The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  Tommy would milk this power position as long as he could. Even if he were physically attacked, he’d refuse to do the right thing. “Tommy has checks at his house,” I said to Peter.

  “Go get them,” Peter said.

  I muscled through the crowd and went to Tommy’s apartment to grab a handful of Bank of America checks from the huge stack on his living room table. When I got back, everyone was lined up waiting outside Birns & Sawyer. I held up the checks and they cheered. “Thank you,” Peter Anway kept saying. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Tommy spent an hour writing out checks. His signature, illegible on the smoothest and most lucid of days, was an infuriated slash. After every slash, he handed the check to its recipient and said, “Go inside and make copy. We need a copy!”

  • • •

  A few people stayed on, including Sandy. “We’re completely fucked,” he told me. “I don’t know how long I can do this. I can do it for a little bit longer but I don’t know how much longer. Maybe if Tommy gives me a director credit I might stick around.”

  No chance, I told him. Sandy then told me that a buddy of his was working on a big show—The West Wing, I think. This buddy of Sandy’s had bags under his eyes from all the work but he was making what Sandy described as “wheelbarrows of money.” If Sandy left, we really were done. Sandy helped set up eyelines, blocked scenes, worked on the dialogue, and established a basic through-line of minimal coherence. I knew Sandy needed more money, so I wrote him an extra week’s check as incentive to stay and sneaked it by Tommy.

  Peter Anway had asked for a few days to go through his contacts in order to find a new DP. When he found someone, Tommy, Sandy, and I came in to Birns & Sawyer to meet him. His name was Graham. Peter described him as a talented young upstart from USC’s film school. He’d already directed a couple of music videos and had experience with HD filmmaking. Graham was a thin, pointy-looking guy who was upbeat and eager about learning new techniques in his craft.

  Peter floated behind us nervously as we began watching Graham’s music-video reel. The title appeared over black. “Oh, wow,” Tommy said. “He does the nice thing. Oh, very good job. Wow. Such excellent work.” The actual demo reel hadn’t even started but Tommy was in full charm mode. That, or Tommy really thought that a blank screen was a display of peerless talent. Graham was obviously finding Tommy’s oohing and aahing a little excessive but smiled all the same. When the reel was done, Tommy immediately began going over with Graham what he wanted. Sandy would occasionally interrupt to provide some sanity-based addenda. Whenever Tommy wasn’t paying attention, Sandy would pull Graham aside and say, “This movie is—and you’ll have to trust me—this movie is going to be absolutely crazy.”

  “So what do you say?” Tommy finally asked Graham. “This is feature movie. Do you want to do it?”

  Graham was still several years away from thirty, and being asked, at that age, to take over photographing a feature film was a big deal, even with someone as wacky as Tommy at the helm. Plus, if Graham took the gig, he’d get to work more with Birns & Sawyer, as well as with high-definition cameras, which few young filmmakers at the time had the opportunity to play with in a professional setting.

  “Okay,” Graham said. “I’ll do it.”

  Tommy went away after that, leaving Graham with Sandy and me.

  “Here’s what you need to know,” Sandy said. “Greg’s the line producer. He’s also a lead actor.”

  Graham began nodding and then, suddenly, stopped. He looked at us both. “What?”

  “I’ve never been a line producer,” I said. “I don’t even know what a line producer is, technically.”

  Sandy continued: “That crazy guy you just met? He’s the star, director, writer, producer, and one of the executive producers. We don’t know who else is producing this turkey because we haven’t met them. He has a shitload of money but won’t say what he does or where he’s from.”

  Graham looked at Sandy for a moment. “What the heck is this thing about?”

  Sandy: “It’s not about anything. It makes absolutely no sense.”

  Graham, slowly: “Okayyyy.”

  Sandy: “You’ll catch on to what’s going on here really quickly. People don’t believe the stories I tell about this experience. Oh, another thing: He bought all this equipment.”

  Graham looked over at some pricey cameras sitting nearby. “It must have a huge budget, right? Nobody buys this much equipment. Is there some big studio behind him?”

  “Totally independent. It’s cinematic masturbation, basically.”

  Tommy was walking out of Birns & Sawyer with Peter Anway, holding a sizable box. He’d just spent an immigrant family’s yearly earnings on a new lens for his HD camera.

  Graham took this in. “I think I got it,” he said somewhat jokingly. “This is obviously a huge money-laundering scheme.”

  At that moment, I had absolute confidence that Graham would be able to handle this movie, and Tommy. Plus, he’d bring into the production half a dozen crew members—a little pocket of the USC film-school mafia.

  We escorted Graham to the interior stage. The first thing Graham said was, “This is way too small to shoot in. Plus it needs air-conditioning.” Tommy’s two-camera 35mm/HD setup proved especially baffling to him. “What is this?” he asked, after looking at the camera mount for a long time.

  “Tommy had that made special to fit the two camera formats,” Sandy said.

  “Why?” Graham asked.

  “We don’t know,” Sandy said.

  “How do you even light this set?”

  “Poorly.”

  Tommy approached now, wanting to know what Graham thought about the two-format camera mount. Graham diplomatically phrased his concerns to Tommy, off whom they bounced without making a mark. “This is our place,” Tommy said proudly. “Our big Hollywood thing. You see, we are first ones ever in Hollywood to shoot with two cameras, thirty-five millimeter and HD, at the same time.”

  Graham ran his hand over his mouth. He would be doing a lot of that over the next few days.

  • • •

  We had a week off before filming picked up again, but I had no respite. Amber’s and my relationship was going about as well as The Room. She accused me of being constantly exhausted, distant, distracted, which I was. We fought a lot, and neither of us was ever wholly right and neither of us was ever wholly wrong. Amber was resentful that the Room gig had gotten me out of retail while she was still struggling at her miserable counter job and mired in debt. I couldn’t understand her envy. I felt like you’d have to be a wartime refugee to be envious of my current work situation. On one attempted date, she closed the night with “I liked you so much better when you were broke.”

  On our first day shooting with Crew Number Two, the mood was decidedly more indie, which I realize is quite a statement. This suited Tommy, because it meant he had hardly anyone else his age around. Tommy is often very playful with young people, the younger the better, but people his own age—especially film-industry people his own age—made him prone to fits and tantrums, probably because he felt self-conscious and challenged by them. The problem was that the first crew was the cream of what a production like this could have reasonably expected to score. Crew Number Two had talent, but not nearly as much experience.

  Our first day back in production was also the day Raphael came in to pick up his check. He found me during lunch. I wrote the check and brought it to Tommy for his signature. Tommy looked at the check, spotted Raphael’s name, and tore it up on the spot. “Absolutely not!” Tommy said. “He can wait like everyone else!” No one, as far as I knew, was waiting to be paid for anything that day. Raphael didn’t see this, thankfully. Tommy then told me he’d tear up every check I brought to him, if necessary. Raphael would not be paid until Tommy was ready to pay him.

  I returned to Raphael and told him that Tommy was still pouting. “Am I,” he asked, “going to have to come in every day before I get paid?”

  �
�I’ll work on it for you,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

  The first scene shot with the new crew involved Lisa and her mother, Claudette, talking about Johnny. Carolyn Minnott, who was playing Claudette, welcomed the informal new atmosphere heralded by Crew Number Two. “Do we get to see a full script this time around?” she asked, only partly joking. Carolyn liked to remark that every one of her scenes in The Room amounted to the same thing: “You should marry Johnny—he’s the perfect man! Also, I hate this person and that person. And now I have to go home.” This day’s particular scene, however, had Lisa admitting to Claudette that she was—in the words of Tommy’s original script—“doing sex” with someone else. Also in the original script, this scene opens with Lisa answering the phone to talk to her mother. While writing the scene, Tommy forgot, at some point, that Lisa was on the phone, so he ends the scene with Lisa walking her mother to the door and saying good-bye. It’s the most wonderfully surreal thing I’ve ever read.

  Juliette Danielle and Carolyn Minnott share a much-needed laugh during a break from shooting.

  On that day, the heat was unbearable. You could cut it with a knife, salt it, eat it, and use it to wipe your mouth afterward. Apparently it was a mere ninety-four degrees in the studio, but it felt like twice that. Tommy had refused to buy an air conditioner for a long time. He finally did, but it broke down immediately.

  I watched Carolyn and Juliette rehearse for a little while before going outside to cool down. Some of the younger, newer crew guys were out there doing the same thing. We talked a bit about Tommy, and how eccentric he was, and before too long I was saying, “You haven’t seen anything yet. Follow me.” I took them to Raphael’s old Giggle Tent outside the studio, which had a VCR loaded with unused footage from the first two weeks of filming. I started showing them some of Tommy’s greatest acting hits. “Oh my God,” one of them said, laughing. “This is so terrible.”

  Another one, looking back so as not to be overheard by anyone, said, “Seriously, Greg. Does he think this is serious? This is real?”

  “Completely,” I said. “Tommy thinks this is the next Streetcar Named Desire.”

  “What’s he planning to do with this movie?”

  “Submit it to the Academy Awards.” Everyone laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. That was Tommy’s stated goal.

  We heard a commotion outside the tent; it turned out Carolyn had passed out from the heat. Luckily, Juliette caught her. When I got into the studio, Carolyn was sitting on the floor, drinking from a bottle of water. Everyone, obviously, was very concerned—Tommy most of all. Liability was the word floating behind his eyes when he asked me to take Carolyn to the emergency room. So Carolyn was helped into my Lumina and I drove her to Cedars-Sinai.

  Carolyn was sixty-four at the time of filming and lived in San Clemente with her family. Every day she made the two-hour round-trip drive up from Orange County for filming. She had been making this drive now for months, starting with casting and rehearsals. And she was never late. She’d always wanted to be an actress, but having a family waylaid her aspiration. When her kids got old enough to go to college, she started looking around again, booked a few small parts, eventually became frustrated, and cooled down. She still kept an eye out for opportunities, but they were few and far between. Then, in Backstage West, she saw an audition announcement for The Room.

  Carolyn, too, was a pro. She never complained, did exactly as she was told—even if that included a scene in which her character announced that she had breast cancer with no apparent concern—and delivered one of the more coherent performances in The Room. It helped, I think, that Tommy was unusually considerate when dealing with Carolyn. He never barked at her. Maybe this was because she, like he, was trying to fulfill a later-in-life dream of movie stardom. Or maybe she just made him feel younger.

  Carolyn was quiet and, I think, a little embarrassed as we drove to the hospital. She laughed when she told me what line she said right before she fainted: “If you think I’m tired today, wait until you see me tomorrow.”

  I checked her in at Cedars-Sinai. The ER nurse said, “What are you doing at your age, passing out in the heat?”

  Carolyn sighed. “I’m working on a movie,” she said.

  “You poor thing,” the nurse said. “Well, that movie of yours should have air-conditioning.”

  • • •

  When we returned to the condo set, Tommy and Sandy were having an unusually vociferous argument. It began when Tommy referred to Sandy as his assistant and told Sandy to let him do the “director job,” which, quite understandably, made Sandy angry. “No, no, no, Tommy,” Sandy was saying. “I’m not your assistant. And I’m telling you this scene is just . . . this is ridiculous. It’s totally, totally ridiculous.”

  “No, it’s not,” Tommy said. “It’s how I want it.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not ridiculous!”

  When I approached them, Sandy looked over at me with an all-praise-God-you’re-back expression. Sandy mistakenly believed that Tommy listened to me.

  At issue was the fact that Lisa begins the scene talking to her mother on the phone and ends by walking her to the door. Yet, somehow, their entire conversation gets recorded on Johnny and Lisa’s answering machine? Tommy was adamant that the answering machine record the conversation, so that, in the next scene, Johnny can find the tape on which Lisa admits she’s having an affair. Tommy had been alerted to the rather intractable space-time conundrum the scene created, but he was fixated on having Johnny find the recorded conversation. In the end, Tommy decided to shoot the scene so that Johnny overhears Lisa and Claudette’s conversation from the condo’s spiral staircase. Then, when Lisa and Claudette leave the scene, Tommy wanted Johnny to proceed to the phone and hook it up to a tape recorder.

  I’ll start with the most obvious problem: The living room set was fifteen feet across. Johnny would have had as much luck hiding from Lisa and Claudette on the staircase as he would lying at their feet. An only slightly smaller problem was the method by which Johnny sought to record his future wife’s future conversations. Bugging a phone generally takes a little more effort than plugging it into a yard-sale tape recorder, and you need a different kind of tape than a ninety-minute Maxell—which Johnny, of course, happens to already have in his shirt pocket. None of it made any sense, but this was what Tommy wanted to shoot. Some crew guys were setting up the coverage shot of the tape recorder when I came in.

  “You can’t shoot that,” Graham told Tommy. “Sandy’s right.”

  Tommy was wholly unruffled by their concerns. “We shoot like this. How we want.”

  “How you want,” Sandy said. “I don’t want to shoot it this way. You don’t need to have Johnny record anything. You already have him overhearing the conversation.” It was an undeniable point. Johnny hears his future wife admit she’s having an affair. Does he now need proof he has proof?

  “I disagree,” Tommy said.

  In interviews about The Room, Tommy always shows an unusual amount of defensiveness about Johnny’s tape-recorder surveillance of Lisa. He maintains that Johnny’s method is a legitimate way to record telephone conversations. Tommy believes this because, in his personal life, he has taped his own phone calls for years using similarly low-tech techniques. Whenever anyone called him—including me—he put the call on speaker and hit record on the same yard-sale tape recorder he now wanted to film. This was why he always said “I’m listening” whenever I called. He was listening. He was also recording. I know all this because I eventually found a huge cache of tapes with hours and hours of phone calls on them, some of which were ours. I confronted him. He denied it at first. When he realized he couldn’t deny it, he claimed he’d done this to study my accent, in order to lose his own. I told him that didn’t sound like a very plausible explanation, and from then on, I hung up on him if he ever put me on speaker. Then he became paranoid that I was taping him. Whenever we were on the phone, he would repeatedly ask me, “Does anybody listen this conve
rsation?”

  “Fine,” Sandy said, dabbing at his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. “I’m too hot to argue anymore. Let’s just shoot the thing.” When Tommy walked away, Sandy said to me, “Nobody is going to see this movie anyway.”

  The first task was to shoot Tommy on the condo set’s spiral staircase while he looks down at Claudette and Lisa as they have their conversation ten feet away from him. Tommy wanted to be filmed through the bars of the staircase, which made him look like an imprisoned long-haired Kong.

  “This doesn’t work,” Sandy said, watching the setup from behind the camera.

  I overheard Graham say to his cameraman that if someone had told him about Tommy, he would have refused to believe that such a filmmaker could exist. Once they got the eyelines set, Tommy went off to makeup for the fifth time that day. Graham started looking around the room. “What’s the deal with all these candles?” he asked. “And what’s with these red curtains? Why does the CD tower have only three CDs in it? Who on earth decorated this set?” (He might as well have said: “The candles, the music, the sexy dress—what’s going on here?”)

  No one answered Graham, which was all the answer Graham needed. His shoulders sagged as Tommy placed himself on the spiral staircase again. They started to film, but Tommy couldn’t stand still. He kept bobbing, moving, and messing up the shot’s composition. “Stop moving, please,” Graham said.

  “I’m not moving,” Tommy said.

  They tried it again. Again Tommy was moving.

  “Please stop moving,” Graham said, through clenched teeth.

  Eventually, Tommy stopped moving, but now came the acting part. This is what Tommy had to say: “How could they say this about me? I don’t believe it. I’ll show them. I’ll record everything.” Yet again Tommy’s humble, self-scripted lines proved too much for him. After an hour of blown takes, botched lines, and Tommy’s calls for “Line!” Graham asked someone to write the lines down on a large piece of paper and hold them up so Tommy could read them. If you watch this scene carefully, you can see Tommy’s eyes scan the impromptu cue card being held up before him. Once we finally got the shot, Graham turned to me and said, “He wrote this, right?”