The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  Tommy was too proud to admit that he’d be spending New Year’s Eve alone, but I knew he was. I wasn’t surprised when he started pestering me to come down to witness his Hollywood sign proclamation in person. Instead, I stayed in San Francisco, too depressed to do much more than watch movies all day. Iris had already warned me that pilot season this year was going to be rough. Reality shows had become so popular that the networks were scrambling away from traditionally scripted television like roaches from fluorescent light. Who needed actors when civilians were willing to eat bugs on camera?

  When I confessed to my mother that I was going back to L.A. to live with Tommy for a few weeks while I found another place, she braced herself against the nearest firmly mounted object. She’d thought I was now home for good. “I warned you,” she said. “I told you! He’s always been a weirdo, but now you know he’s a weirdo—and you’re still going back there? Come on. Who did I raise?”

  This succeeded only in putting steel in my back. When I got Retro Puppet Master, I hoped I had kick-started my strenuous climb to regular work. Things, of course, hadn’t quite panned out that way. My mom, on the other hand, couldn’t figure out why, after doing a movie, I wasn’t already a big star. She wondered how much more time and effort this megastardom of mine was going to take. The one thing that managed to cheer me up was a Christmas card from Iris. “You have everything it takes to become a successful actor in L.A.,” it read.

  One day, right after Christmas, I got a call from my hippie friend who had, in some ways, inadvertently instigated this whole mess by going toe to toe with Tommy on the phone a few months ago. I didn’t blame him for wanting to confront Tommy about his bizarre need for secrecy; I knew he was trying to look out for me.

  The first thing my friend said: “I just saw a movie you need to watch. Now.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

  I’d seen previews for the film but knew only a little about it. “Really? What’s it about?”

  “Just trust me, Greg. You need to see this film.” My friend, a longtime film editor, was also a self-proclaimed movie snob, so it was rare that he ever got that excited about anything that wasn’t Casablanca or Cinema Paradiso.

  A couple of hours later I met my friend at Festival Cinemas in downtown Walnut Creek, where he’d already purchased two tickets. I didn’t know what to expect from the film, having never read the work of Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the novel Ripley was based on, and having never seen any of director Anthony Minghella’s previous films. (I’ve since rectified this.)

  “So why do you think I should see this?” I asked while we waited for the previews to begin.

  “Just wait. After I saw it, I couldn’t stop thinking about the move you’re contemplating.”

  I laughed. “My move? Why?”

  He didn’t laugh. “You’ll see.”

  The last decade has brought about a general and much-needed critical rehabilitation of Ripley, which was simply ahead of its time. Today a lot of people regard it as one of the best films of the last twenty years. It’s certainly among the most beautiful: Italy hasn’t looked so good since Fellini. The performances, too, are affecting and powerful. The first time I watched it I noticed all that stuff, yes, but it had far more piercingly personal resonance than that. From Ripley’s opening scenes, in which Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley vacuums up all the requisite bits of knowledge he’ll need to convince Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf that they were at Princeton together, I knew precisely why my friend was forcing me to watch it. Tom Ripley is someone who wants to belong to respectable society so deeply that he’ll do anything. He loves Dickie Greenleaf’s life, and this love turns into an obsession with Dickie himself. Tom is so skilled at reading people and situations that he’s usually able to get what he wants, but he’s utterly incapable of recognizing when he crosses the line into abject creepiness. Those who call Tom on his strangely obsessive social-climbing tendencies are usually punished with violence. In this way, Tom’s small, innocent lies become gargantuan, soul-killing lies. Murder becomes the foundation of the life he makes for himself, the life he refuses to let go of. Tom’s brotherly attraction to Dickie becomes a spurned lover’s rage when Dickie tries to cut him out of his life. When the film places Dickie and Tom in a small boat off the coast of San Remo, both yelling about what they believe their friendship really constitutes, my stomach squirmed in wormy recognition. I simply couldn’t believe what I was watching. I couldn’t believe how well it captured what Tommy’s and my friendship had come to feel like. All of which made me Walnut Creek’s least happy and most startled moviegoer when Tom grabs an oar from the boat and beats Dickie to death with it.

  I was stunned by the aftermath of this scene: Tom sobbing and cuddling up to Dickie’s corpse on the floor of the small boat while bloody water sloshes over them both. It was one of the most intense and chilling things I’d ever seen. I looked over at my friend, who was already staring at me. He said one word over Ripley’s desperate weeping: “Tommy.”

  That night, I came down with the worst flu I’ve ever had. I couldn’t walk, think, sleep, or talk. I was vomiting every thirty minutes for the entire night and didn’t get out of bed for three days afterward. By day four, I was so weak I could barely lift my arms. I felt as though I’d been torn apart by microscopic locusts.

  My mother tried to convince me not to go back to L.A. She failed. My hippie friend tried to convince me not to go back to L.A. He failed. Patricia Highsmith, Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Anthony Minghella tried to convince me not to go back to L.A. They failed. Now my body was trying to convince me not to go back to L.A. It, too, failed. Two weeks later, against all logic, I was in my Lumina and heading back to Hollywood. My apartment in L.A. was, at the end of the day, all I had going for me; it was my life raft. If I wanted to keep my dream alive, I had to live on the raft I had, even if this meant that Tommy was, however briefly, my fellow passenger.

  The last thing my mother told me before I left Danville was this: “You are at a crucial time in your life. You’re twenty-one years old. Don’t make the wrong decision. Wrong decisions can take an entire life to undo. You’re playing with fire.” Even my father thought I was crazy for going back to L.A. He made it very clear, in fact, that my choice meant I didn’t have a “normal mind.” But if having a “normal mind” meant reporting day after day to a job my heart wasn’t in, for months and years on end, then no, I didn’t have a normal mind, and moreover didn’t want one.

  • • •

  During the drive down to Hollywood, I thought about what could have been driving Tommy’s renewed interest in Los Angeles and acting. I’d managed to piece together some of Tommy’s acting trajectory. I knew, for instance, that he’d made his first attempts in the late 1980s, when he was commuting to his LACC classes from San Francisco. After that, he’d moved to L.A. and bounced around: Westwood, West Hollywood. He’d most likely begun living in the Crescent Heights place in the early to mid 1990s, which was also when he made his last serious push to become an actor. I’d heard a circa-1994 tape in which an innocent, exuberant Tommy chronicled his darkest acting hours, telling himself to “try acting for couple more months,” and repeating to himself, “I believe I have something to offer. I will do it. I really have something. To break me take time. Take really time.” By 1995 or so, however, his aspirations had fizzled, thanks in no small part to his no-nonsense L.A. acting teacher Vincent Chase. After that, Tommy left acting behind and retreated to San Francisco. But he kept renting that L.A. apartment during the years that followed, which means his dream never really went away; it was simply dormant. After his San Francisco car accident, Tommy enrolled in San Francisco acting classes. He began Jean Shelton’s class, where, for the first time, as I heard him happily say on another tape, “someone pick me” for a scene partner. That someone was me. This random collision ended up changing everything for us both.

  I reached the apartment after midnight. My heart was jackha
mmering in my chest as I neared the door. I entered to find the entire room walled off by thick black velvet drapes hanging from the ceiling. It was like Tommy had turned one side of the apartment into a cable-access television set: Apartment Chiller Theater.

  Before I could do the sensible thing and flee, Tommy’s large white face peeked out from a gap in his black velvet curtains. “Well, hello, stranger,” he said.

  I was quiet for a moment. “Hey,” I said.

  Tommy stepped out from behind the curtains. “You can see there have been some changes in apartment. This is now my private corner. No one is allowed back here. Unless they have special access.”

  I was more than fine with Tommy’s private black-curtained refuge. It was a little Addams Family, maybe, but at least it meant I still had my own space.

  I’d been back in the apartment for only a few minutes when Tommy started asking me for my agent’s contact info and the name of the headshot photographer I’d used. An image of him crashing into Iris Burton’s office—and her driving a wooden stake into his heart—popped into my mind. I saw that he’d prepared a stack of envelopes prelabeled with casting directors’ addresses. I had been in the same room as Tommy for five minutes and already I felt suffocated.

  He announced that if I decided to continue living in the apartment, my rent would be upped. Instead of paying Tommy less than one-quarter of the mortgage a month (Tommy’s story was inconsistent as to whether he owned or rented the place), I was now to pay him half. “You need to learn responsibility,” he said. “The school is over.” This, too, was fine, since I didn’t want to keep living my life in indentured servitude to Tommy. But it meant my already diminished savings were going to run out more quickly than I’d anticipated. I promised myself I would spend the next morning looking for part-time jobs and a new place. Already I could feel that the apartment’s old, beloved energy had become warped by Tommy’s presence. Tommy may or may not be a vampire, but I can say with surety that, at least in close quarters, he’s eminently capable of draining the life and light right out of someone.

  While I was unpacking my stuff in my bedroom, Tommy stood in the doorjamb. “You look so skinny and pale, my God,” he said. “What happened to you? Are you ghost?”

  “I had the flu for two weeks,” I said. “Like I told you.”

  “How much weight did you lose?”

  “Ten pounds.”

  Tommy’s hands went to his stomach. “Well, you’re lucky! Maybe I should get sick, too, huh?”

  “I’m tired,” I told Tommy, hoping to convey that it was time for him to head back to his vampire wonder cave. “I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

  Tommy nodded, and I closed the door.

  Tommy stays up very late. I knew that, at the time. When you don’t live with someone, Tommy stays up very late is a curiosity, a personality quirk, an abstraction. When you live with someone, however, Tommy stays up very late swiftly defines the living dynamic. On that first night, Tommy spent an hour on the phone working on his diction with his friend Chloe. He could be heard repeating the phrases she was apparently feeding him (“Yes, I think so,” “Where is the nearest telephone?” “I don’t agree with you”), all in his valiant ongoing attempt to lose that ineradicable accent of his. The apartment was too small for me not to hear every syllable of every exchange.

  “How is my voice tonight?” Tommy would ask Chloe after ten or twelve attempts. “Less accent?” I assumed Chloe’s judgment was usually not affirmative, because Tommy would begin the process anew.

  After Chloe had had enough and hung up (or killed herself), Tommy busted out some English audiotape course he’d purchased. I listened to the rough chock of Tommy pressing the play button. Then: “You think it’s good, do you?” Tommy would repeat that: “You think it’s good, do you?” Then another chock, this time of the rewind button being pressed, followed by a whirring sound, and there the phrase was again: “You think it’s good, do you?” Tommy would repeat it, his intonation so hopelessly wrong. Tommy played and repeated the phrase “You think it’s good, do you?” for over an hour. He did it at least eighty times. I know because that’s when I stopped counting and put my pillow over my head.

  You think it’s good, do you? This wasn’t even a phrase the average native English speaker would say. Tommy should have been learning to say “I’d like a refund for these tapes, please.”

  I was fast asleep when my door opened and Tommy began doing pull-ups on the bar he’d installed in my doorway, which I’d somehow not noticed. It was 4:00 a.m. After a grunty set of ten pull-ups Tommy dropped to the floor with a thud and turned to pace around the living room like a caveman, after which he hit the chin-up bar again. Once he completed four sets, he closed the door.

  This is a nightmare, I thought. Either that, or Tommy was trying to convince me to leave.

  In the morning, I hit every service-industry and retail establishment I found on Sunset, Hollywood, and Santa Monica Boulevards. I probably filled out a few dozen applications that day. Near the end of my quest, I found myself in a gay bar that wasn’t due to open for a few hours. This wasn’t the kind of bar in which hipsters drank elegant potions and talked about the film industry. This was a slightly feral bar with an older clientele and dungeonlike décor.

  “I wanted to see if you guys are hiring?” I asked the manager. Well, they needed a bar back, which is the person who carries kegs and boxes of booze around and, per the manager, also occasionally cleaned the toilets. “I can do that,” I said desperately.

  The man’s eyes filled with strangely friendly pity. “I’m really sorry,” he said, “but you wouldn’t last one night in this place.”

  At the end of the day I walked four miles to drop off an application to work at a grocery store. I was told that the store didn’t have any positions open at the moment but that they’d keep my “stuff” on file. I’d never felt so defeated in my life.

  I spent the next few days walking around Los Angeles, hoping that while I was out, my home phone was ringing with prospects. Alas, it wasn’t. I did manage to do some constructive things, one of which was load up on literature at the Samuel French Bookshop on Sunset. Then I signed up for two courses at Santa Monica College: the History of Film and the History of Theatre. I’d resisted college for so long and been such an indifferent student in high school, I was a little stunned by how much I wound up loving both classes. I could thank Tommy, at least, for inadvertently making school an enjoyable endeavor.

  I spent a lot of time wishing I were more of a partier or a reveler—anything to break up the nights back in the vampire wonder cave—but I wasn’t. So while Tommy spent his evenings and nights and very late nights trying to lose his accent, I mostly read books with my door closed and my headphones on. One name I came across in several acting books was Jeff Corey, a character actor who’d been very successful in the 1940s. He was summoned to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a committee he ridiculed during his testimony. Following his blacklisting, Corey became a highly sought-after acting teacher. He’d worked with Gary Cooper, James Dean, Jack Nicholson, Sharon Tate, Leonard Nimoy, Jane Fonda, and, more recently, Shannen Doherty. Corey still ran a weekly acting class out in Malibu, so I made an appointment with him to see whether I could get in.

  The day of our meeting my Lumina didn’t start, and the bus to Malibu was as grueling as a trans-Siberian train. Tommy offered to drive me to the coast, which typically took an hour. I didn’t say anything about Corey or what I was doing in Malibu, for fear that he’d run into the house with an armful of headshots.

  We found Corey’s house on the Malibu cliffs, which overlooked Point Dume Beach, and I suggested to Tommy that, while he waited, he should take a swim or something. “I don’t go in ocean,” Tommy said. I tried to convince him that ocean water was actually very good for the body. Anything, basically, to keep him from curiously popping in on Corey’s and my meeting. “Are you kidding?” Tommy said. “Ocean’s not good for you. There
are monsters that bite your ass.”

  Tommy parked across the street and left me with these parting words as I started toward Corey’s house: “Be careful. The gigolo business doesn’t work how you think.”

  Corey took me to his guesthouse, where he held his classes, and which had a panoramic view of the Pacific as beautiful as any I’d seen. Corey himself was irritable and cranky in the way that only old men can pull off and make adorable. I sensed that Corey no longer had that many eager young visitors, but the man still loved to talk. The first thing he told me was that Bob Dylan lived across the street from him. (I immediately thought, Tommy Wiseau is blocking Bob Dylan’s driveway.) The second was that Elia Kazan, who had been one of my favorite directors, was a shitty tennis player and an even worse loser. He told me tales about when he’d done In Cold Blood and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and described working with James Dean on “his walk” the week before Dean was killed. I could take in Corey’s charactery face—all white hair and big unkempt eyebrows—and listen to his anecdotes for hours. I remember thinking that if someone were to play Jeff Corey in a film, the only two people who could have pulled it off were Burgess Meredith and Jeff Corey.

  After we’d talked for a while, Corey asked me to do a monologue. I did, and it came out sideways. I was, I admit, greatly intimidated by his direction: “Sit with your legs closer together! Come on, young man! Stand up and take command!” My monologue was rough, but Corey had mercy and invited me to take part in his class.

  The next morning, for the first time since I’d come back to L.A., Tommy’s curtains were slightly open, allowing me the chance to peer into his lair. It was as weird as I’d feared it would be. For a bed, Tommy had placed a regular twin mattress over a half-inflated air mattress, which meant he was sleeping at a tilty thirty-degree incline every night. For pillowcases, Tommy was using old T-shirts. He noticed me pondering these Wiseauvian masterpieces of squalid home décor. “How do you like my new creation?” he asked, as he held up one of the pillows. “This is my new thing.” Scattered across Tommy’s glass-topped desk were papers, his how-to-lose-your-accent tapes, the tape recorder he’d later use in The Room, exercise books, and yoga videos. His clothes were thrown everywhere. Half-empty glasses of water were sitting on the floor, some cloudier than others. Taped to the wall was a piece of paper, scrawled across which was one of Tommy’s more mysterious mantras: “I, me, you. Voice. Body. Mind. We all have that!”