The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  I mangled my Viking callback, which was held next to a restaurant appropriately called the Stinking Rose. All I could think about was whether I was going to be homeless at the end of the day.

  When I got back to the apartment Tommy was once again on the phone. I knew he’d had his meeting with the late Stella Adler at around the time I was forfeiting my Viking role. “These Stella Adler people,” he was saying to whoever was on the other line, “they’re all behind schedule. Not as good at acting as I thought. They don’t even understand the subconscious. You know what, I’m sorry. I do my way.” He looked over at me. “Well, I have to go now. My friend is here.” He’d really doused that word in kerosene and set it on fire. For a long few seconds after hanging up he didn’t say anything. He was sitting on a chair, not making eye contact, his hands folded in his lap, smiling a hideously false smile. “And how was audition?”

  I stared right back at him. “Not good. It was better the first time.”

  “Oh, come on. I’m sure you did good job.”

  “Yeah. Sure you are.”

  He stood up. “Let’s go for a spin and talk about stuff.”

  I was nervous to go anywhere with him. I knew something bad was going to happen if I did. But if I didn’t go with him now, it meant the last two years of our friendship were based on my being a stupid, trusting idiot, and I didn’t want that to be true. I followed Tommy to his car. A few minutes later he was turning left on Sunset, not saying a word but driving faster than I’d ever seen him drive: the speed limit. Then he floored it. My hands flew out to grip the dashboard. “Tommy,” I said. “Slow down.”

  He veered recklessly around one car, another. “This guy from yesterday at the door—I guess he like you, huh? Best friend?”

  “Tommy, what is this really about?”

  “And your goofy friend. You talk to him all the time, huh? You tell him all these things.” His mouth was set at an ugly angle. He was driving slower now but somehow just as recklessly.

  “Tommy, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Why you talk about me?” His voice was slightly more aggressive.

  “I don’t even know what—”

  “Why you talk about me to this friend? Why? You talk about Jean Shelton! You talk about football! You talk about acting! My place! Why do you talk about me?” He was screaming at the windshield, hunched over his steering wheel, too disgusted to look over at me. “Why do you talk about me? I thought I trust you, and you talk about me!”

  Now I was scared. Tommy had completely lost control of himself. What was he so afraid of? I knew, then, that this was how Tommy’s Planet operated. I wondered if the reason he didn’t have any friends was that they all, eventually, wound up here: untethered, lost in space.

  “Tommy!” I said. “I don’t even know why you’re so upset!”

  “Why do you do this? Why do you do this?” He wasn’t hearing me. He was lost in the orbit of his own rage.

  All I had told my hippie friend about Tommy was simple stuff, basic stuff—fond stuff, even. I told him that Tommy was always willing to try new things, things he had no prior interest in, like playing football. I described his openness to new experiences. I told him how good Tommy could be, and how kind he often was, once you got to know him. I told him how grateful I was to Tommy that he let me live in his place, that he was the only one to tell me to keep going when everyone else in my life had urged me to give up. I know you don’t trust him, I said to my hippie friend, but Tommy really is a good guy, deep down.

  Tommy turned off Sunset Boulevard and pulled over—pulled over on the very street Joe Gillis uses in Sunset Boulevard while trying to avoid those loan sharks, after which he discovers Norma Desmond’s mansion. But I didn’t know any of this at that moment. I didn’t know that I was living Joe Gillis’s life in twenty-first-century form.

  “Look,” Tommy said, more calmly, and I knew instantly that he’d been preparing this speech for a while. “I decide I’m moving to Los Angeles to be actor. I just want people to leave me alone. I can’t have anyone around at this time. Now is time you find your own place. I cannot trust you. The feelings go away.” Tommy held his thumb and forefinger apart and squeezed them shut. That was our friendship now: a molecule’s width of nothing.

  This felt like a bad dream. Tommy was so oily with menace that all I wanted to do was run. The person whose support had meant so much to me was gone.

  I got out of the car and started walking away. Everything I’d worked for, I thought, was done. I’d wound up exactly where my mother had predicted I would. The tears in my eyes proved it.

  The next thing I knew Tommy was driving beside me, urging me to get back into his car. “I’m sorry, Greg,” he said, gulping the words. “I’m sorry I yell at you. I can trust you. You know that. You can stay in apartment.”

  That was all this ridiculous tirade had been about. Tommy was still capable of hurting and affecting and controlling me, and knowing that he could do all these things was, to him, the very stuff of relief. Now that Tommy had this dark assurance, all between us was, in his mind, fine. But it wasn’t fine. I now knew that everything my mom and friend had said about Tommy was right. There was something twisted and poisonous inside him—something potentially dangerous, even. It was just a matter of time.

  I got back in the car and said, “Okay,” but I never again looked at Tommy in the same way. I started searching for a new apartment that night.

  eleven

  “I’ll Record Everything”

  No one leaves a star. That’s what makes one a star.

  —Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard

  One afternoon, during the fifth week of production, Raphael approached me on set and said, “We need a line producer. If we don’t have a line producer by the end of this week, I’m leaving.”

  Raphael confessed to feeling “embarrassed” by the blinding amateurism of Tommy’s project, especially when he had to do his job in front of Birns & Sawyer’s owner, Bill Meurer, who’d recently taken to yelling at the crew about the disorder that was now disrupting his business. Worse, Raphael kept having to do other people’s jobs. There was simply no organization. Tommy was constantly hiring and casting and firing and hiring again, all while finding ways to sandwich two jobs into one: I was a lead actor but also the line producer. Sandy was the script supervisor but also the first assistant director. Peter Anway was the Birns & Sawyer sales representative but also, somehow, Tommy’s assistant.

  Tommy knew Raphael was upset but didn’t believe he would actually ever follow through on his threat to abandon the production. After all, Tommy had a line producer: me. So what was the problem? The problem was this: Tommy didn’t really know what a line producer was. He didn’t know how a film set was supposed to operate. Being a line producer on a chaotic movie shoot is a consuming full-time job, to say the least. The line producer has to run the production, make sure people are paid, help the art department fetch stuff, schedule call times, and do everything else that no director wants to do—and Tommy Wiseau was incapable of doing. To ask a person who is also a lead actor to do these things was self-defeating and ridiculous. I was being forced to rush away from scenes I was shooting, thereby stalling production, so I could order pizza for a starving cast and crew. Raphael was right. We needed help.

  Obviously, I understood Raphael’s concern, but I also knew what Tommy’s response was going to be. Tommy had to feel that all decisions were coming from him. If someone else proposed something, no matter how strong the proposal, Tommy would refuse to take any action. And unless Tommy believed he would directly benefit from an idea, no money would be spent, not under any circumstances. If Raphael needed a line producer, he was going to have to tell Tommy in such a way as to make Tommy feel like the idea was his and not Raphael’s—and good luck with that.

  Later in the day, on our lunch break, Raphael finally grabbed me in the long-odds hope that I would be able to influence Tommy’s decision. “Come on,” he said, “let�
�s go tell him.”

  Tommy, as always, was off eating his lunch alone in Johnny and Lisa’s living room set, where he couldn’t be disturbed. He didn’t like anyone but himself preparing his food plate, especially after the difficult first week of production. He occasionally voiced concerns that someone might spit in his food or drink. Tommy also refused to eat off plastic utensils, which he worried could be poisoned. In other words, he was already well on his way toward developing full-blown wicked-king paranoia. Raphael walked right up to him, with me balefully dragging behind.

  “Tommy,” Raphael said, taking a deep breath to shift into now-I’m-talking-to-Tommy mode. “Look, it’s time we get a line producer.”

  Even though Raphael had mentioned this to him many times, Tommy looked up with total surprise. Tommy had ninja skills when it came to ignoring things he didn’t want to hear or act on. When you’re able to see only what you want to see, it’s remarkably easy to live in a problem-free world. Tommy directed his metal fork at me. “We have Greg,” he said, as calmly as a magician might say “voilà.”

  “Tommy,” Raphael said, “Greg is not a line producer. Greg is acting in your movie, and you can’t keep putting this on him.”

  Tommy set down his utensil and placed his hands on his thighs. His expression became one of great, put-upon affront. “Greg can do job. He has skills. Why are you putting Greg down?”

  At this blatant attempt at manipulation, Raphael’s hands flew up. “I’m not putting Greg down. Tommy, listen to what I’m saying. I need a professional line producer to be here if we want to continue this. If I don’t have that, I’m leaving on Sunday.” With that, he turned and walked away.

  Raphael pointedly refused to bring the issue up again for the rest of the week. Tommy did nothing. When Sunday morning came, Raphael showed up and asked me if a new line producer had been hired. I said no, of course not. “Then I’m not shooting,” Raphael said. “Good-bye, Greg. C’est fini.” He began to pack up his equipment as Tommy approached him.

  “Greg is here,” he said to Raphael, who kept his back to Tommy as much as possible while he got his gear together. “Greg is here.” Again and again, Tommy kept repeating this, with growing anger, while Raphael headed over to Peter Anway to shake his hand and say good-bye. Peter accepted the shake with obvious alarm. They were speaking quietly, so I couldn’t hear them, but I did notice that all of Raphael’s guys—half the crew, in other words—were now packing up. Crews will almost always follow a respected DP’s lead. If he leaves, they leave, too. Tommy noticed Raphael’s crew packing up and promptly lost control. He began bouncing around the set, screaming at people, calling them traitors, accusing them of wanting to sabotage his “feature-movie project.” They ignored him, which only made Tommy more hysterical.

  I was watching yet another disaster unfold on the set of The Room. Locating and hiring a group of competent professionals accustomed to working together—and willing to work under Tommy—was not something that could be done quickly or cheaply. This movie, I thought to myself, was dead in the water. At this rate, no production on earth could survive Tommy. I couldn’t see any lifelines. In the midst of all this chaos, the actors all bailed and went home.

  Tommy was still yelling at Raphael, his wobbling finger outthrust: “You’re a very disrespectful person! I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re very disrespectful! I can’t throw away million dollars, hire hundred people, because you tell me so!” Raphael, ignoring Tommy, was still circulating around the set, saying farewell to his colleagues. Tommy was following Raphael from a distance, heaving insults at him like rotten fruit. “Very, very disrespectful! You will not sabotage my project! We do my way!”

  When he had had enough, Raphael turned to Tommy and said, calmly, “Tommy, I was very open with you. I can’t continue to work like this. I gave you until today to hire a line producer and you ignored me. So there’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry.” With admirable dignity, he waved good-bye to the rest of us and made his way to his car.

  “Fine,” Tommy said, spinning around to face the remaining members of his production. “Let him go! We don’t need this guy. We don’t need him.”

  Raphael was willing to leave without picking up his last paycheck, but his crew was not nearly as accommodating. They wanted to be paid. Now. It was quickly turning into a mob scene, with the remaining crew yelling at Tommy and Tommy yelling back at them. Poor Peter Anway wedged himself between Tommy and the angry crew members, who might as well have been brandishing pitchforks and torches. “Please, guys,” Peter said. “Let’s all just calm down and talk this through.”

  Tommy, the most irate of anyone, yelled, “I don’t have to talk! Calm down nothing! Raphael’s disrespectful. It’s his problem. It’s not my problem!”

  “Just pay us, you son of a bitch,” one of Raphael’s people demanded. You could feel weeks of frustration burbling up. Some of these guys were plainly prepared to worsen the asymmetrical quality of Tommy’s face.

  Tommy looked at the guy who called him a son of a bitch, his eyes lidded and heavy. Then, something seemed to reboot in his mind, and he made a big, sweeping, carnival-barker gesture. “Everyone, inside! We have emergency meeting!”

  Knowing they had to suffer through Tommy’s emergency meeting to get paid, everyone simultaneously groaned as they filed into Birns & Sawyer. The office we wound up in was not large, and the air was suffused with the hot stench of anger, body odor, and bad breath. “Okay,” he said. “So here we are. Let’s have discussion. We have obviously problem today, but we here to talk. It’s America. I’m an American, just like you.”

  The absurdity of this comment was met with some giggling.

  “American with accent,” Tommy said, waving away the laughter. “So be it.” He looked around. “We like to know who stay today. Because we will continue production. Okay? We are not going anywhere. No one will ruin my movie.” His voice, by this point, was slightly quivering. “Production will continue. Cameras will keep rolling.”

  In fact, the cameras were rolling at that moment. At the beginning of production, Tommy had hired a young Czech kid named Markus—he’d been doing odd jobs at Birns & Sawyer when Tommy found him—to shoot the rough footage for a making-of documentary about The Room. Tommy’s orders to Markus were to film everything, all the time. Oftentimes Markus stuck his Canon right into people’s faces. Sandy, at one point, shoved the camera away and said, “Turn that off or I will.” Other members of the production more bluntly told Markus to “stay the fuck away” whenever they saw him coming. Markus revealed this resistance to Tommy, who said, “We don’t care what they say. Keep going.”

  And now Markus, ever diligent, was filming Tommy’s emergency meeting. No one much liked that, given the circumstances. “Get your fucking camera out of my face!” one of Raphael’s people said.

  Tommy noticed this and said, “No!” His outburst momentarily shut up everyone in the room. Tommy pointed adamantly at Markus. “You keep filming. You may film this strike.” What no one knew—what I didn’t even know at the time—was that Tommy was daily watching all of Markus’s raw footage until the wee hours, which went some way toward explaining why he was always so late in the morning. All this time, Tommy had been spying on his own production. So just about every time someone made an unkind comment about Tommy, Markus was there recording. Just about every time someone laughed about Tommy’s acting, which was often, Markus got it. Tommy knew more about how he was perceived on set than anyone was aware. And now he let people know what he knew. He began pointing out crew members in the crowd and repeating back to them some nasty comment they’d made. “This guy,” Tommy was saying, “this guy here, with the hat? I know what you’re saying. You say I’m bad actor? I say you’re bad crew member.”

  Tommy’s emotional insurance policy scheme, if that’s what it was, worked. The mood in the room softened immediately—whether because people felt bad or guilty or genuinely worried, I have no idea, but there was now enough fragile goodwill between all
parties to move forward in a civil manner. “We’ll work for you,” one of Raphael’s people said, “if you meet our basic demands.”

  Tommy said he was willing to hear those demands.

  They were: Tommy couldn’t keep showing up four hours late. Tommy couldn’t take the HD camera home with him every night, because it delayed the already delayed process of setting up in the morning. Tommy needed to pay the crew decently. If the crew stayed for ten hours, Tommy needed to include dinner.

  Tommy had heard enough. “Please stop,” he said. “Stop this nonsense. Have respect for producers. You guys are flying in the sky.”

  “Then pay us,” someone new said, astonished that these reasoned and reasonable demands could be called “nonsense.” “We’re done!”

  “Yeah,” another said. “Just give us our check and we’ll get out of here. We don’t want to work for you.”

  Tommy kept repeating, over and over, that all this was “nonsense,” that in Hollywood this was “how things work.” “Be professional,” he said. “Stop this crying.”

  I said, over the arguing, “Tommy, just pay them.”

  Again there was silence. Tommy looked at me, at them. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t have enough checks at this time. And I notice you guys, all of you, you say very condescending things in your statements. It’s on the camera. Look, we will pay you later. We cannot pay you now.”

  Uproar. The crowd was closing in on Tommy; his directorial force field was rapidly giving way. “Guys!” Peter Anway said. He was standing next to me, in the back of the room, trying to shout sense into someone, anyone. “Everybody calm down! It’s fine.” No one acknowledged him. Peter looked over at me, terrified. This shoot was his responsibility. If a fight broke out and Birns & Sawyer got turned upside down, Meurer would likely fire him. The battery powering Peter’s famous, plugged-in grin had expired. Tommy was almost certainly going to be assaulted if something wasn’t done—even though he might well have deserved it.