The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  After Tommy brushed off the ur-Lisa, there was a knock at the door. In walked Juliette, who looked at Tommy and me and said, very coolly, “I’d like to start auditioning for Lisa.” This was actually a very Lisa-like move for Juliette to pull. As soon as she left, Tommy looked at me with a grin. “Can you imagine? She’s very manipulative. Her competition is vicious!”

  Later that day, Tommy sent the ur-Lisa a fax with a world-record number of misspellings, terminating her contract.

  This didn’t mean that Juliette had an automatic in. Tommy began yet another round of casting calls for Lisa. Some very attractive young women wound up coming in to audition. The first one to show up, Alexis, actually did look like a young Angelina Jolie. Her audition went well. After it was done she asked me, “So who’s playing Johnny? Has he been cast yet?” I knew if I told her, she’d walk, instantly. But she seemed talented, and cool enough that I didn’t want to waste her time. So I pointed over at Tommy and said, “He’s playing Johnny.”

  Alexis looked at Tommy with narrowed, suspicious eyes, as though running through her mind a number of scenarios involving fame and what she was willing to do to have it. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!” Then she turned back to me. “Yeah, so I don’t think I’m going to be able to work this into my schedule. It was really nice meeting you, though.”

  The next few auditions were just as rough. It didn’t help that Tommy had placed a bed in the audition room—the same bed he later used in Johnny and Lisa’s apartment. Almost every woman who came in needed to be reassured that The Room, whatever it was, wasn’t a porno.

  Meanwhile, Tommy’s idea of directing an actress during auditions was to push her in front of a camera and emotionally terrorize her. “Your sister just became lesbian!” he’d say, and wait for the “acting” to kick in. If that didn’t work, he’d yell: “Your mother just die!” Every actress with confidence or a strong sense of self bailed. The few able to withstand Tommy’s attitude fled at the first mention that they’d have to lock lips with him.

  Juliette, though, was willing to kiss Tommy, even though you’re barely supposed to kiss in rehearsals. With no contract signed and no camera running, she and Tommy would stand there in rehearsal and make out. For minutes. Whenever I told Tommy, “You don’t need to go that far,” he’d say, “I need to see if they can perform. If they can’t perform, I’m sorry, they have to leave. Out. And don’t be jealous, young man.” (After The Room was released, my mother commented that to pay $6 million to make out with a girl was “pretty pathetic.”)

  Once Tommy cast Juliette as Lisa, we had to find someone for The Room’s other important young woman character: Michelle. After Tommy sacked Brianna, the original Michelle, the production staggered on for some weeks before Tommy realized he needed to think about recasting her. “I need a young, beautiful girl,” Tommy urged. “Not some old prune.” Well past the point at which finding another Michelle had become an emergency, I yanked a bunch of headshots out of a pile on the floor of Tommy’s apartment and started making calls. A few hours later, at 10:00 p.m., Tommy was surveying a lineup of eighteen non-prunes in the Birns & Sawyer parking lot. There was no time to book an audition room, so they all had to perform to the camera in front of one another in the parking lot. In terms of filmmaking, this was the very definition of amateur hour, and they all knew it. It was so bad that I apologized to every actress the moment she finished her audition. My apologies weren’t good enough for some actresses near the back of the dwindling casting line. When Tommy had unkind things to say about one actress’s audition, the last three women in line looked at one another in disgust and walked off the lot. This left us with four actresses, the first three of whom couldn’t survive Tommy telling them their sisters had just become lesbians. The last woman up, Robyn Paris, was a newly married graduate of Duke University who’d been doing commercial work in Los Angeles. The first thing I noticed about her was her unbelievably genuine smile. She didn’t ask any questions before doing her scene; she just walked up to the camera and did it. She was easily the best person we saw—and she didn’t even have to be told that her mother was dead.

  “Wow!” Tommy said. “Beautiful! Very nice. So we may give you part.”

  Robyn’s amazing smile got even bigger, but I could tell she was thrown. This wasn’t how directors talked to actors during auditions. For all sorts of practical and emotional reasons, most directors remain very Sphinxy and poker-faced with actors during auditions. “Okay,” she said.

  “We will let you know. We need you to perform the kissing stuff. Are you giving? Can you make it here tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” Robyn said, still smiling, but far more cautiously now. I don’t think she fully understood him.

  “Then maybe we see you tomorrow.”

  Talking to an auditioning actor in this way, promising and unpromising, givething and takething away, is basically a form of abuse. But Robyn left in what seemed to be good spirits. The second she was off the set, Tommy told me to hire her. I gave it a half hour, called her, and told her when to show up the next day.

  The crew was knocked out by Robyn. Sandy compared her to Julia Roberts, which wasn’t an insane comparison to make. Both had smiles that hit you like sunlight off a mirror, and Robyn actually knew which end was up on a movie set. Having ascertained from her audition experience that The Room’s wardrobe budget would be limited, she brought in her own clothes. She’d also done her own makeup. Within twenty minutes of arriving on set, she was rehearsing, learning the crew people’s names, and generally charming everyone in sight.

  The indomitable Robyn Paris.

  As the production went on, Robyn would come to me and ask, politely, why she wasn’t being paid according to how much time she was spending on set. I tried to explain, equally politely, that The Room was on something called Tommy Time. Jokes like that only made Robyn more skeptical. “If I’m here for six hours,” she’d say, “is it a six-hour rate or does it qualify as overtime?” I had no good answer to such reasonable questions and couldn’t press Tommy to provide one. Eventually, like everyone, Robyn gave in. It was a job; she was getting tape and experience.

  • • •

  For all of Tommy’s issues with women, it should be said that he does try throughout The Room to provide his female characters with emotions and activities he regards as realistic. Unfortunately, these womanly emotions and activities usually involve sitting around, shopping, drinking wine, gossiping, getting banged, or some combination thereof. Tommy’s female characters have no inner dimension at all; they’re idealized, but halfheartedly. From Tommy’s artistic perspective, a woman is someone who’s supposed to be on the couch when a man gets home, someone who’s supposed to know to order her man a pizza when he has a bad day, someone who’s been trained to regard a dozen roses as a gift of universe-exploding significance.

  The scene immediately preceding Johnny and Lisa’s heart-to-heart was filmed the day after Robyn had been hired and the day of Juliette’s back acne catastrophe. All of Tommy’s ideas about women are at play: the women have apparently just returned home from shopping (“Did you get a new dress?” Johnny asks when he enters the scene), they’re being manipulative (Lisa tells Michelle that Johnny hits her but—good news!—she’s also “found somebody else”), and they’re guzzling merlot. Tommy was watching Sandy instruct Robyn and Juliette on the living room set. I could tell that Sandy was having a good time. He was calling Juliette “Jules” and flirting shamelessly with Robyn. (I noticed that whenever Robyn was around, Sandy would begin talking about things like “the monstrous project I just did at Universal.”) For a few moments it felt like an actual film scene was coming together.

  It wasn’t. The scene Robyn and Juliette wound up shooting is riddled with continuity errors. Throughout the scene, for instance, Lisa puts her wineglass down in one shot but is still holding it in another. Even worse is the alarming thing that starts happening to Juliette’s neck when she becomes animated toward the end of the scene: the cords in h
er neck begin popping out against her skin as though the alien from Alien were trying to fight its way out of her jugular. Her unfortunate blouse didn’t help, putting her throat machinery on full display. I suspect this neck poppage was a result of the contorted way she was forced to sit; I leave any more granular explanation to an anatomist.

  Other than Lisa’s awful red blouse and apparently exploding neck and the dozen or so continuity errors, Robyn and Juliette’s scene came off without a hitch. Now it was Tommy’s turn to enter the scene. Because I was one of the only people involved in the production who’d seen the entire Room script, I knew this scene—in which Johnny melts down in front of Lisa—had at least one incandescent mistake in it. This mistake concerned Johnny’s biggest line in the film: “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” That’s not what the original script said, though. The line in the original script read: “You are taking me apart, Lisa!” Tommy stole—or, rather, tried and failed to steal—the “tearing me apart” line from Rebel Without a Cause, spoken by James Dean’s character, Jim Stark, who is drunk and lashing out at his parents. Naturally, Tommy loved this scene. The power and sheer balls-out emotional savagery of it. It’s a moment where viewers don’t really know whether they’re watching a movie or an entire generation coalesce. Occasionally I wonder if The Room was not conceived and written just so Tommy could have this elemental, unbridled moment of performance. Which makes it even weirder that Tommy still managed to fuck up the line in his script. No one involved in The Room had caught this gaffe, because no one but I had any idea how much James Dean meant to Tommy. (Meanwhile Tommy’s version of the line has a hundred times more hits on YouTube than James Dean’s version, which quite frankly makes me feel like I’m being torn apart.)

  In the scene’s opening, Johnny sits on a chair across from Lisa. The first thing Sandy noticed when Tommy sat down was that a table in the background was distractingly empty. “We can’t just shoot a blank table,” Sandy said. It wasn’t the first time it had come up that Johnny and Lisa’s condo had all the charm of my room at the Saharan Motel. (How did Tommy come to furnish his film’s imaginary condo? By walking into a thrift furniture store in L.A. and purchasing the entire mock-up apartment in its display windows. This means that Johnny and Lisa’s condo was modeled on a space purposefully designed to be uninhabited.) Early in the production Sandy offered Tommy the use of his own house to film the interiors, so as to avoid moments like these; he even brought in pictures for Tommy to consider. “Look,” Sandy said. “It would be so much easier. We don’t have to have all these props, or all these people around. Everything could be done much more quickly. We’d be in and out in a couple of days.” Tommy refused, later telling me, “If Sandy takes over, he has control. I know what he does. He wants more money. Plus, I’m sorry, his house is Mickey Mouse.”

  Sandy was still staring at the blank table behind Tommy and Juliette. “Where,” he wanted to know, “is the art department?” The art department, which was comprised of Merce and a revolving door of stagehands, volunteered that the budget didn’t really allow for comprehensive, realistic decoration, and moreover, no one had told her to fill the tables with knickknackery. Tommy took command of the situation and sent the art department down Highland Avenue to a framing shop. A little later they returned with sample frames, all glorified with stock photos of spoons. Tommy, over Sandy’s and the art department’s objections, told them to use the framed spoons, for the simple reason that he wanted to get on with filming. I don’t think the most gifted prognosticator could have predicted the fateful impact of this impatience-born split-second decision, much less the volleys of plastic spoons that Room audience members would later throw whenever these sad little stock-photo spoons appear on-screen. To the photographer tasked with the tedious job of snapping those spoon pictures, take heart: Your work has not been wasted.

  Spoons!

  A Tommy impersonator in San Francisco.

  Now that the framed spoons were in place, Tommy got back to the demanding if familiar task of not remembering any of his lines. Shooting the first part of Johnny and Lisa’s conversation took longer than it should have, but given that it wasn’t a huge Acting Moment for Tommy, he was able to relax and, with effort, eventually grind out his lines. When Tommy was faced with the pressure of nailing the argumentative, taking-me-apart moment of Johnny and Lisa’s conversation, however, he came unglued. Johnny’s declaration of “I cannot go on without you” was where the problems began. Tommy would move as far into the dialogue as “I cannot go on” and get confused and call out, “Line!”

  Sandy would then dutifully feed him the rest: “Without you.”

  “I cannot go . . . Line!”

  “On. Without you.”

  “I cannot . . . Line!”

  “Tommy, for God’s sake. ‘I cannot go on without you.’ ”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “Action!”

  “I cannot go on . . . Line!”

  The crew’s mutinous mockery of Tommy began. Raphael, our director of photography, had by now retreated to the special tent he’d set up at the edge of the set. This allowed him to pretend to watch Tommy’s performance on the monitor while he giggled so hard the tent sometimes shook.

  “Line!” “Line!” “Line!” Over and over again. It became hard to accept. Unlike the scene in which Tommy emerged from the outhouse, he wasn’t doing anything in this scene. It wasn’t like he had to walk and talk at the same time; he was just standing there, looking at Juliette. Tommy eventually made it to the line “You’re lying! I never hit you!” which wound up sounding like “You’re a lion! I never heat you!”; this despite Sandy’s repeated requests for a better, cleaner take. Not that it mattered. Virtually none of Tommy’s captured audio performance was usable, given the sound crew’s inexperience and the fact that they had to keep stopping and starting during Tommy’s takes to load more film.

  I was reclining nearby on the floor, next to Amy, the makeup artist. Tommy came over and squatted next to us. “I don’t need you to talk to her,” he said, as though Amy didn’t exist. “I need you to watch the screen and help me.”

  “I can help you from here.”

  “No, you can’t. Come with me to monitor.”

  We went over to Raphael’s Giggle Tent. Sandy was there with him.

  “How this come out?” Tommy asked Raphael.

  “Great,” he said.

  I followed with “Perfect. Keep going.” What else, at this point, could anyone tell him?

  “Oh, you just say that,” Tommy said, and left me, Raphael, and Sandy alone in the Giggle Tent.

  “Where is he from, anyway?” Raphael asked me. “Where does he say he’s from?”

  “New Orleans,” I said.

  Close-up time. Time, in other words, for Tommy to say “You’re taking me apart, Lisa!” with the camera right in his face. When Tommy made his first go at the shot, a few people on set recognized the attempted reference to Rebel, but no one had the heart to tell him he was mangling the line. “My arm’s gone!” crew people started calling out. “Stop taking me apart!” Tommy became agitated and angry in the manner of someone with an itch he’d lost all hope of scratching. I’d mentioned to Safowa that Tommy had gotten the line wrong. She took me aside and said, “You should really tell him, Greg. Really. You should.”

  She was right. So I took Tommy aside, looked at him squarely, and told him he had the line wrong. It was tearing and not taking.

  “Oh,” Tommy said. I was surprised by how calmly he absorbed this news. It turned out that was just camouflage, because the first thing Tommy did was turn around and yell at the slate person for picking up his jacket off the floor. He followed that up by telling the camerapeople what a terrible job they were doing. “I see your camerawork,” Tommy scoffed, “and you need to do a better job.” One of the cameramen’s assistants, who was charged with doing the lens, spent the rest of his tenure on The Room saying, “Just trying to do a better job!” whenever Tommy gave anyone camera-r
elated direction.

  Tommy returned to the heady task of saying “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” He was still having trouble. Sandy had given up hope and Juliette was laughing in Tommy’s face. Tommy was so consumed with getting the line right that he didn’t seem to notice. “Keep rolling, dammit!” he told the cameraman, take after blown take. Then, suddenly, Tommy got it, he said it, his arms thrusting up like terrible mallets: “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!”

  Sandy, who was sitting on an apple crate, had not been expecting this. “Cut!” he said, springing up. “Cut!”

  Tommy was veiny with exertion. He stood there, breathing, pointlessly triumphant. For a moment, it looked like his head might actually explode.

  James Dean wept.

  ten

  Do You Have the Guts to Take Me?

  Well, whatever you do, however terrible and however hurtful, it all makes sense, doesn’t it? In your head.

  —Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley

  Upon my return from Romania to L.A., I discovered that someone had spent considerable time in my apartment while I was gone. All the cupboards in the kitchen were open. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. Someone had dragged in a small rollout bed and left it in the living room. There were numerous long black hairs in the tub. Most troubling, an envelope containing my check for Retro Puppet Master was sitting on my desk; it had been opened.

  I’d spoken with Tommy briefly a few weeks ago, from France, where I’d met up with an old girlfriend after Retro wrapped. During that conversation he hadn’t mentioned anything about being in Los Angeles, much less being in the apartment. (He did, however, ask me if I was “doing sex” with the girl I was seeing.)