by Greg Sestero
That night I started writing a screenplay about a young guy who lived with a lunatic in a house that had been built on a haunted Indian burial ground. I wasn’t expecting to sell the thing. It was pure therapy.
A few nights later—January 23, 2000—was the Golden Globes, known to Tommy as “the Golden Globe.” I was driving home from school, fighting my way through the limo traffic, and wishing desperately that I were flowing with it instead. When I walked into the apartment, Tommy was hanging upside down from the bedroom doorjamb’s pull-up bar like a bat. He was wearing his tank top and baggy sweats with multiple bleach stains. His eyes were closed. Being greeted by this vision of Tommy nearly made me sit down on the kitchen floor and quietly weep. The man-bat spoke: “Take your shoes off. I get sick because of all this bacteria, dammit.”
“Bacteria?” I said. “Are you serious?”
“Yes I am serious. I get sick because of all this bacteria. Sneezing like hell.” This was when I noticed that Tommy was wearing white surgical gloves. So it was official: Tommy had gone Howard Hughes nuts. “From now on,” he went on, “you must wash the hands, immediately. Leave your shoes outside. Don’t touch my things. I’m sensitive to all this stuff. Have respect.” Then Tommy curled up, grabbed the pull-up bar, released his legs, hung on for a moment, and finally dropped to the floor. “I’m starving,” he said, wobbling a little as the gathered blood rushed from his brain. “Let’s eat something.”
Tommy couldn’t bear to eat alone. He would suffer through hours of hunger-pain spasms to avoid the solitude. But I liked—even preferred—to eat alone. Sitting by myself at the end of a day was a way for me to think and reflect. Since I’d started living with Tommy, it had also become a useful time to plot.
“I’m not going out tonight,” I said. “It’s crazy traffic everywhere because of the Golden Globes.”
Tommy shrugged. “Golden Globe? So what. I’m not invited. Who cares. Let’s go eat. Go see feature movie. Something different. Find some chicks or something! I’m bored in this apartment. I can’t be in cage all day long. Why you keep me in cage? I think I will get married soon.”
Tommy was right about one thing: He was living in a cage; a self-constructed, curtained cage called Tommy Wiseau’s Life. That said, going out and eating was bound to be better than spending another evening in my bedroom while Tommy alternated between English-language mangling and pull-ups. I also knew if I stayed home I’d be tempted to watch the Golden Globes, and that was only going to remind me of how distressingly far away I was from the life I wanted.
We wound up at the Koo Koo Roo on Santa Monica Boulevard, which had recently become Tommy’s new favorite restaurant. From the moment we walked in, though, Tommy was off. Everything bugged him. The booths, the décor, the light from outside, the clientele, the small portions. (“Is there shortage here?” he asked.) When the server took our orders, Tommy started quizzing him on the chicken: how it was prepared, whether the chickens were clean, how many calories, why it was so expensive. The server walked away when Tommy dared him to find the most delicious piece of chicken they had. At one point, I had found all his goofiness entertaining, or at least tolerable, but now it was embarrassing.
After our interminable dinner, we were standing in front of the Beverly Cinemas trying to figure out what to go see. The Talented Mr. Ripley was still playing, and I somehow knew—I knew—that Tommy was going to suggest we go see it. If he did suggest Ripley, I decided I wasn’t going to tell him that I’d seen it a month ago; he’d just complain about not having been invited. Tommy scanned the posters and stopped on Ripley. I was watching his eyes, and the poster just snagged Tommy’s attention. Then he turned to me while pointing at the poster. “I want to see this movie.”
I’d seen several movies with Tommy. He’d always get bored and restless before it was over. Sometimes he got chatty within the first half hour and other times he fell fast asleep after ten minutes. Or he’d shout “Boring!” in the middle of the film. “There’s better acting in the Jean Shelton class!” When Ripley started, though, Tommy didn’t talk. He didn’t stir. He was wide-eyed and riveted from the very first scene. For me it was even better the second time, because now I was watching it through Tommy’s eyes. I was trying to decide if he was seeing it the way I had. When the scene of Tom beating Dickie to death came to pass, Tommy actually leaned back and clamped his hand over his mouth. When, at the end of the film, Tom asks his beguiled, deceived lover Peter to tell him “something nice about Tom Ripley” moments before strangling him to death, Tommy leaned forward in his seat and sat there with his face cupped in his hands. I kept glancing over at Tommy, thinking, What’s he feeling right now? What’s running through his head? Tom Ripley has to kill Peter, the only person who’s ever loved him. Why? Because to get that love he’d had to lie about who he really was.
For the first time since I’d known him, maybe for the first time in his life, Tommy insisted on staying in his seat through the entire end-credits crawl. When the lights came up, Tommy looked devastated. His eyes were wet, his mouth slightly pried open. He had the wrung-out look of a man who’d just come to the end of a long, doomed love affair. The movie had bludgeoned him to within an inch of his emotional life.
I didn’t think Tommy was a killer like Tom Ripley, but the movie told me that a tortured person can do horrible things for sympathetic reasons. And Tom Ripley was deeply sympathetic. So was Tommy.
I felt sad walking out of the theater. I realized that when Tommy had gone haywire in the car months ago, he had done so to avoid rejection. He’d decided that to avoid losing someone who potentially understood or accepted him, it was best to get rid of that person preemptively. That way, he could comfortably continue to live his deeply lonely life, consoled by his conviction that others had done him wrong.
Tommy and I didn’t talk much until after we got into his car. On La Cienega, some limos were cruising alongside us; the Golden Globes had just gotten out. Ripley had been nominated for five of them, including Best Actor for Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley and Best Supporting Actor for Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf. We pulled up to a red light; a limo idled next to us. Suddenly Tommy said, “You know what? I’m not waiting for Hollywood. I can make my own movie.”
I looked over at him. I knew better than to say anything right now.
“I can make movie,” he said again. “I will make better movie than these fuckers, you watch.” He sped up and cut off the next limo for emphasis. “I know they don’t want me. I know they don’t understand me. Guy with accent and long hair. So I show them. I show them what I can do.” Tommy had sent out more than a hundred headshots since he’d arrived in Los Angeles. He did, in other words, exactly what I’d done when I got here. No one had called him back. Not one person.
We returned to the apartment. Tommy drew his curtains and sat down at his desk. He was rubbing his forehead, his eyes as intensely focused as a laser beam. I started to head off to my bedroom but Tommy asked me to stay and talk with him some more. He ran his hands through his hair and slouched over and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he sat up. “You know what? Fuck it, man. I will write my own play. I’ll do my own project and it will be better than everybody else. You think this movie we just saw was tragedy? No. Not even close. I will make tragedy. People will see my project and . . . you know what? They will not sleep for two weeks. They will be completely shocked. You watch.”
I’d seen Tommy angry before, but this was different. For the first time since I’d known him, his anger had a discernible target. He wasn’t going to try to please Hollywood anymore. Forget the headshot game, the get-an-agent game, the audition game, the sell-yourself game. He’d make his own rules and create his own project. Ripley had planted a mysterious seed inside him. Excited by his own plan, Tommy stood up and pounded himself on the chest. “Listen to me, okay? I’m going to do it all myself. Everything. I’m going to show all these fuckers from Hollywood in their limousines.”
He started to pace and furious
ly describe the play or movie (he kept going back and forth about which one his project would be) he wanted to make, all of it coming to him on the fly. “So listen. Very important information. Are you ready? My movie will have seven main characters. I will play main character. I call him Johnny. He has this beautiful girl, Blondie, and his best friend—this all-America handsome guy. You will play him.
“It all take place in one room, this drama. Everybody is so close and life is perfect, but then girl, beautiful girl, she betray him. She sleep with his best friend. Everybody hurt and betray Johnny. So he become furious! He’s fed up with his life, with everybody, and decide to kill himself in front of entire world. Then everyone will see. People will be shocked. It will be big drama. After my creation, people will not sleep for two weeks. You watch. Hollywood want reaction? I give these bastards their reaction.”
Not until years later did I really understand what Tommy had done, which was to create his own personal version of the three main Ripley characters. This meant he mix-and-matched their characteristics according to his own strange value system, after which he placed them into a warped version of his own life experience. In Tommy’s story, the Tom Ripley character is half Lisa and half Mark, while Johnny is half the charismatic Dickie Greenleaf and half the innocent and lonely victim Tom Ripley. It’s such a strange interpretation of the story, but it was what Tommy took away from it. Tommy couldn’t see what the film was actually trying to tell him about himself.
“I play the best friend?” I asked, still mostly humoring him, never imagining that this scheme would last into the morning.
“I know the name of your character now,” Tommy said, looking at me. “You will be called Mark—like this guy Mark Damon.”
thirteen
“Leave Your Stupid Comments in Your Pocket”
Sometimes it’s interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be. This promised to go the limit.
—Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard
“Tommy!” Peter Anway said, all rubbing hands and grinning nervousness, when Tommy arrived on set. “Mr. Meurer is not happy with us right now. Do you understand? He doesn’t want to see that Rooftop set when he comes in today.”
Tommy always took the Meurer-to-Anway information-transit system seriously. Bill Meurer, in Tommy’s mind, represented the Hollywood establishment he so desperately wanted to be a part of. So right away he gathered his (third) crew together and announced, “We don’t want to upset the Bill.” Now, instead of filming, our job was to disassemble the Rooftop set one piece at a time.
This was the morning of the one-year anniversary of September 11. While we were ripping apart the Rooftop a plane flew overhead. It was a fighter plane of some sort: low-flying, sleek, vaguely wasp-shaped, and traveling very fast. At the sight of the jet Tommy stopped everything. “Okay, everybody,” he said. “We have meeting inside. Please follow me.”
We all looked at one another. What now? It was blood-boilingly hot inside Birns & Sawyer’s cramped studio space, but once Tommy got us all in there, he asked everyone to please be quiet and “remember the American flag.” We stood there, doing our best to be quiet. Then someone laughed. Tommy furiously decamped to another part of the studio and returned with a digital timer one of the camerapeople had been using during filming. Tommy set the timer to five minutes and placed it where everyone could see it. “Because you laugh,” he said, “we now have five minutes of silence for America. Have due respect.” Ten seconds into that five-minute silence, someone else laughed. Tommy reset the timer. “If I hear any laugh,” he said, “which is very disrespectful, we do another five minutes. You can laugh the rest of your life. So you be the judge.”
It was probably the longest five minutes I’ve ever experienced. Eyes were glazed and several mouths were trembling, but no one wanted that clock to be reset. Somehow, on our third try, we made it all the way through. The timer ran out to several gasps, and I realized how many of us had been reduced to holding our breath near the end to keep from cracking up.
Tommy followed these five minutes with a little speech: “This prick Osama is the biggest asshole-motherfucker-piece-of-shit who ever lived. He think he can stop America. I’m sorry, Mr. Dickhead Osama, you don’t have chance. We are the best country in the world.” He then led the room in a chant of “USA, USA!”
Five minutes of reverent silence followed by fist-pumping mania: That was a pretty accurate encapsulation of the patriotism of Tommy Wiseau.
Tommy typically kept his Christmas tree up all year long. Sometimes he didn’t remove the menagerie of Halloween pumpkins from his doorstep until the following Halloween, when he replaced all the old, black, rotten pumpkins with fresh new orange ones. Tommy’s favorite American holiday was Thanksgiving, but he didn’t just celebrate Thanksgiving Day. He celebrated Thanksgiving Month, eating a full turkey dinner every day for the next thirty days. I once asked him about this. His explanation: “We live in America. Anything is possible. I love living American life.”
• • •
I have never gotten the sense that Tommy is mysterious for the sake of being mysterious. Rather, he is an incredibly guarded person trying to be less guarded. But the emotional fortifications Tommy has built around himself are too entrenched. When trying to express the parts of himself he seems to have lost access to, Tommy offers up fantastical, sad, self-contradictory stories. I’ve heard these stories many times. One of them begins like this:
Long ago, on the far side of central Europe—Communist Bloc Europe—sometime after the death of Stalin, a young boy, T——, is born to a mother who loves him. T—— has a brother and sister; he is the youngest or second youngest. His father is abusive, largely absent, alcoholic, and dead early, or was never there at all.
Seventy-nine percent of T——’s hometown was destroyed in World War II. He inherits nightmares from this ruined landscape, this ravaged country. Life is hard. His family is poor. Sometimes he sees Soviet soldiers, the closest thing he has to reliable father figures.
Very early T—— becomes determined to do something so simple and yet so impossible: travel to America. He goes to the library every day and looks at those few books about America that the Communists have neglected to remove from the shelves. T—— touches the pictures. He sees something in them, something he can’t fully explain. He knows he belongs there. With the death of Stalin, little by little, things begin to change in his country. By the late 1950s there are Disney movies in the cinema, though his family is too poor to afford tickets. Nevertheless, the gray, bombed-out world around him is replaced by something more glorious, more Technicolor.
One of his first memories is of standing outside a cinema, watching 101 Dalmatians through a crack in the door. He’s chased away, eventually, but that night he dreams of being among those tiny spotted dogs, safe inside Disney’s reality. Occasionally, his schoolmates will have American magazines—as precious as food or contraband—and he begs to hold them, just for a moment. He defends America to his peers and teachers who tell him terrible lies about life in the place he loves. For this, T—— is beaten up, picked on, mocked for being a traitor: the scar under his eye derives from one of these valiant early fights. They call him Americanski, Johnny Americanski, as he walks home from school. He doesn’t have friends. He goes to the Catholic cathedral in his hometown and prays to be allowed to visit America. He cannot confess this sin of wanting to be different, to forsake his homeland, to any priest. He worries he’ll be reported. He feels alone.
As a teenager, he sells posters of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and John Wayne in the city square. Maybe he sees in one of those contraband American movie magazines a photo of something he’ll have a hard time forgetting: John Wayne standing outside what T—— imagines to be a great Hollywood movie studio, Birns & Sawyer. His countrymen buy his posters, of course, but some of them criticize him for selling American propaganda. He doesn’t care. In his head, he’s left already.
Sometimes he wants to be a movie star. Other times, a
rock-and-roll musician. He schemes about how to get to America. He knows he’ll have to visit somewhere else first, like West Germany or France. He doesn’t much like the sound of either place. Decades later he’ll tell a friend, disgustedly, “America is so much better than your stupid France, your stupid Germany.” He tries to learn English by reading English-language books at the library, willing himself to understand the words. He makes lists of English words he likes. Maybe he waits with his mother in the bread-buying line, saying words to himself: Bread. Street. Movie.
He becomes a young man. He’s strong, quick, and wily. His cousin is like him, hates the Communists, and desires nothing more than to escape. They ask around, investigate. They hear of a small French city whose police are said to tolerate illegal immigrants. Someone, after all, needs to do the terrible jobs French people are unwilling to do. He and his cousin scrape together the money needed to bribe the right people and suddenly they’re on a bus. It’s dark. No doubt there are many people on this bus from other Communist countries, and maybe T—— has the feeling of being involved in some endeavor much larger than himself. He’s no longer alone. Other people feel the way he does. This must make him happy.
After a connection in Berlin, he and his cousin get off at Strasbourg, an Alsatian town known for its cuisine. He knows nothing of this. He’s told to report for work at a restaurant in the middle of town. He thinks he has known belittlement and cruelty—but he knows nothing. The work is terrible: unclogging toilets, washing dishes. T——, much later in his life, will refer to it as “black market” work. He eats food from dirty plates when no one’s looking. He lives in dark, subterranean spaces. This is not the life young T—— imagined for himself when he boarded that bus. He learns French. The name of the restaurant in which he works is L’Amour, and soon he knows what that word means. It seems like a joke.