The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  “Weren’t you . . . weren’t you going out for a soap or something?” A week or so before I’d had to take off during rehearsal to audition for The Young and the Restless, a part I didn’t land. I’d only told Brianna about it, but word had obviously wended its way back to Don.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Don’s eyes filled with jumpy, piqued alertness. “So did you get it?”

  “Uh, yeah.” I still don’t know why I said yes. I think Don’s manic newfound interest in my career was freaking me out a little.

  “Hey!” Now Don was smiling. “That’s great. Congratulations.” He looked back at Tommy for a moment, as though having finally made sense of the situation. “So,” he said, assertively, “you’re auditioning for some other thing for the producers? Or does this have anything to do with the soap?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s something different.” This was getting ridiculous. For all Don knew, I was an intern. Yet here I was, appearing to be effortlessly moving ahead in his field while he was stuck trying to get tape in The Room.

  “What’s your character’s name?” Don asked suddenly.

  I hesitated. “In the soap?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tristan.”

  “Well,” Don said, drifting away from me now, “it sounds exciting. Good luck!”

  Brianna, too, tracked me down to extend her congratulations, a thin cover for wanting to know what the hell was really going on. Brianna had not had a good experience with Tommy to date. A week before, in what turned out to be a disastrously intemperate cast meeting in the Birns & Sawyer office, Brianna had asked why Tommy was always hours late and why, since it was so hot, did he not have water available for them to drink? Tommy erupted, yelling, “Nobody in Hollywood will give you water!” before chucking a plastic water bottle at Brianna’s head. Brianna and the rest of the cast walked out and almost quit the film entirely. I didn’t blame them.

  Brianna—an actress even if a camera wasn’t pointing at her—looked like the sort of pretty blond earth-child who should have small colorful birds floating about her head and chipmunks sitting contentedly on her shoulders. She had asked me, several times, why I wasn’t in The Room. Now she was saying, “I told you, Greg! I told you you should have been in front of the camera instead of interning!”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s probably going to turn out to be nothing, though.”

  “Producers,” she said, turning the word into an implicit accusation.

  • • •

  The first scene we shot for The Room was on the remarkably fake “alley” set that Tommy had built in the studio space. Tommy’s rationale for choosing not to film in the real alley that was literally right outside Birns & Sawyer’s door? “Because we do first-class production. No Mickey Mouse stuff!”

  The alley scene’s major players were Johnny, Chris-R, Mark, and Denny, whom Sandy referred to as “the weirdest character I’ve ever encountered in twenty-five years of filmmaking.” During the making of The Room, Tommy demanded that Philip Haldiman, who was playing Denny, enter some scenes singing his lines, asked him to “cry hysterically” while Juliette yelled, “What kind of drugs?” and made him lingeringly eat an apple early in the film because, Tommy explained, this was “very sexual symbol.” Given the nature of the character Philip Haldiman was asked to play—a man-child Peeping Tom neighbor who has no purpose in the story other than to ambiguously propose a threesome and be saved from a drug dealer—he did about as well as any young actor could have.

  Philip was twenty-six at the time—older than I, Scott, Brianna, or Juliette—but Tommy still cast him as the youngest character in the film. Tommy wasn’t clear in the script about Denny’s age (or anything else), but we all assumed Tommy wanted Denny to be between fifteen and eighteen. Philip looked young, but not that young, which makes every scene he’s in that much more uncomfortable. In an attempt to make Philip appear more youthful, Safowa had fit him in a tunic-length Charlie Brown–goes–to–prep school rugby shirt. I felt for Philip. Everyone did.

  Philip Haldiman, freed from the Charlie Brown shirt, with a friend at The Room’s premiere.

  Don, meanwhile, was warming up a few feet away from me. His spiky dirty-blond hair appeared to have been newly highlighted. He was wearing slacks and an off-white Abercrombie & Fitch collared shirt, which had been generously unbuttoned. Tommy was ready to go now, too, having changed into black Nike cross trainers and dress pants. He walked past Don and said, “Don’t try to be Brando today because you will hurt yourself.”

  Dan Janjigian was playing Chris-R, The Room’s resident drug dealer. Despite having only ninety seconds of screen time, and having been cast as a complete fluke, he turned in what is commonly regarded as the single best performance in The Room.

  Tommy had had a lot of trouble casting the part of Chris-R, probably because he chose to greet most of the guys auditioning for the part by jumping them when they walked through the door. At one point, Tommy wanted to have Scott Holmes (who’d been cast as Mike) also play Chris-R. Scott was supposed to pull this off by wearing what Tommy described as a “disguise”—a black Indiana Jones–style hat and horn-rimmed glasses—on the assumption that the audience wouldn’t notice. Scott was no pushover physically, but in terms of attitude and aura he was about as menacing as an Ewok. When Don learned of Tommy’s trouble finding a good Chris-R, he suggested that Tommy meet his stacked six-three roommate, Dan, who cut a nicely intimidating figure.

  Prior to The Room, Dan was busy doing things like competing in the 2002 Olympics on the Armenian bobsledding team, working as a motivational speaker in Los Angeles’s Armenian community, and starting successful Internet companies. Dan’s audition for Tommy was his first audition ever. Not one to phone anything in, he read up on Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen beforehand, on the mistaken assumption that Tommy knew something useful about either.

  On the first day of filming, Dan arrived on set in character and stayed in character. Trained or not, the guy had become a Hellfire missile of method. In his tight black tank top and even tighter black beanie, he was at times so frighteningly locked into Chris-R that no one dared talk to him. Between rehearsals, Dan would stalk back and forth along the set’s edge, muttering and swearing, keeping himself angry.

  Dan had some questions about Chris-R. We all did. Why the name “Chris-R,” for instance? What’s with that hyphen? Tommy’s explanation: “He is gangster.” What about this drug business, which never comes up either before or after Chris-R’s only scene in the film? “We have big problem in society with the drugs. Chris-R is gangster and Denny takes drugs. So he must be rescued.”

  The original Chris-R scene opens with Denny playing basketball in an alley. Chris-R suddenly joins Denny and demands, “Where’s my fucking money?” Apparently, Denny has bought drugs from Chris-R, which makes Chris-R’s demand for money a little odd, in that drug dealers pretty much require up-front payment. Eventually, Chris-R pulls a gun on Denny, after which Johnny and Mark rush into the scene to disarm him.

  Soon enough Don was being “filmed” running into the scene with Tommy to disarm Dan. They did several takes. “A lot of emotion!” Tommy kept saying. Zsolt, the Hungarian sound guy, was immersed in his sound equipment instruction manual and thus still unable to get the sound to synch. Raphael chimed in to say how strange it was that a guy the size of Chris-R, who’s holding a gun to someone’s head and is presumably prepared to fire it, could be jumped on and disarmed so easily. Tommy told Raphael not to worry, that when they got “more emotion” into the scene, it would all make sense.

  Then it was my turn. “Be aggressive!” Tommy told me. “Really go to edge of your moment. This is drama! Show these people what you can do. Very powerful.”

  We rehearsed the scene a few times before Tommy announced he was ready to begin filming me. If anyone found it odd that the first thing The Room’s mysterious producers wanted to see me do was rush into a scene in which I had no lines, they kept it to themselves.

 
In between shots, Tommy noticed that Don had walked away to get a drink of water. This was a mistake: Brianna had already established that water was an issue guaranteed to make Tommy go berserk. When Don sidled back up to the edge of the stage, Tommy stopped the scene that was under way and pointed at him. “You stay here while we shoot! Okay? You do not leave set, I tell you right now. Follow instruction! Do you understand?”

  At first Don laughed, unable to believe that stepping away from a scene he’d already shot to get a cup of water could possibly be an issue. When Don realized Tommy was serious, his face bunched up. “What’s your problem, Tommy? I just stepped out to get water.”

  “No,” Tommy said, “you stay here! You leaving is fucking up our set.” Suddenly I realized that Tommy was creating a pretext to fire Don.

  The alley scene finally wrapped. Sadly, none of its particular magic ever made it into the film; Tommy had the entire Chris-R scene reshot on another set a week later. The dreadfully unconvincing indoor alley set turns up in the finished film only once, during a scene in which Mike tells Johnny a long story involving wayward underwear.

  I’m not sure when word got out on set that film hadn’t been rolling on Don, but it did, and now several people were whispering about it. As everyone regrouped to shoot the next scene, I became increasingly worried about what would happen when Don found out. Tommy, sensing my discomfort, took me aside and said, “Don’t worry about him. If he attacks you, I will protect you.” Very reassuring.

  Tommy chose to shoot next on the Rooftop set. Now, the logical thing to do would have been to shoot another of several planned alley scenes because everything was already set up there, and the Rooftop wasn’t even completed. But Tommy went with his gut—his weird, inscrutable, unpredictable gut—and so the relevant crew members hurried to put their finishing touches on what has become The Room’s most famously incompetent cinematic element, deserving of its capital R.

  To begin, the Rooftop wasn’t a rooftop but rather three separate Styrofoam walls backed with cheap plywood, all of which had been hastily set up in the Birns & Sawyer parking lot. When shooting Rooftop scenes from alternate angles, the crew moved the three walls to create the illusion of four. (Unfortunately, they often failed to align these pieces, as you can see in the finished film.) Tommy had also determined that a convincing approximation of a fancy San Francisco condominium’s rooftop access point would be a sheet metal shed. When this shed was included in Rooftop shots, the two Styrofoam walls were pulled apart and the shed was pushed into the gap: movie magic at its finest.

  Behind the Rooftop was Tommy’s coup de grâce: a green screen wall. Tommy had decided to add the San Francisco skyline to every Rooftop scene via postproduction digital trickery. As everyone who’s seen the film now knows, this compositing process was not successful. Half the time the Mediterranean San Francisco skyline more closely resembles that of Istanbul; at other times, it looks as though the Rooftop is carrying its inhabitants through space and time itself.

  The Rooftop scene Tommy now wanted to shoot involved two characters: Peter, Johnny’s psychiatrist friend, and Mark. Mark has headed up to the Rooftop to evade his problems and smoke a joint when Peter arrives to confront him about his affair with Lisa, Johnny’s future wife. Mark responds to Peter’s accusation with an uncharacteristically abrupt burst of anger and tries to throw Peter off the roof. Then Mark immediately apologizes to Peter for trying to kill him, and Peter lets it slide. It’s probably the most swiftly forgiven attempted murder in the history of film.

  Safowa scrambled to throw together our costumes, presenting me with an all-denim getup complete with cowboy boots that made me look like a rejected concept drawing of the Marlboro Man. By now I noticed that Don was watching Tommy closely. Tommy still hadn’t requested new wardrobe for him for the Rooftop scene, which must have seemed suspicious.

  When the cameras started rolling, Tommy kept interrupting the scene. As per the original script, Tommy wanted Mark to knock Peter out and then wake him up by dumping a bucket of water on him. Kyle Vogt, who was playing Peter, sensibly pointed out he had only one suit. “Yeah,” Sandy said, unable to believe Tommy was seriously proposing this. “Once Kyle’s suit is wet, we can’t shoot again until it’s dry.” Tommy ran his hands through his hair, as though whether or not to dump a pail of water over Peter’s head was the most agonizing decision imaginable.

  We tried the scene again, but Tommy remained unhappy. “There’s no chemistry! Voice need to go up! Okay? Come on, Greg!” I have never been so aware of someone’s eyes on me as I was of Don’s at that moment. This was obviously way beyond anything some producer wanted to see.

  Tommy was also mad because he thought I’d changed a line in the script. In the scene, Mark is supposed to ask Peter, “Why do you want to know my secret?” Tommy thought the line was: “Do you have some secrets?” But it wasn’t. That’s something Johnny says to Mark earlier in the film. Tommy didn’t know his own script. By this point, Tommy was getting looks from just about everyone, especially Don. To deflect his embarrassment, Tommy yelled “More emotion!” and kicked a pail of water that turned over and splashed up near his $250,000 worth of cameras.

  Sandy put his arms on Tommy’s shoulders and guided him away, saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We can’t have any of that near the cameras.”

  Tommy was not hearing this. “It’s boring!” he said. “No emotion!” Then he called me over to where he and Sandy were standing, put his arm on my shoulder, and said, quietly, “I know what you want to do.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Just do it,” he said. “Don’t be scared. Throw this stupid chair like your spy movie.”

  It occurred to me that Tommy was referring to Spy Game, which I’d watched that morning. In particular, he was referencing the scene in which Brad Pitt, while arguing with Robert Redford, throws a chair off a roof. Tommy, it turned out, had watched a good chunk of Spy Game from the stairs behind me. No wonder he was so late. “If you want to break chair or something,” Tommy said, “break chair! I don’t care.”

  In my next take, I kicked over a prop table and threw in an authentically frustrated “fuck,” all to appease Tommy and bring this painful, awkward scene to an end—not only for me but also for Don. When Tommy watched the playback he decided that my ad-libbed “fuck” was his favorite take. He couldn’t stop talking about how much he liked that take. It was now evident to anyone paying attention that I was being filmed for something more than a screen test. I looked over at Don and saw him talking with Brianna and Juliette. Brianna was animatedly throwing her hands around. Don was shaking his head. Juliette’s hands were clasped over her mouth. Tommy’s scheme was over. Don knew.

  four

  Tommy’s Planet

  He has so many realities—and he believes them all.

  —Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley

  David and Donna were scene partners in Jean Shelton’s class, and also extremely nice people, but they were in growing danger of raising Samuel Beckett from the dead and compelling him to stomp through San Francisco like Godzilla. I was sitting two rows back from Shelton, who was pinching the bridge of her nose and looking into her lap. When David and Donna came to the end of their scene from Waiting for Godot, Shelton was silent, as was everyone else. David and Donna stood on the stage like prey animals waiting to see which one of them would be eaten first.

  Jean Shelton looked a little bit like Yoda’s mother: short, glasses, frizzy white hair. Yet she seemed to us, her students, more like Darth Vader. When you got up onstage in front of her, you were pulled between feelings of terror and exhilaration. She was the best kind of teacher, in that you didn’t care if she liked you personally; you just wanted her to respect you professionally.

  Shelton’s class was held in a basement studio space on Sutter Street, off San Francisco’s Union Square. But for the stage, the room was kept very dark, though you could always see Shelton, thanks to the way the light illuminated her halo of whit
e hair. When you were awaiting her judgment, as David and Donna were now, you dreaded the first few words from her mouth. Her accent was very mid-Atlantic: soft, round consonants and fierce vowels. That big, commanding voice of hers filled the room, cutting through the darkness.

  “Awful,” Shelton said to David and Donna. “That was just . . . I’d tell you to try it again but I doubt you’ll do any better.” She waited for David or Donna to speak. They didn’t. They couldn’t even look at each other. “Poor selection of material, as well. I saw nothing good. Nothing useful.” She paused. “I’m sorry.”

  That was another thing about Shelton. You never felt as though she enjoyed being negative. She always seemed to genuinely want you to be great. As David and Donna climbed from the stage and collapsed into front-row seats, Shelton looked around. “Does anyone want to do anything? We still have some time. The stage is open.” The seats in the theater were old, so their creaking served as a good indicator as to how restless the class was feeling. On this evening, the chairs were creaking like crazy: Everyone was ready to leave.

  To my—and, I’m sure, everyone else’s—astonishment, someone stood in the back row. It was the pirate from the previous week. Today he was wearing black pants, an ostentatiously studded belt, and a gleamingly pearlescent button-down shirt. He had a slightly hunchbacked posture, and when he walked his arms barely moved. He was also taking his sweet time getting to the stage. He went backstage and slowly picked around before returning with a foldout chair, which he snapped open and slammed down onstage, so that its back was facing the audience. He straddled the chair, legs spread wide, and pushed his long dark hair from his face. It suddenly seemed possible this guy was actually sort of great. No one who wasn’t great could afford to conduct himself like this.

  Shelton asked him, “And what are you doing for us, Thomas?”

  “No, not Thomas. It’s Tommy.”