The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

Finally I returned Tommy’s calls. He answered, as always, “I’m listening.”

  “Tommy, what’s up?”

  “So,” he said, “I’m watching your show The Bridges.” I quickly realized he meant Nash Bridges, and the episode he was watching was the one in which I’d appeared. “It’s just okay, you know. They do arresting with these guys, sissy guy, with the handcuff. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “Sexuality! You don’t know this stuff? Maybe you learn in five years from today. You put on the handcuffs and crazy stuff happen. I rest my case.”

  I wanted and needed to steer the conversation in another direction pronto. “So . . . yeah. Um, what’s up?”

  Tommy was still absorbed in the show. “Oh,” he said, “this guy has some issues, my God.”

  “Tommy!” I said.

  “Okay, I get the picture. So what’s the—what was the name of the school you auditioned before the Jean Shelton class?”

  “A.C.T.”

  “You know what I’m thinking? Maybe I take some classes there. Maybe I go to this A.C.T. Why not! I try Shakespeare and the voice class. I need to lose this stupid accent.”

  I knew, suddenly, that Tommy was somehow feeling challenged by me. All this time he’d been living in San Francisco, doing his business, believing that taking acting classes was the best way to keep his dream alive. But now that I was in L.A. and auditioning for real projects, he realized that his dream was on the most pitiful form of life support. “Sure, Tommy,” I said. “You should do that.” But I was thinking that Tommy and A.C.T. would be the worst possible match. A.C.T.’s instructors were top-notch and brutally honest.

  “By the way,” Tommy said. “I get fat a little bit. What should I do? Don’t worry, I’m not your competition.”

  I wanted to laugh, but he sounded serious. Almost dejected. “Get a stair stepper. Do it for forty-five minutes a day.”

  “Where to get stair stepper?”

  “You can get one at Big Five or something.”

  He started talking about something else, and I knew this little chat could go on for hours if I let it. “Hey, Tommy,” I said, “I think I’m gonna go grab a bite and learn my lines. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” He never wanted to let me get off the phone, not even now, when nothing was being said. “Five more minutes, okay?”

  I could always sense Tommy’s loneliness and he was so lonely now he was practically radioactive. “Okay,” I said.

  “I found new restaurant in the Mission Street. Such good crepes, my God.”

  “Yeah. I’ll try it next time I’m there. But I have to go.”

  “Wait, just a minute. Have you tried that mama-papa deal down the Crescent Heights? Such good potatoes.”

  “Tommy, I’ve got to learn my lines.”

  “You get all these auditions. Wow! I’m so proud of you. Somebody have good luck, huh? Somebody has nice apartment!”

  “Yeah, we’ll talk later.” I hung up, went down the street, grabbed a bite, and returned home. I was gone a little over an hour, yet I had a message from Tommy waiting for me when I got back. All I heard at first was something rhythmic and repetitive happening in the background, beneath Tommy’s huffing and puffing. “I’m sweating like hell,” he said. In the time it took me to eat, he’d gone out and bought himself a stair stepper.

  • • •

  I’d never seen any of the Puppet Master films, but I felt instantly attracted to André Toulon, their titular character. For one thing, Toulon was European, and I’d always felt as European as I did American. For another thing, Retro Puppet Master was a prequel that showed Toulon as a young Parisian puppeteer before he went mad with power and became the Puppet Master. Like any good Star Wars nerd, I thought, Do it like you’re doing Anakin Skywalker. An Anakin Skywalker who talks to puppets.

  Less heartening was the audition script, which was four pages of me speaking to newly arisen puppets, whom Toulon has brought to life with a secret potion. In this audition I was also expected to theatrically bestow upon Toulon’s puppets their names as living beings: Dr. Death, Six Shooter, Cyclops, Blade, Tunneler! It was all monologue, basically, and easily the strangest thing I’d ever gone out for. Even less heartening, though, was that the audition called for a British accent, which I couldn’t do. But I could do a French accent. The character actually was French, and I assumed they’d asked for a British accent because it was usually easier to find a young actor able to do one. A good French accent, I felt confident, would be my ace in the hole.

  The audition was at 1645 Vine Street, where Ed Wood made a few of his movies. I stood across from the casting people in the building’s penthouse, a view of Capitol Records and the Hollywood sign visible behind them. I could tell they’d already seen a lot of people that day; I’ve since learned that James Franco was one of them. They looked bored, disheartened, and as drained as the empty Diet Coke bottles spread before them. The head casting guy decided to jab me right away. I’d sent in four separate headshots, all stapled together, all showing different looks, which I’ve since learned is a no-no. One is always enough. “I’m surprised,” he said, lifting up my stapled headshots, “that you didn’t send us your baby photos.”

  I said nothing. I had nothing. I smiled, or tried to. But I felt the wind rushing out of the room rather quickly.

  Then he said, “Iris Burton. You better impress me.”

  This was in response to Iris’s reputation. One of her famous quotes was, “I don’t eat steak. I eat filet mignon.” These guys were definitely hamburger men casting a hamburger movie, and moreover they all knew it.

  “We were shocked when we got a submission from Iris,” the one woman among them said, obviously trying to lighten the mood.

  But they didn’t get a submission from Iris. The culprit behind that submission was standing before them.

  “So,” the first, dickish guy said, “we need you to do an accent with this. A British accent. Can you do an accent?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I’d like to try it with a French accent.”

  They all looked at each other. “Okay,” the dickish guy said, the disdain in his voice making it clear he wasn’t expecting much. “Go for it.”

  They’d placed facsimiles of all the puppets on the floor, so I sat down and started playing with them, saying my lines with a French accent. I was used to playing with Star Wars figures, so that’s what I pretended I was doing. I was five years old, I was Anakin Skywalker, I was a nice French boy who’d grow up to be evil.

  When I finished, they all looked like they’d just seen the puppets come alive. They’d been trying to cast this part for weeks. They’d seen hundreds of people. “Kid,” the guy who hated me five minutes ago said, “do you have a passport?”

  • • •

  They offered to pay me SAG scale, which was $2,500 a week. We were filming at Castel Films Studios in Bucharest, Romania. It was, as the saying goes, a dream come true: I was flying to Bucharest, to star in a movie. The Puppet Master people called Iris, because now they could call Iris, and loved the fact they were calling Iris. They were working with Iris! Or so the casting director, with whom I eventually became friends, said to me. He also told me that when they informed Iris I got the part, she said, in shock, “He can actually act?” Iris herself summoned me to her rose-covered Beverly Hills mansion.

  “Kid,” she said, “congratulations.” (I found myself dearly anticipating the day I would no longer be “kid” to anyone.) “This is a chance. This is a good chance. Do what you can with it. I tried to get you more money. They’re not going to give you more money.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not interested in money.”

  She smiled. “You’re not allowed to say that ever again.” She reached into her desk and pulled out a thick knit hat. “It’s cold as hell in Romania. You’ll want to wear this. Also: Don’t fuck your leading lady until the shoot is over and remember to take your vitamins.” She
patted me on the cheek and sent me out.

  Thanksgiving was coming, and I had to get home to see my family. From San Francisco, I’d be flying to Bucharest. When Tommy found out I was coming back to town, he told me he wanted to meet up. I hadn’t seen him in almost four months; I hadn’t told him anything about my film. We met at Virgin Records in San Francisco, per his request. I was excited about the film and wanted to share the good news with him. On top of that, I felt immensely grateful to Tommy, without whom none of this would have happened. Had I never met Tommy, I probably would have still been stuck living with my parents. For some reason, when I was heading out to meet him, I grabbed my football.

  I think I may have winced when I saw Tommy. He looked dejected, gunned down, burned out, insomnia-plagued. He looked so much worse than the last time I’d seen him—which was saying something. His hair was crusty and his eyes were droopy and his skin looked pasty and thin. He was wearing sweatpants and flip-flops and an old white T-shirt that looked like it had been washed within an inch of its life. He gave me an awkwardly complicated bro-fist greeting, but he wouldn’t look at me directly. Every glance was furtive, shot from the corner of his eye. Otherwise he stared at the ground.

  I suggested we go to Golden Gate Park to play football. Tommy admitted that he’d never played catch, let alone thrown a football, before. He claimed to like football, though, much better than soccer. As he shot-putted the ball toward me, his inexperience showed. I asked him how he managed to spend all these years in San Francisco, home of the five-time Super Bowl champion 49ers, and not once throw a football. “Tommy,” I said, “Joe Montana would be disappointed in you.”

  To this Tommy replied, “The Joe Montana is prick.” Tommy had no idea who Joe Montana was. It was like he lived in Galilee and had never heard of Jesus.

  After playing for a while, Tommy announced that we had to go fix his cell phone. We were driving to the cell phone place when I finally told him about the movie. “Oh my God,” he said, and pulled the car over. “I need candy!” He lunged for a See’s box in his backseat and started to tear into it.

  I watched him gobble the first couple of chocolates as though they were sedatives. He calmed down, eventually, and I think he actually managed to convince himself that he was happy for me. “We go celebrate,” he said, turning the car around and leaving his broken cell phone for another, less exultant day. “We go see feature movie.”

  As we sat through Meet Joe Black, I could feel pain and confusion radiating from Tommy in the darkness of the theater. Maybe he felt he was losing me to something. Worse, he was losing me to something he wanted to lose himself in. Tommy was wondering why nothing had happened for him—and why it was happening for me. He didn’t want me to outgrow him. He wanted to feel like he was still needed. I didn’t know what to say or how to comfort him. After the movie, he dropped me off at Virgin Records and we said good-bye quickly.

  A few days later I flew to Bucharest. We finished production on Christmas Eve, and I went back to my hotel. I remember sitting there, on the edge of my bed, taking in the moment and welcoming the tears filling up my eyes. I replayed the last few months, the last few years. Tomorrow it would be Christmas, and I was going to be alone. That was okay, because I felt like I had been given such an amazing gift.

  I fell asleep, only to be woken up by someone forcefully knocking on my door and a Romanian voice saying, “Telegram!” A telegram? I opened it:

  Merry Christmas. You are a special person.

  May all your dreams come true.

  TW

  I still don’t know how Tommy found me.

  nine

  “You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!”

  The whole place seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis—out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow motion.

  —Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

  On the day we were set to shoot the scene in which Johnny and Lisa have a wrenching heart-to-heart about their relationship’s long-term feasibility—a scene famous for the line “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!”—Tommy was watching Safowa do a wardrobe check on the other actors who’d be filming that day: Robyn Paris, who played Michelle, and Juliette Danielle, who played Lisa. As usual, Tommy was micromanaging the situation while skillfully failing to manage much of anything.

  Safowa had decided to dress Lisa in a sleeveless, backless, charmless, powerfully unfortunate red blouse. This blouse did Juliette’s body no favors. On top of that, the camera, as they say, adds ten pounds—which became more like twenty pounds when illuminated by The Room’s unflattering lighting. When working with a character like Lisa, it’s the job of the costume designer and the director to come up with clothing that makes the actor look better than she does in everyday life. In this respect, no one was failed by The Room more terribly than Juliette, who was shot and costumed and directed in such a way as to make her a magnitude less attractive, likable, and charming than she was and is. The first time I met Juliette, I thought, This is an incredibly sweet person who’s going through a tough, tough time. It was an accurate impression. She’d recently moved to Los Angeles from Texas and was essentially supporting her entire family; she had put her regular day job on hold to do The Room. Juliette believed that The Room—for which she was paid a pittance—was her one shot at making some real money down the line.

  The best thing about Juliette was her on-set attitude, which was unfailingly kind and enthusiastic. A lot of times, after shooting, Juliette would go to a nearby karaoke bar and sing with anyone who wanted to join her. The guys on the crew loved Juliette.

  Juliette with the first of many, many red roses to come.

  Once Safowa got this awful blouse onto Juliette, Tommy began circling her. He stopped, though, when he came to Juliette’s back. There’s no other way to say this: Juliette had a few pimples concentrated on one small part of her upper back, which the blouse unforgivingly exposed. Now, there were several ways for Tommy to have handled this. He could have called the makeup person over and asked her, quietly, to make sure Juliette’s blemishes got covered up before filming. He could have had Safowa put her into a different outfit. What he did was to say, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Excuse me, I’m sorry. We can’t have this on the camera.” He waved the makeup artist over. “You see all this stuff here? Take this shit out. We can’t have this.” Juliette knew exactly what Tommy was talking about and started to cry quietly, while the makeup artist sprang into action. “This is American movie,” Tommy said, over Juliette’s desperate sniffling. “It needs to be sexy. She needs to be beautiful.” With that, Tommy went off to do his seagull thing elsewhere on set—making a lot of irritating noise while simultaneously shitting on everyone.

  Juliette was slow to recover from Tommy’s cruel treatment. “I’m okay,” she said, shaking her head, wiping her tears, her voice brittle and angry. “It’s okay. I’m fine.” It was obvious she was already at her breaking point. She’d definitely been feeling uneasy around Tommy. Everyone had been. But Tommy treated Juliette more like a daughter than a colleague, and this made their relationship especially uncomfortable given their roles in the film. If, for instance, Tommy caught the scent of cigarettes on Juliette’s breath, he’d say, “Do not smoke the cigarettes!” If she giggled before a take, he’d tell her to knock off “that squeaky stuff” and grow up. At times it really did feel like the most dysfunctional incestuous relationship this side of Jerry Springer.

  Tommy’s fears about age are embodied in The Room’s characters: Why would Johnny, an obviously middle-aged man, have a twenty-one-year-old future wife, a twenty-four-year-old best friend, and a bunch of other friends only a few years out of college? With the exception of Lisa’s mother, no one in the cast is close to Tommy’s age. According to Tommy’s script, Lisa is between twenty-one and twenty-five and has been with Johnny for either five or seven years. How old, then, was Lisa when she and Johnny got together? A writer less fixated on youth as the ideal state of human existenc
e might have considered that question.

  I’ve often been asked why Tommy cast Juliette as Lisa, a character intended to be so heart-slayingly seductive that virtually every male character in the movie loses his mind over her. Maybe no character in the history of film is called “beautiful” more often than Lisa is. From the very beginning of The Room’s conceptualization, Tommy said he wanted Lisa to be “the biggest thing” in the movie—other than him, of course. “She has to be absolutely beautiful,” he’d say over and over. “Young. Super-duper sexy. I want her to be as beautiful as Angelika Jolie.” Paging through the Victoria’s Secret catalog, he’d say, after every page, “That’s the perfect Lisa!” The kind of sexiness Tommy wanted Lisa to exhibit is something that’s existential, and Juliette was too young, too insecure, and too inexperienced to inhabit such a persona.

  So Juliette was put into a terrible, unfair situation, and all things considered, I think she handled it well. She’s not given nearly enough credit for that. Juliette was set up to fail, and most people in her position would have quit. But Juliette never quit. When Tommy threw a water bottle at the original Michelle, the whole cast walked out. Juliette, though, was disconsolate; she wept. She cared about the movie more than anyone. In the end, Juliette was cast as Lisa because she was the only actress capable of surviving the meat-grinding torture of Tommy’s casting process. For Juliette, serial humiliation became just another obstacle to smash through.

  When I came aboard the USS Room, Juliette had already been cast—as Michelle, not as Lisa. The original actress Tommy had settled upon for Lisa was not ideal. Her teeth were discolored from what I assumed had been years of heavy smoking, and she was Latina, with a heavy accent, thus not quite fitting Tommy’s vision of an all-American girl. She wasn’t unattractive, but viewed through the cruel lens of movie-star expectation, she was even less Jolie-like than Juliette. This woman had signed a preliminary contract, though no payment had been discussed. Eventually, after weeks of auditioning and long, unpaid rehearsals, ur-Lisa wanted to know when she’d start filming. One day she showed up at Birns & Sawyer and demanded some money and a firmer contractual commitment, which somehow offended Tommy.