by Greg Sestero
In the original draft of the Room script, the stage direction reads: “JOHNNY OPENS THE DOOR TO THE ROOF ACCESS. MARK IS SITTING THERE.” Tommy had decided this wasn’t dramatic or emotional enough, especially now that he’d rewritten his script to include scenes in which Lisa claims to others that Johnny has abused her. To establish that Johnny is incapable of abuse, Tommy concocted a new opening for this scene, in which Johnny steps onto the Rooftop saying, “It’s not true! I did not hit her! It’s bullshit! I did not.” After which comes this: “Oh, hi, Mark.” There are seventeen words in this sequence. Eleven of them are nonrecurring; only one carries the burden of a second syllable. In other words, these are not terribly difficult lines to learn.
Sandy had blocked the scene so that Tommy would emerge from the outhouse; hit his mark on the second “I did not”; look up; nail his eyeline; say, “Oh, hi, Mark”; and walk off camera to where we, the audience, imagine Mark to be sitting. Most school plays contain scenes that pose bigger technical acting challenges.
Tommy couldn’t remember his lines. He couldn’t hit his mark. He couldn’t say “Mark.” He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t find his eyeline. He would emerge from the outhouse mumbling, lost, and disoriented. He looked directly into the camera. He swore. He exploded at a crew member for farting: “Please don’t do this ridiculous stuff. It’s disgusting like hell.” Sandy stood there so openmouthed that it looked as if he were waiting for someone to lob something nutritive at him.
Finally Tommy commanded me to sit off camera, hoping that my becoming his living eye line would help him. It didn’t. Everything became infectiously not-funny funny. People were turning away from the set, their faces constipated with laughter they dared not release. Tommy didn’t notice any of this. He was locked into a scene and a moment he couldn’t bring to life. It was as horrifyingly transfixing as watching a baby crawl across the 405 freeway. We were all waiting for a miracle.
It took Tommy thirty minutes to feel comfortable enough to walk down the outhouse’s two steps without staring at his feet. It took another thirty minutes for him to take those two steps while also remembering his lines. With time, and effort, he got the walking-talking aspect of the performance down, but doing all this while hitting his mark and looking at me remained a grand fantasy. Sandy kept saying, “Now you need to look up when you say hi to Mark.” Tommy would nod. Yes. Indeed. Exactly what he needed to do. He would try, and try again.
Tommy/Johnny: “I did not.”
Sandy: “Look up!”
Tommy/Johnny: “Oh, hi, Mark.”
Sandy: “Up! Up!”
Sandy stopped everything and took Tommy aside. He tried to reason with him, as though Tommy’s understanding and not Tommy’s ability were the real problem. “You have to look at Mark when you say the line, okay? Because right now you’re looking down.”
“Okay,” Tommy said.
He’d rehearsed this moment for half the day and this was the result. Soon the cameraman was laughing so hard that his camera started to shake during takes.
Sandy decided to watch some VHS playbacks, to see if there was anything—anything at all—usable. I was still sitting off camera, feeling as though I’d been dosed with something potent. Tommy came over to me, looking worried. “How am I doing?” he asked. “Give me the feedback. Something.”
It was a genuine request. I felt sorry for him at that moment. I knew how hard he was trying. I also knew that being a dramatic actor was the most important thing to Tommy. Everything he’d done in life was to get to this point. How could I help him? I had no idea.
“You’re doing great,” I said.
But the obvious peril Tommy was in—that the whole production was now in—had broken through his vanity. For once Tommy wanted something more than chummy assurance. “How,” Tommy asked again, more insistently, “am I doing? Don’t pull my legs!”
I looked around, thinking, Props, because props always helped Tommy; they took his mind off trying to act. I saw a nearby water bottle and grabbed it. “Here,” I said, handing the bottle to Tommy. “Use this. You know what you’re supposed to do, right? So do it. What do you always tell me? Show some emotion.”
Tommy smiled in pure, holy relief. “Why didn’t you tell me emotion? My God! That’s easy part! Now you see why I need you here? These other people don’t care.” He immediately started peeling off the water bottle’s sticker, because nothing scared Tommy more than having to pay someone for permission to use a logo. Tommy is probably the world’s single most copyright-obsessed human being who does not also have a law degree.
Sandy joined us on the side of the Rooftop set. He looked for a long time at Tommy’s water bottle before speaking. “What’s this?”
“Water bottle,” Tommy said.
Sandy took in a lungful of deep, calming breath. “Yes,” he said. “I know. What are we doing with it?”
“I need to throw something, dammit. During scene.”
Sandy turned away, removed his glasses, sat down, and rubbed his eyes.
Tommy headed back to the outhouse, his water bottle in hand and his script hidden in his breast pocket. I sat down. Sandy stood by the monitor. “Action!” The door flew open and there was Tommy holding his water bottle and stepping out of the outhouse and hitting his head on the doorjamb so hard that it took twenty minutes to ice the bump and conceal it with makeup. I heard one of the cameramen say, desperately, “How are we ever going to get this? It’s impossible. We’ll be here forever.”
Then, just for comic relief, Don and Brianna arrived on set to pick up their checks. Tommy, sitting in the makeup chair while Amy iced his forehead down, ignored them at first. Brianna talked to Juliette as Don ginned up the courage to approach Tommy. Their brief, chilly exchange ended with Tommy signing two $1,500 checks. Don, I could tell, was a little relieved not to be doing The Room. Really, he was surprisingly decent about the whole thing, even telling me that someday we’d be able to laugh about this. Tommy had deigned to acknowledge Don, but he wouldn’t, for whatever reason, talk to or even look at Brianna.
I gave Brianna her check. “Look at him,” she said, holding it as though about to rip it in half. Tommy was still sitting in makeup, pressing an ice pack to his forehead. “He won’t even acknowledge me. He’s such a pussy.”
Tommy noticed me idling too long with Brianna and called me over. “Greg! I need you here!” He wanted to continue running his lines. It was hopeless. He still couldn’t remember them—and now, to make things worse, it was possible he had a concussion.
Sandy and I huddled together and came up with a handy formula for Tommy to remember. When I returned to Tommy I said this: “Okay, so here’s what you do: ‘I did not,’ mad, mad, mad, throw the water bottle, stop, notice me, look up.” Tommy asked that I repeat the formula. Several times. “Show me once more,” Tommy said. By now his bruise had been buried beneath a beige snowdrift of concealer. He was, finally, ready. He took a breath, returned to the outhouse, and did the scene. At long last we got the shot. It took three hours and thirty-two takes, but we got the shot.
If you can, I implore you to watch this scene. It’s seven seconds long. Three hours. Thirty-two takes. And it was only the second day of filming.
The sound guy, Zsolt, can’t take any more.
• • •
The next day, Tommy came to the set with some ambitious ideas for camera angles. He wanted to begin by filming the scene in which Johnny and Denny talk on the Rooftop and have the camera do some fast “spinning” motions, or maybe do some bird’s-eye shots from a crane. His other demands: “Where is football? Art director? We need football! Greg? I need script! I’m missing page forty-nine. Lighting department? We need more lights! The more lights the better.” To make things even more exciting, Tommy decided he wanted to film his and Philip’s scene while tossing a football back and forth, which is a more complicated thing to stage than it sounds.
Tommy, in short, was driving the crew bananas. Raphael was particularly flabbergasted an
d began taking long walks around the set, tapping his left foot, and sometimes calling out, “Can we do a scene, please?” Tommy, meanwhile, fretted over minute details with Sandy, such as which direction a thrown football would rotate. These Tommy v. Sandy discussions occasionally became a little surreal. During Tommy’s scene with Philip, Sandy suggested they get a fan to create the illusion of a windy rooftop. Tommy said that wasn’t necessary, because it wasn’t too hot out. Sandy said, “I’m not trying to cool you down. I’m trying to make the scene feel real.” Tommy laughed and said, “Are you tripping me? A fan? That’s a good one.”
During the scene, Denny confesses to Johnny that he thinks he might be in love with Johnny’s future wife, Lisa. Johnny says this is okay, because if everyone in the world loved each other, the world would be a better place. Raphael, who had never seen a full script, watched with a look of disbelief as Tommy recited these lines. Sandy’s hand was plastered to his forehead, as though he were trying to keep the weirdness from penetrating his mind.
While Tommy was shooting the Johnny/Denny Rooftop scene, the art department was busy dismantling the indoor alley set where Denny’s confrontation with Chris-R had been filmed. They planned to begin assembly on Johnny and Lisa’s living room set as soon as they were finished. When Tommy discovered what the art department was doing, he went crazy. It turned out Tommy wasn’t finished with the alley set; there was another scene he wanted to shoot on it.
Sandy couldn’t believe this. Most productions film on a given set until they’ve completed that set’s allotted scenes. When you change sets, you send a clear signal that you’re moving on. The scene Tommy still wanted to shoot in the alley was probably the least important one in the entire script. It opens with Johnny and Mike running into each other in the alley, after which Mike explains to Johnny how he broke into Johnny’s apartment to have sex, forgot his underwear, and was yelled at by Johnny’s future mother-in-law. Johnny’s response: “That’s life.”
The head of the art department was a woman named Merce. She eventually agreed to rebuild the alley but only once Tommy promised to pay her for doing the same job twice. It took twenty-two hours to dismantle the alley set and another twenty hours to put it back up. Once finished, Merce gave Tommy her receipts. One item leaped out at him: “Two hundred dollars for nails?”
“Yes, Tommy,” she said, evenly. “That’s what they cost.”
Tommy handed her back the receipts. “I’ve done construction before, my dear. I’ve built steel building with my two hands. You must be kidding me.” Merce wound up having to eat most of the nail expenditure.
As the alley set was being reassembled, many of the cast and crew begged Sandy to talk Tommy out of shooting the scene. Leading the call was Scott Holmes, who played Mike. Scott was saddled with having to say many of the scene’s most preposterous lines (“I’ve got to go see Michelle in a little bit to make out with her”) and collapse in pain at the end of the scene for no reason. The original script says only that “Mike has a sudden fall” into some trash cans and “hurts his leg,” but the script was curiously silent as to what provokes this sudden fall. Now Tommy wanted to make the scene about (what else?) football. Mark injures Mike by roughly and unexpectedly handing him the ball. This causes Mike to collapse and Johnny to suggest a visit to the hospital. How you get from an unanticipated football hand-off to potential hospitalization, I have no idea.
Scott and I more or less settled on how I was going to injure him with the football, but by the time we were ready to shoot the scene, Tommy was gone. He’d rushed off to work out, since he decided he’d be wearing his tank top in the scene. He returned thirty minutes later, slightly out of breath, and smelling not unlike an onion that had been stored inside a man’s shoe.
We shot the scene. Everything in The Room is bad, but there’s often an integrity about it. This alley scene has a different character. It feels like a bunch of clueless film students got together with some jerk-off improv group and decided to make 5 percent of a movie together.
Tommy watched the footage of the scene with his headphones on. He was staring so intently at the monitor that some of us became certain that Tommy saw this scene, at last, as the pointless disaster it undeniably was. Sandy tried to comfort Tommy. “It’s okay,” he said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Forget this scene. Nothing happens in it anyway. Save your money. Let’s move on and film the living room stuff.”
Tommy looked back at Sandy in shock. “No,” he said, smiling. “This is good, fun scene. We have good chemistry. And look at this.” He directed Sandy’s attention to the monitor. “You see that? I look strong, like little eighteen-years-old kid.” That’s when I realized why the scene meant so much to him: In that monitor, at least, Tommy was young and had a fun life and many, many friends.
six
Too Young to Die
You’re the brother I never had. I’m the brother you never had.
—Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Making my way to the stage in the lower basement of Jean Shelton’s theater was always a little disquieting. The lights were blinding, and I was always aware of Shelton’s small, penetrating eyes on me. So you can probably imagine the degree to which my anxiety was intensified when I was about to go onstage with Tommy for the first time.
Three exchanges into Tommy’s and my scene, I blew a line. To fill in the resulting silence—Tommy had absolutely no hope of remembering his lines if his scene partner screwed up—I instigated a fake onstage fight, trying, I guess, to out-Tommy Tommy. I fake-kicked Tommy: he fake-collapsed and writhed in fake pain. “Okay, you two,” Shelton said. “We can calm down now.” We got up and tried to continue with the scene, but Tommy was so “completely shocked,” as he would later say, by my theatrics that he spent the rest of our time onstage making up new, uniquely useless lines.
The class loved it. Shelton didn’t. When we were done, she yelled at us both, which was every bit the bowel-loosening experience I’d feared it would be.
When we sat down, Tommy whispered to me, “You are completely off the wall.” Which is when I had to accept the shocking truth: I had embarrassed Tommy. For the rest of the night Tommy barely looked at me. When class let out, he demanded I buy him “apology chocolates” from the nearest See’s merchant. “Get me the mint,” he said.
Still, what I appreciated about Tommy early on was how willing he was to go, no questions asked, on whatever strange crusade I was thinking about. I’d finished reading the James Dean biography I’d borrowed from Tommy and had become newly fascinated by Dean’s sad, crooked journey into legend. I had the idea to take a pilgrimage south and find the exact spot of Dean’s fatal car accident near the tiny town of Cholame, California. Most people would have found this a morbid, long, boring road trip, but the moment I brought it up with Tommy, he said, “Sure. Why not? Sounds like adventure.”
We took his car. I drove. Tommy reclined his seat, covered his face and neck with a T-shirt, and promptly fell asleep. I pushed Tommy’s car to 110 miles per hour and still the man did not stir; when Tommy was out, he was out. (Years later I saw him fall asleep in the middle of a conversation. Once I even saw him fall asleep while eating.) We arrived at the fateful spot on Highway 46 around sundown—the time when Dean had been killed. The moment I put Tommy’s Benz in park, he sat up. Another talent of Tommy’s was being able to sleep for exactly as long as a car trip took. In this respect, and this respect alone, Tommy’s brain was digital.
We got out of the car and stood on the side of the road; I described for Tommy how the Dean crash went down. I showed him the roadside monument that had been built in Dean’s honor, which greatly impressed him. There was also a Dean-centric restaurant close by called the Jack Ranch Café. Maybe, I said, we should check it out.
Outside the café was a sign: BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES. Inside, it looked like an Old West diner with a fifties theme: complete with a jukebox, vintage bubble gum machine, antiquated Pepsi ads, life-size cardboard stand-ups of Dean from
Rebel Without a Cause, and a big wooden wagon positioned in the middle of the dining room. Tommy and I took in all the Dean pictures and memorabilia, including an original copy of the local newspaper’s account of Dean’s death. In almost every photo, Dean was doing that famous squinty wince-pout that a lot of young male actors go through a phase of trying to approximate. Tommy kept making small, impressed sounds as he leaned in close to read the photos’ captions. I’d never seen Tommy so rapt before, so respectful, so silent. Even when we sat down, Tommy continued to look around.
“You have resemblance to him,” Tommy said suddenly, “but your face is in. His is more out.”
“What?” I said, wondering where he was going with this.
“My God, you are behind the schedule. Listen to me, young man. I’m sorry, but you need more than resemblance. Dean has this signature thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s called being James Dean.” Tommy didn’t respond to this. “So tell me: What do you like so much about James Dean?”
Tommy’s hands moved around excitedly. “Look. He’s very, you know, moment to moment. He’s emotion. Real emotion. Not plastic. From the heart. Words are secondary. The way he speak. Style. And that’s what you need. Don’t be jealous. You can do it.” He was back in Elder Thespian mode, bullshitting about the craft. It was funny nevertheless. “Greg,” he went on, “I keep telling you: You need to watch the James Dean. Watch him. Very close, you watch him, and you’ll learn. Also, before I forget: I want my James Dean book back, for your information.”
Legends.
We headed back to San Francisco. Having just spent so much time thinking about Dean, and cars, and dying, this time I didn’t speed. Tommy, as though reading my mind, asked that I take it easy around any curves. Then he added: “I have my own James Dean story, you know.” A long time ago, he said, when he was “just a kid” in France, he’d been in a car accident. It happened during a “joy ride” with a friend who did “tricky stuff.” With Tommy and this friend were two girls they’d picked up. Tommy’s friend was showing off for the girls by taking turns on a perilously twisty road far too fast. Eventually he missed one of these turns. The car flipped over four times, punched through the guardrail, and plunged into a lake upside down. The girls were screaming as the car filled up with water and began to sink. Tommy kept shouting at them to shut up as he tried to get the door open. He couldn’t. Tommy told me that he saw “a big light,” and his entire life flashed before his eyes. The only thought in his mind, as the water reached his chin, was: God, please help us. I’m too young to die. Then the water stopped rising. Tommy was able to force the doors open. All four escaped and swam to the shore. Tommy described coughing up water on the shoreline and watching as the car’s headlights disappeared into the dark water below. “It was like Titanic,” he said. “I couldn’t believe I survive.”