The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  Pierre is broken. He lives on the street for a while, does things for money he will never fully describe or reveal. Then he learns that his uncle Stanley, the brother of his deceased father and a World War II veteran, is living in America. Pierre, desperate, contacts him. Could he come to visit? Please? In a series of negotiations that, Pierre will later say, somehow involved the Red Cross, he convinces his uncle Stanley to sponsor him. First, though, he must make some money. Pierre heads off to Paris and works in a sex shop in the Pigalle district. He sells handcuffs and lingerie and mops up the floors of private rooms. Pierre is apparently written up in a French newspaper by some journalist whose eye he catches. In the article about his struggling, odd, nocturnal life, Pierre will be called the Night Owl. This is just the first time in Pierre’s life that he will become known as a strange local fixture in a cosmopolitan city. Around this time, Pierre goes to see a film called The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He will say it had no particular impact on him.

  Tommy returns to Paris, 2012.

  His sponsorship eventually comes through. He is free to come to America and stay with his uncle Stanley and aunt Katherine. He heads out to Charles de Gaulle airport with his small bag. Everything important to him is in that bag or within his pockets. Somehow he has a French passport. But how could he? Again: unclear. The customs officials at the airport don’t believe that Pierre is French. They demand that Pierre speak good French to them, to prove his identity. “I’m not fucking French,” Pierre says—the last words he speaks while standing on French soil.

  • • •

  Once Johnny’s big announcement was finally completed, we moved on to filming the debut of a new cast member, whose name was Greg Ellery and who was playing a character Tommy hastily named Steven. (“I have attorney named Steven,” Tommy explained.) Steven’s lines were all originally intended to be spoken by Peter, Johnny’s psychologist friend, but Tommy had lost Kyle Vogt, who was playing Peter. Rather than assign the rest of Peter’s lines to other, established characters in the film—Mike or Denny, say—Tommy created an entirely new character, which I think might be the most fascinating artistic decision he made while conceiving and making The Room.

  The rooftop and interior party scenes in The Room are where everything reaches a dramatic boiling point. Lisa admits to having lied about being pregnant. Mark confronts Lisa. Johnny confronts Mark. Johnny and Mark fight. This is the film’s dramatic payoff. Everything we’ve seen until now has prepared us for these moments—and into the film walks a character we’ve never met. We have no idea what he’s doing at the party or why he’s so unhappy about Lisa’s involvement with Mark. Steven is, in this way, The Room personified. You could even say that The Room is about Steven or, at least, about Stevenness, a condition in which things happen for no clear reason, to an unknown purpose, at a fascinatingly inopportune time. Steven completely saves the end of The Room by reminding us how weird it really is.

  Kyle Vogt as Peter and Greg Ellery as Peter’s replacement, Steven. Separated at birth? Probably not.

  Steven’s first filmed line, spoken to Lisa, was this: “When is the baby due?” Byron, watching on the monitor, said, “That’s the worst actor I’ve ever seen. Who picked this guy?”

  As it happened, I did—and Ellery was, in my opinion, lovably entertaining. He was a bit of an oddball, but that was what made him so perfect for The Room. For the role of Steven, Tommy had first wanted to hire a Mexican guy who was helping around the set and didn’t speak much English. “That’s okay,” Tommy said. “Give this guy chance. He can be great Steven.” We talked him out of that when it was determined this gentleman may not have been an American citizen. We tried and failed to talk Tommy out of having yet another casting call this late in the production, but he was adamant that we find his Steven. Once again I grabbed some headshots from a pile and called a dozen people in. Tommy unwisely decided to attend the casting process, once again held in the Birns & Sawyer parking lot. This is how he greeted all of his potential Stevens: “You just won a million dollars.”

  Most of the actors said, “Excuse me?”

  Tommy shook his head at them. “I’m sorry, if you don’t act, you have to leave. Don’t interrupt the scene. Don’t break the character.”

  Greg Ellery, however, when told that he’d just won a million dollars, immediately got what Tommy wanted and began to celebrate. (It’s possible that he believed he had actually just won a million dollars.) “If you like this guy,” Tommy said, “hire him.” So I did. Ellery showed up on set a couple of days before he was supposed to, driving a loud Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He quickly developed a reputation. He told one person involved in the production a story that he’d once had a bubble on his leg, a boil or something, and when he popped it, a bunch of teeny spiders came crawling out. So there was that. After his first day on set, he approached me and said, “That Tommy dude is the director? All this time I thought you were the director of this thing!”

  For the interior party scene—which was a continuation of the rooftop party—Tommy wanted lots of balloons and, he said, a hundred extras. I managed to bring in eight extras with the tantalizing guarantee of a hundred dollars a day plus food. Tommy had wanted to pay the extras twenty dollars a day, with no food.

  The first party-scene extra to show up was named Piper. Tommy insisted on a nighttime meeting, which is not typical casting procedure. I was waiting for her outside a darkened Birns & Sawyer. I could tell she was slightly hesitant to approach, so I smiled and waved her over. Then Tommy appeared behind me. Piper later told me that the first thing she thought when she saw Tommy was: Run away right now, Piper, or you’re going to be killed. Piper gradually became more confident that she wouldn’t be killed and stayed on. All the party-scene extras were called in like this: at the last minute, at night, and under objectively terrifying circumstances. Several wouldn’t stay until I showed them all of Tommy’s equipment.

  With our measly eight extras—one of them being Amy, our very own makeup artist—the party scene looked pathetic. One of the extras immediately earned Tommy’s enmity by stepping in front of him during one of the night’s first takes. “Excuse me, young missy,” Tommy said. “You never cross on camera. Oh, my God! This is Acting 101! So, do not try to steal show.”

  She looked back at Tommy, stunned he was making such an issue out of an innocent mistake. “What show am I trying to steal?”

  Tommy rolled his eyes. “You’re not that important, sweetie, for your information.”

  The woman walked away, muttering. “That guy’s got control issues. I think he’s scared shitless of women. He’s a joke is what he is.”

  This extra had known Tommy for a grand total of thirty minutes.

  We’d been filming for much longer than planned, and under increasingly quicksandlike conditions. I could smell the end, though. In the party reaction shot, which flashes on-screen after Johnny arrives at his surprise birthday party, you can see me staring off into the distance when I’m supposed to be saying “Happy birthday!” with everyone else.

  “Okay, Keanu,” Sandy said. “Time to wake up!” But performing in The Room was, by this point, like drinking the very last dregs of something through a tiny straw: It took a lot of effort and you barely tasted it.

  • • •

  We’d just shot the scene in which Mark confronts Lisa and asks if the baby she’s carrying is his. Lisa then slaps Mark, which brings the sparsely attended birthday party to a halt. Johnny intervenes, after which there’s a near fight. Now we had to film the moment in which Johnny once again approaches a slow-dancing Mark and Lisa, peels them apart, and demands to know what they’re doing. This time, though, there’s an actual fight. Why not just have one confrontation? I have no idea. In the final film Tommy separates these two nearly identical moments with a supremely nonsensical establishing shot of a San Francisco skyscraper.

  As for the fight scene between Mark and Johnny, we’d already sort of blocked it out with Byron’s assistance. They started ro
lling and Tommy approached Juliette and me. I had never before seen him so lethargic; it looked as though he were sleepwalking. Some of the extras started laughing. I actually heard one of them ask what Tommy was on and could she have some? Tommy didn’t see or hear any of this. I’ve never known Tommy to drink or use drugs, but he did take a lot of (legitimately prescribed) medication, gobble a lot of vitamins, and chug Red Bull around the clock. Consequently, despite his nocturnal schedule, there’s sometimes a point at the end of a day where Tommy simply stops functioning. A lot of fans over the years have seen Sleepwalker Tommy at midnight screenings and assumed he’s wasted, but he’s not. Rather, his brain has simply called it quits for the day and turned over all vital operations to his central nervous system. That’s the condition he was in right now.

  Byron was demanding that Tommy show him something more during our confrontation—a punch, say, or something resembling a punch—but that wasn’t working at all. Tommy kept pulling up handfuls of emotional sand. Not even when Tommy and I started “fighting” did he come to life—not until, that is, I said the line “What planet are you on?” Take after take, Tommy would be somnolent and drooling, but at hearing this line he whipped off his sport coat with fire in his eyes. This wasn’t an ad-lib; Tommy wrote the line. But I think hearing me say those words set off a long, painful chain of memories in Tommy’s mind, memories about his childhood and, I suspect, much else. It’s one of only a couple of moments in the film where Tommy’s artistry, such as it is, becomes honest.

  • • •

  Pierre is greeted in New Orleans by his uncle Stanley and his aunt Katherine, an American—the first real American Pierre’s ever met. He’s overwhelmed with joy and optimism. From New Orleans they travel to the small town of Chalmette, which in terms of culture makes Strasbourg look like Michelangelo’s Rome. Pierre wants to go to school, but his uncle explains to him that American schooling is expensive. If he wants to live with Stanley and Katherine, he has to help with money. Through his uncle, Pierre finds work as a stock boy in a Chalmette grocery store called Schwegmann’s—another grim, thankless job. During the day he oversees the milk section. At night Katherine helps him with his English.

  Shortly after arriving in America, Pierre wrecks Katherine’s Cadillac; his relationship with his uncle is consequently strained. In short order Pierre feels misunderstood and out of sorts in Louisiana, and he learns to despise its “rednecks,” who often drop by Pierre’s grocery store and mock him for his accent. Pierre’s Chalmette life is humidity, insects, groceries, rednecks, tense dinners with Stanley and Katherine, saving his pitiful paychecks, and dreams of being anywhere else.

  Tommy, circa the late 1970s.

  A certain kind of strangeness follows Pierre to Chalmette, however, and he will describe being offered a gold chain by an older man in exchange for sex. Of course, Pierre spurns the offer. When he can afford it, Pierre takes the bus to New Orleans, a city he comes to love, and walks around the French Quarter. On one of these visits, Pierre meets a young French guitarist named Jean Luc. Pierre sits with the young man sometimes, listening to him play, and other times drinks with him in bars around town. They have many “strange experiences,” Pierre will later say. Walking down Bourbon Street, surrounded by tourists, Pierre confesses to Jean Luc that he’s not fulfilled in Louisiana. Pierre confides in Jean Luc because he, too, is an artist. Pierre’s real dream, he says, is to be an actor or a musician. Jean Luc tells Pierre, “If that’s what you want to do, you should really be in California.”

  California. Pierre likes the sound of that word. To Pierre, California is America—and Chalmette is a fetid swamp.

  “Actually,” Jean Luc tells him, “I know the perfect city for you. The perfect city! You should go. You will love life there. As soon as you can, you should go.”

  “Where?” Pierre asks.

  “San Francisco,” Jean Luc says.

  • • •

  Unfortunately, Tommy’s emotional honesty didn’t help him with his lines. Tommy had to say, “I’ll kill you! Get out of my house before I break every bone in your body!” But in Tommy’s exhaustion-altered state, the line became, “I’ll kill you! Get out of my body before I break every bone in your house!”

  The first time Tommy flubbed the line, I heard someone mutter, “What did he just say?” But he kept saying it. He didn’t even understand the problem. He was transposing the words without even being aware of it.

  “Tommy!” Sandy finally said. “Where is this coming from? How many times can you confuse that line? What kind of house do you have, anyway?”

  Tommy was blinking, dazed, sullen, running his hand through his hair. He tried it again and made the same mistake. Soon enough, two extras quit. They had better things to do than watch a writer/star/director/producer/executive producer going at his own script with a cleaver. A couple of crew members were press-ganged into being extras for the remainder of the night.

  Byron wasn’t happy with Tommy’s and my fight. It’s supposed to be a ferocious struggle between two men over a devilish woman, but we were shooting two guys holding each other’s arms and hissing; grade school fights are typically more brutal. That didn’t mean that Tommy wasn’t hurting me during our takes. He happens to have the most insanely powerful hands of any human being I’ve ever known—pure cyborg strength—and by the end of the night I had bruises all over my wrists and forearms.

  After a bunch of takes, Byron had seen enough. “Look,” he said, “you guys are fighting like a couple of pansies.”

  Of the many words you should never use to refer to Tommy Wiseau, pansy is high in the upper quartile. On the next take, Tommy caught me off guard and finally went for it. He gave me a hard and unpansylike shove. I fell backward, landed on my can, and for good measure hit the back of my head against the door, which is the take that wound up in the film.

  Tempers were short by this point. When it came time for the Steven character to jump in and break up Johnny and Mark’s fight, Greg Ellery grabbed Tommy, which made Tommy lose track of his lines. When Johnny turns to Steven and yells, “Shut up! Shut up!” that’s Tommy really yelling at poor Greg.

  Well past everyone’s bedtime, we finally finished this emotionally exhausting sequence. Next up was the scene in which I had to say to Steven, “Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!” The line wasn’t remotely sayable. I couldn’t imagine even Liam Neeson saying this line convincingly. Tommy gave me a brief reprieve from attempting to deliver the line, however, when he decided that he wanted another scene of me and Juliette kissing.

  In the original script, Mark tells Peter to keep his stupid comments in his pocket, but this confrontation does not piggyback on Peter’s catching Mark and Lisa secretly canoodling on the couch at Johnny’s birthday party. Peter doesn’t need to catch Mark and Lisa because he already knows they’re romantically involved. But now that the character of Steven had entered the picture, the film needed a moment of discovery, and that moment of discovery had to turn on Mark and Lisa groping each other on the couch. In a way I was impressed: For once, Tommy had accurately identified and worked to solve a plot hole in his own script. The first couple of times I tried to say “Leave your stupid comments in your pocket,” the words just didn’t come. I felt paralyzed, as though I were apologizing to some future audience. The line seemed a violation of drama, of cinema, of language itself. Every time I looked at Juliette she could see how hard I was concentrating. This always made her laugh, at which point we had to start all over again.

  After one calamitous take, I asked Tommy if we could go with another line. Byron backed me up on this: “Wouldn’t ‘Shut the fuck up!’ work a lot better?” But whenever Tommy was questioned about his script, he doubled down. He wasn’t going to let any of us move on until he had this ridiculous line of dialogue in the can.

  “The problem,” Tommy told me, “is that you’re not upset. No emotion. You need to be upset!”

  “No,” I said. “The problem is the line doesn’t work.” />
  “The line,” Tommy said, “work just fine.”

  Byron and I exchanged a long, complicated look of shared misery. Then Byron shrugged. “Guess you gotta give the man what he wants.”

  I tried it again.

  “It’s not enough!” Tommy said. “Not enough! Not at all enough!”

  As we set up again, this was what I told myself: If you can land this pointless, nonsensical line, you will be one step closer to the end and forgetting about this whole experience. What are you even worried about? No one’s going to see this thing. It’s going to sit on a shelf in Tommy’s house. It’s not going to kill you. They’re just words. Leave your stupid comments in your pocket. See? Easy.

  “Come on, Greg!” Tommy said when I tried again. “You’re not upset!”

  “Actually,” I said, “I am upset!”

  “Then give me something, dammit!”

  So I imagined I was saying the line to Tommy, and then changed all the words in my head: “Leave [Why] your [are] stupid [you] comments [doing] in [this] your [to] pocket [me?]!” On the next take, no surprise, I nailed it. Well, maybe not nailed it, but the words came out with real, spitting-cobra force. In some sense, saying the line felt like an exorcism of every terrible Room experience I’d had up until that point.

  “I’m not saying it again,” I said, walking away from the camera. “I’m done.” A decade later, the phrase I had such trouble wrapping my mind around, much less saying aloud, has at least three Urbandictionary.com entries.