The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m twenty.” I’d told Tommy my age several times. For some reason Tommy always lowered it—much like, I assumed, he lowered his.

  “Oh,” Tommy said, pausing. “Well, whatever. But you are just kid now and you become independent. So you have my support. You know, when I start my business, I make twenty-five cents an hour.”

  “What business? Street Fashions?”

  Tommy looked around. “Don’t say so loud! Yes. Twenty-five cents an hour.”

  He had to be lying. Who other than third-world laborers made twenty-five cents an hour?

  Suddenly Kirk Douglas walked into the restaurant. Spartacus himself! I pointed Douglas out to Tommy, but Tommy thought I was indicating one of Marino’s heavyset waiters. When I finally got Tommy to look directly at Douglas, Tommy returned to his food and said, “Big star. Who cares?” Tommy wasn’t interested in giving the power of stardom to somebody else.

  “So,” he said. “I tell you another secret, maybe. You know how I start my business? Nah, maybe that story wait. Maybe you not ready for it. But the fact is I have many jobs in my life—so many you can write book about them all.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “In many other places. France, Louisiana, et cetera. I’m pretty good in the business but not so good with the love. Girls can be very tricky, but that’s life. You know the expression: ten seconds pleasure, ten years hatred.”

  I suspected that Tommy had probably had a normal life at one point. Then, I presumed, some kind of personal calamity—nervous breakdown, midlife crisis, heartbreak, addiction, something—caused him to grow his hair long and go into hibernation, only to come out broken and different. I was catching Tommy as he emerged from that reclusion, and the thing powering his emergence was his reignited desire to become an actor.

  I was curious to learn as much about Tommy as I could. It felt like I was seeing a case study of what happens to someone whose dreams had been stifled. I was reaching out to Tommy, and he was reaching out to me, but for entirely different reasons. Both of us were stuck; neither of us knew what to do next. If either of us bailed on the other now, I thought, we’d both sink.

  Mario Marino entered the restaurant. The waitress walked over to point him out to me. Could we meet him? I asked. Sure, she said, and went to fetch him. I told Tommy we were about to meet the man who knew James Dean, and suddenly there Mario was, standing beside our table, looking incredibly youthful and vigorously black-haired for being almost seventy years old. “Buona sera,” he said.

  I shook Mario’s hand and told him I had read about him in Joe Hyams’s James Dean biography.

  “James Dean!” Mario less said than exploded, in the Italian way. You half expected there to be confetti floating around the ends of his sentences. “Yes, yes! Very nice young man. He loved pasta! A lot of pasta.”

  I asked what Dean was like, his favorite dishes, whether the Villa Capri was still open, everything. In retrospect, it was a little embarrassing. But Mario answered patiently. He had perfected the restaurateur’s gift of pretending you were adored and welcome even if you were being a total dork. At which point Tommy got involved.

  “What do you really think of James Dean overall?” Tommy asked Mario.

  “Oh, a very nice boy. Very nice.”

  “He’s not overrated a little bit? You know what I’m saying. Come on. Give us something. What crazy things he do? Don’t be phony. You can be honest. I won’t say anything.”

  “No, no,” Mario said, eyeing Tommy suspiciously. His voice deepened and firmed up. “Very nice. Very nice guy.” And with that Mario gracefully excused himself.

  • • •

  We were back in Tommy’s car now, and he pulled out a piece of paper. “This,” he said, “is code to parking garage. I don’t know if it change from last year.” Last year? When was the last time Tommy was here? He then informed me that he’d told the building manager he was showing the apartment to his “little cousin,” so if I saw her, I had to pretend to be Tommy’s cousin. We were driving down Fountain, headed toward Crescent Heights. Tommy told me to take a left. No, wait. A right. Then a left. Soon enough we were lost. Tommy could not find his own apartment.

  We found the place, eventually. It was right down the street from the Laemmle Sunset 5, where, years later, The Room would play regularly. We neared the apartment complex and I saw the palm trees and the swept sidewalks and the handsome security gate and caught myself thinking: This is actually a good start. Only then did I realize how dire my expectations had grown over the course of this very long day.

  Tommy said he would recite to me the security code he’d written down earlier. While he recited the numbers, I was supposed to type them in. The security code was this: 1-2-3-4. I asked Tommy why he bothered writing that down. Tommy responded that he wrote it down because he could never remember it.

  “This is a really cool place,” I said when we got out of the car. “And you’re a block from Sunset. Why don’t you use it more often?”

  Tommy shrugged. “I have very busy schedule in San Francisco. I come here when I have some business.” I could tell he was enjoying my surprise at how nice the building was. The apartment was on the third floor, but we had to check Tommy’s mailbox before going up. When he opened the tiny metal door, two or three envelopes popped out as if spring-loaded. The rest of his mail had been crammed into the slot so tightly, it didn’t look like anything less than a crowbar would be able to extricate it all. When Tommy saw the look on my face he just laughed. “It’s not easy to manage life in two different cities,” he said.

  On the elevator ride up to the third floor Tommy told me, “I pay for the place already, so it’s fine for you. Rent is nine hundred dollars a month, but I pay ahead so I don’t have to worry about it. I pay six months, four months in advance. No stress that way. I don’t like the stress.”

  The elevator doors opened and I was hit by crisp, summery air. The corridor overlooked the complex’s turquoise swimming pool, surrounded by deck chairs and glass-topped tables. Tucked between several dramatically lit palm trees was a Jacuzzi. I could hear its soft nighttime burbles.

  At the apartment door Tommy handed me his armful of mail while he cycled through the keys on his one key ring to rule them all. On his fourth try, the right key slid home, and we stepped inside. One bedroom. Balcony. The kitchen was large for one person, as was the living area. But for the dust, everything seemed clean and operable. Pinned to the entryway bulletin board was a single card: Sports Connection, a West Hollywood gym. Tommy strode ahead of me to turn on the air conditioner.

  Little by little, though, I noticed a few odd things. For instance, knee-high stacks of old Hollywood Reporters were spread around the living room, their covers advertising five-year-old production deals and cancellation notices for television shows I had forgotten existed. Tommy had that famous Jim Morrison “American Poet” poster unevenly taped, all by itself, on the left-hand wall. It also took me a few moments to notice the apartment’s striking lack of furniture, unless the Hollywood Reporters were the furniture. There was a bed in the bedroom, and a glass desk in the living room, but no kitchen table, no couch, and no chairs. A boxy and ancient antennaed television set sat on two Roman-style pillars. There weren’t any plates or glasses in the cupboards or any silverware in the drawers. In the bathroom I found hundreds if not thousands of tiny black spatter stains—almost certainly the result of numerous black-hair-dyeing sessions. If it weren’t for the dye stains, it would have been hard to believe that anyone, much less Tommy, had ever lived there. The apartment had so little personality that it could have been the complex’s model apartment, or some love nest kept by transient adulterers. Or maybe it looked like exactly what it was: the rarely visited apartment of a strange and lonely man.

  “So what do you think?” Tommy asked me.

  I was already plotting out my life here. “I think it’s nice. I’ll take it, if that’s still okay with you.”

  “You don’
t have to rush. Take your time. See if you are comfortable.” Tommy busied himself with his mail for a bit. It was getting late now and I was exhausted from driving all day. I set up camp using a rolled-out sheet on the living room floor and a few Hollywood Reporters as pillows. Tommy was still carefully opening, reading, and throwing away his mountain of mail. I was almost asleep when I heard Tommy step around me and close his bedroom door. The shower spat to life a moment later and he began belting out Aladdin’s “A Whole New World.” I listened to the thrum of the air conditioner, the whooshing of passing traffic outside, and thought about how easily I could get used to this space. It felt right. I could live here. And it was so central. But I still didn’t know how Tommy managed to afford “life in two different cities,” as he put it. What did he really do?

  I was moving past the last drowsy checkpoint before sleep when Tommy’s bedroom door opened. I didn’t open my eyes at first, but I could sense Tommy watching me from his doorjamb. I squinted my eyes open. Tommy was in a tank top and sweatpants. His toothbrush was in his mouth; his hair was wet. “Hey,” he said. “Yo. Are you comfortable? Do you need anything? Sleeping process?”

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  “Are you fine?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was falling asleep.” I put my arm over my eyes to block the light. Tommy lingered there a moment longer. At last he started to close the bedroom door but stopped before it clicked shut. Then I heard the bedsprings accepting Tommy’s weight and the dry, papery sound of sheets being pulled, pillows rearranged. Churning, restless silence followed that. A strange silence. As I began drifting back into sleep, I thought I heard Tommy say in a high singsong pitch, “Somebody’s chicken.” Somebody’s chicken?

  I’d just pretend I never heard it. It was probably just Tommy being Tommy, right? It didn’t matter. Moments later, I could hear Tommy snoring.

  seven

  “Where’s My Fucking Money?”

  Shut up, I’m rich!

  —Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard

  The first time Tommy gave Sandy a check, Sandy was certain it would bounce. Sandy was so sure of this that he made a wooden-nickel joke with the teller at Tommy’s bank. The teller, though, told Sandy not to worry. “What do you mean?” Sandy asked. “This account?” the teller said. “It’s a bottomless pit.” Sandy was dumbfounded. How much money would move a teller to inappropriately confess something like that? Whoever Tommy was, Sandy now decided, he was obviously backed by someone or something big.

  This was very much the impression Tommy wanted everyone to have. As he said to me one morning on the way to the set, “We are shooting now for two weeks. You know what that means? People in Hollywood know we are fully loaded.”

  As usual, I let Tommy hear himself. Which was all he wanted to do anyway.

  “Have you ever seen one million dollars in cash?” Tommy suddenly asked me.

  “I have not,” I said.

  “Well, I have, young man. And it looks really nice—like this.” He did a gesture with his hands, outlining an imaginary pile of money. “Very big pile. Looks very nice.”

  If I asked him the question he wanted me to ask—“How was it that you were able to see a million dollars in cash, Tommy?”—I knew he was going to back off, get defensive, or make a joke. So I didn’t say anything. I just sat there in the car with Tommy and his imaginary pile of money.

  “Last night I have vision. I think we need to do Chris-R scene again, but on roof. It will be spectacular. He is such good character. Like Al Capone. My idea is that when we fight him, the gun will fall off the roof, like in gangster movie.”

  As The Room’s line producer, I felt obliged to ask, “You want to shoot the Chris-R scene again?”

  “I don’t like the dailies. They just don’t cut it. We need something bigger, more spectacular.”

  For Tommy, “bigger” and “more spectacular” meant green screen. The green screen was like a portal into Tommy’s imagination and having it as an option gave him a scarily limitless range of possibilities. A few days before, Tommy had pulled Raphael aside and told him his latest big idea.

  “I want my car,” Tommy began, “to fly off the roof and into the sky.” By now, Raphael was prepared for literally anything when Tommy discussed his ideas. Even so, I could tell this particular vision had really, deeply stunned him.

  “Why,” Raphael said, “do you want to do this, exactly?”

  “It’s just possible side plot. Maybe Johnny is vampire.”

  Raphael stood there, looking up at the sky. He began to nod. The next time I saw Raphael he was laughing uncontrollably while he relayed Tommy’s flying Mercedes-Benz vampire vision to one of the cameramen.

  Tommy and Raphael Smadja discussing some finer points of cinematography.

  Now, in the car on the way to the set, Tommy said, “You see how creative I am? Somebody’s good director.”

  I said nothing. I couldn’t get over how much effort reshooting the Chris-R scene on the Rooftop set would entail.

  “You see,” Tommy said, “you never give me credit. No one ever give me credit. Well, I give myself credit.”

  The biggest problem with reshooting the Chris-R scene was that Tommy no longer had half the characters the scene called for. Dan Janjigian was long gone. Brianna, who was included in the version of the scene shot in the alley, had been fired.

  Tommy gathered together Philip, Carolyn Minnott, and Juliette—all of whom would figure prominently in the scene’s new Rooftop version—to explain why it was being reshot. He described how much more dramatic it would be. He described the gun falling off the side of the roof. He mentioned Al Capone. He also added an additional and pretty significant detail, which was that Chris-R would actually be firing his gun in the air during the scene.

  But before Tommy could start reshooting, we still needed to confirm Chris-R’s involvement. Neither I nor anyone on set could imagine that Dan would be willing to come back and reprise his role, given the general wackiness of his experience with Tommy. I told Tommy as much, but he didn’t see a problem: “Get this guy here now! No excuses!” I explained that Dan probably couldn’t report for acting duty today (or ever) and that it was ridiculous to expect anyone to come in with only a few hours’ notice. “Well,” Tommy said huffily, “then I guess he not professional actor.”

  So I called Dan. He didn’t answer. “Call him again now!” Tommy said.

  A few minutes later, I found a quiet spot on the set and called again. This time, Dan picked up right away. “Tommy hasn’t blown up Birns & Sawyer yet?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “but he’s working on it. What are you up to?”

  “With my girlfriend. Doing a little shopping at Ralph’s.”

  Tommy, standing at the other side of the lot, saw me talking on the phone and started yelling: “Greg, tell him we need him here now! We don’t have time for the bs’ing!” I covered the receiver to shield Dan from hearing Tommy and went for a little walk around the block.

  “Yeah,” I said, “so get this. You ready?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Tommy wants to reshoot the drug-deal thing you were in. He wants to do it on the Rooftop set. Also, he wants to do it now.”

  Silence.

  “As in right now. Immediately.”

  “Good one,” Dan said, but he knew I wasn’t kidding.

  “Yeah, so . . . you ready to become Chris-R again?”

  “Why on the Rooftop?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t know. He said something about it being more dramatic? He wants you back on set ASAP. That’s pretty much all he said.”

  Dan was quiet. Later he told me that he thought about how relieved he’d been when his Room gig ended—but then, weirdly, how much he’d kind of enjoyed being an actor. Maybe doing it again would be fun. He also wondered if there might be more scenes in the movie for him if he really managed to wow Tommy. Like everyone else in the cast, Dan had no idea what the script was about; all he’d been given was his scen
e. For all he knew, the whole film was crawling with charismatic drug dealers.

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Dan said, “but all right. I’ll come by tomorrow around one. Actually, wait. How about you let me know when you’re headed over. I know Tommy. No matter what time we settle on, he’ll be four hours late.”

  “Good call,” I said. “You’re a wise man.”

  Dan laughed. “Am I?”

  I passed the good news on to Tommy. His response: “He should come now!”

  “Tommy, he’s grocery shopping with his girlfriend.”

  Tommy shook his head sadly. “Not everybody has dedication. We prepare now anyway. First we do test of me running onto roof, then we prepare with gun. Et cetera, et cetera. When gun falls off roof, I want big struggle. We may do crazy stuff, so be prepared. Then I review footage.”

  We obviously weren’t shooting anything today. The actor most central to the scene Tommy wanted to shoot wasn’t even present. Even so, he decreed that no crew or cast member could leave the set. He wanted a full day’s worth of rehearsal for a scene we’d already rehearsed and shot. This was, at best, an extravagant use of everyone’s time. When the complaints started coming in, Tommy had this to say: “Rehearsal is very important. You need preparation. You can’t just do scene in five minutes!”

  • • •

  The next day, Dan emerged from wardrobe already in character. If anything, he had taken his Chris-R game up a notch.

  Even though we’d moved out of the alley set, Tommy still wanted Denny to open the scene dribbling his basketball. The Rooftop, I probably don’t need to point out, had no basketball hoop. Sandy tried to talk Tommy out of this, but Tommy saw no logical issue with Denny practicing his dribbling on a condo rooftop. “He plays basketball,” Tommy said. “Let Denny do what he want! You can play basketball without hoop. I do it all the time. It’s fun!”

  Philip and Dan now joined Tommy on the Rooftop set. His initial direction was impressively without substance: “Okay, we begin with Chris-R talking to Denny. Denny try to trick him little bit. Chris-R, your voice go up. Denny, you get scared.”