommodate both the 35mm camera and HD camera at the same time, meaning Tommy needed two different crews and two different lighting systems on set at all times. The film veterans on set had no idea why Tommy was doing this. Tommy was doing this because he wanted to be the first filmmaker to ever do so. He never stopped to ask himself why no one else had tried.

  Tommy and his “big Hollywood thing”—the two-camera setup.

  I navigated my loud, coughing Lumina through the parked trucks and construction equipment toward Tommy’s reserved spot, which had been ostentatiously blocked off with large orange cones. Guess who put them there?

  The best description I ever heard of Tommy was that he looks like one of the anonymous, Uzi-lugging goons who appeared for two seconds in a Jean-Claude Van Damme film before getting kicked off a catwalk. That’s what Tommy looked like now, sans Uzi. This particular day, he was wearing tennis shoes, black slacks, a loose and billowy dark blue dress shirt, and sunglasses, his hair secured in a ponytail by his favorite purple scrunchie. As we walked from the car to the set, he was yelling in every direction: “Why are you standing
around like Statue of Liberty? You, do your job! You, move those here! And you film operators, don’t touch anything for HD. Be delicate! We need to hurry! There is no time for waste!” Everyone stared back at him with expressions that said, Are you fucking kidding me? Tommy was ludicrously late for his own shoot and his first leadership step was to hassle the crew? It was not a hot day, but already I was sweating.

  The Room’s crew had been provided by Birns & Sawyer, largely thanks to Bill Meurer and his sales rep, Peter Anway, who realized Tommy was going to need help operating all this expensive equipment that he knew less than nothing about. Meurer and Anway’s ultimate motive was to keep this production afloat for at least thirty days, which was the period Tommy had to return the pricey equipment he’d bought from them. Still, providing Tommy with a crew was an act of legitimate kindness on Meurer’s part. It gave Tommy access to some cinematic veterans, among them Raphael Smadja, a French-born director of photography who’d done a ton of work in reality television. These were savvy and competent professionals, which meant they were completely unprepared for dealing with someone like Tommy.

  Peter Anway’s famous plugged-in grin.

  Peter Anway had worked hard to convince Tommy that the production would need a script supervisor. In terms of emotional coherence and dramatic logic, Tommy’s script may as well have been written in crayon. Tommy wanted to make sure that The Room was legitimate in the eyes of Birns & Sawyer, so Raphael Smadja brought his old friend Sandy Schklair in to meet Tommy.

  Sandy had twenty-five years of experience in film and television, most of it in a script-supervising capacity. With his untucked flowered shirt, Selleck mustache, and hefty glasses, Sandy looked about as non-L.A. as it was possible to look. He was friendly and funny most of the time—though his work on The Room nearly drove him mad. Years later Sandy would claim to have directed the lion’s share of The Room, which is a bit like claiming to have been the Hindenburg’s principal aeronautics engineer.

  “All I need is a pink angora sweater and I’m good”: Sandy Schklair, The Room’s script supervisor.

  Sandy later told me his first thought when he met Tommy was to wonder why his arctic skin didn’t sizzle when it came into contact with direct sunlight. He figured Tommy was probably some spoiled wild child from an oil-rich Bulgarian family who’d been paid by his parents to vacate the motherland and never come back. In their meeting, while Tommy described The Room to Sandy, Raphael—who had already signed on—was standing off to the side, out of Tommy’s line of sight, with his hands pressed prayerfully together, silently begging Sandy to come aboard. To Sandy, Tommy seemed delusional, inexperienced, and rich, so why not?

  Sandy was the only person on set, besides me, who’d been given a complete script of The Room. He’d done considerable work on it, mostly turning its dreadful dialogue (“Promotion! Promotion! That’s all I hear about. Here is your coffee and English muffin and burn your mouth.”) into linguistic units human beings could exchange. Beyond that, Sandy couldn’t do more without rewriting everything from scratch, which Tommy would not tolerate and which Sandy had no stomach for. Sandy saw the script for what it was: unintelligible and shot to the core with a curiously unexamined homoeroticism. But a job was a job.

  One of the first things Tommy did after arriving on set was check in with Raphael, who was clearly puzzled as to why Tommy was so late. His wan smile was balanced atop his little silver soul patch. Raphael was standoffish, the opposite of the gregarious, talkative Sandy. He seemed to take the fact that he was working on something as low grade as The Room personally. But he softened to me considerably when he found out I spoke French, and became more open as production wore on.

  Once it was established that Raphael was eager to get going, Tommy checked in with The Room’s costume designer, Safowa Bright, another decent and conscientious on-set presence. Tommy had given her a minuscule budget and so she spent much of her time despairingly combing through L.A. thrift stores to piece together outfits. The result was a “Wardrobe” unit consisting of a single homeless-shelter rack of clothing and a few plastic laundry tubs. Safowa also had to deal with Tommy’s eccentric design whims. Unsurprisingly, many of The Room’s costumes would turn out to be baffling at best and catastrophic at worst.

  Tommy’s final stop was to see Amy Von Brock, The Room’s makeup artist, who’d been assigned a dusty, pathetic station to the immediate right of the stage door. Amy had no place for a mirror or a table on which to set her many brushes. After seeing Catering’s table, monopolized by Tommy’s hot-water keg, she was already deeply frustrated, when Tommy plunked himself down in her chair, demanding that none of his “nest” show. I had to translate that: In Tommyese, nest means scalp, though I couldn’t begin to tell you why. While Tommy’s nest was being covered up, he told Amy that he wanted every actor’s moles to be concealed, too. Amy looked at me. I shrugged. This experience was not going to be easy on her.

  I hadn’t seen The Room’s interior sets in anything resembling finished shape, so I headed over to Birns & Sawyer’s small studio space to have a look. Several crew members—who, as a favor to Anway, were working below their normal rates under the assumption that the film was low budget—were staring daggers into the $6,000 private bathroom Tommy had constructed for himself near the back of the stage. This bathroom had everything: separate plumbing, extrasoft toilet paper, a vanity mirror, a sink. One thing it didn’t have: a door. Instead it had a little blue curtain for a partition.

  This was weird for so many reasons. For one, Birns & Sawyer had a clean, roomy bathroom facility eighty feet away from Tommy’s little toilet ego shrine. For another, was he really going to void his bowels in the middle of the studio, separated from the people with whom he was working only by a flimsy curtain?

  One of the crew hissed, “What is a private bathroom doing in here?”

  “This guy had enough money to build his own bathroom? Why doesn’t he just use the normal bathroom, like everyone else?”

  “That’s fucking ridiculous. With what we’re being paid? That. Is. Fucking. Ridiculous.”

  “I am totally shitting in that thing every time he’s not looking.”

  The studio door opened behind us. “Greg!” Tommy shouted from the doorway. “Greg, I need you here. We do rehearsal!” Some crew members had stuck around and were staring at Tommy with openly mutinous expressions. “Don’t talk to Greg,” Tommy said to them. “Leave him alone. I talk to Greg.”

  Tommy dragged me outside, where he spotted the man operating the 35mm camera. He proceeded to give him the secret lowdown as to how he wanted to film Don and me today. In the ten seconds Tommy spoke to him, the camera operator’s face underwent at least five distinct changes of expression: puzzlement, dismay, shock, incredulousness, and finally bleak acceptance.

  I hated myself for having any part in this. I knew if I did the right thing and walked away from being Mark, it also meant walking away from a life-changing amount of money—and at the time I didn’t believe enough in myself to feel I could have earned that amount another way. I felt my weaknesses were being exploited—and I was letting it happen. Maybe that’s why I was dispirited: Tommy had made me realize that I had a price. I knew what Tommy was doing to Don was duplicitous and even cruel. But now I was struck afresh by how incredibly wasteful an idea this was. Tommy was wasting the cameramen’s time, and obviously Don’s time, but also the lighting people’s time, and the sound guy’s time, and the makeup person’s time, and the costume designer’s time—all because he didn’t want to engage Don directly. It was strange: Tommy normally thrived within the black light of confrontation.

  The actors were all waiting around for Tommy to start doing something. It was, after all, hours past their call time. Tommy was insistent that the entire cast, even those who weren’t shooting that day, be on set, all day, every day of filming. He loved to spontaneously include actors in scenes they were not originally written into. If you were an actor on The Room, every day was a surprise.

&nb
sp; “Everyone,” Tommy said, waving his arms, “now please listen. I need crew here, too.” With everyone gathered around, I looked at the actors with whom I’d grown so familiar over the last few months: Scott Holmes (who was playing Mike—and who was eventually credited as “Mike Holmes” because Tommy forgot his real name), Philip Haldiman (Denny), Juliette Danielle (Lisa), Carolyn Minnott (Lisa’s mother, Claudette), Brianna Tate (Lisa’s friend Michelle), Dan Janjigian (the uniquely named Chris-R), and Don himself, who already looked suspicious. Everyone seemed wiped out. Months of Tommy’s drama, loony rehearsals, vicious arguments, and a blowout between Tommy and the cast just days before had left us all on edge.

  “So,” he said, “Greg is here, as you know. And I have news that we want to see him—producers want to see Greg—for future project. So he’s going to do couple scenes today on film with you guys. Producers want him on the film, okay. That’s what they say”—he shrugged—“so we need to organize cameras, et cetera, et cetera.”

  The cast tried to wrap their minds around this odd announcement. “Who’s he playing?” Brianna asked.

  Tommy answered: “He’s going to be playing the Mark for rehearsal process. The producers want to see him as the Mark.”

  Don turned to Brianna—no one was aware then that they’d been secretly dating—and exchanged a pregnant look with her. Then Don’s eyes found mine. I shrugged at him.

  Tommy dismissed us with the promise that rehearsals would begin in twenty minutes. I tried to go find someplace inside the Birns & Sawyer studio to hide but Don caught up to me. “Hey,” he said, his head atilt.

  I smiled at him with as much genuine, non-back-stabby warmth as I could muster.