by Greg Sestero
“Really?” Tommy asked, leaning forward.
“Really,” I said.
“I think so, too,” Tommy said, looking away. “I think it would be so powerful.”
fifteen
“God, Forgive Me”
Betty Schaefer:
I just think that pictures should say a little something.
Joe Gillis:
Oh, one of the message kids. Just a story won’t do!
—Sunset Boulevard
Tommy kneeled down in front of the condo set fireplace, made a ponderous sign of the cross, and raised a large silver prop gun to his mouth. He was rehearsing his character’s final moment on camera, his most dearly anticipated acting feat: Johnny’s suicide.
Here’s how The Room begins to end: Johnny becomes infuriated by Lisa’s behavior at his surprise birthday party, trashes his and Lisa’s condo in a rage, somehow gets his hands on a gun, requests divine forgiveness, and shoots himself in the head.
The night Tommy conceived The Room, he promised a riveting cinematic experience that would leave people so shaken they wouldn’t be able to sleep for two weeks. Now, several years later, Tommy was in that promised moment—and half the cast and crew were trying, with spotty success, not to laugh.
Take after take, Tommy was so focused on capturing Johnny’s emotional upheaval that he was floundering out of frame, wincing, crying out, flailing his arms—all this after he’d pulled the trigger. Meanwhile, Byron was doing his best to get Tommy to please, for the love of God, stay in frame. Byron’s on-set evolution had been interesting. Neither a script supervisor nor a first assistant director, he’d gone from being a stagehand to a surrogate Sandy, coaching Tommy step by step, moment to moment. I was beginning to think of him as The Room’s Director of Yelling at Tommy. When Tommy’s kneeling degenerated into a lazy slouch, Byron would yell, “Be erect!” Tommy would arch his back obediently. Five seconds later he’d be slouched over again and out of frame. “This is you, buddy,” Byron kept coaching. “Come on! This is it. Energy, Tommy!” Tommy, though, looked flustered, lost, confused.
Tommy couldn’t synchronize his suicide moment with the loud, helpful “Bang!” being yelled out by Byron. Sometimes he’d still be kneeling there after the “Bang!” as though nothing had happened. Amy, the makeup artist, who was standing just off camera, would try to time Tommy’s trigger pull with a fake blood squib, which squirted the fireplace behind Tommy with a burst of barely noticeable spatter. This not-so-special effect looked like someone sitting off camera had whacked a ketchup packet with a hammer. Tommy’s delivery of his final line—“God, forgive me”—also fluctuated from take to take. In a couple of takes he whispered it, in a couple he said it with no emotion at all, and a couple came out like this: “Why? Why? Ahhhhh! God. Oh, my God! Ahhhh! Forgive Me!” Bang. Blood splatter. Tommy was still kneeling there. Then, all at once, he collapsed.
Byron was behind the camera, glowering under his backward baseball cap, looking more and more like an embattled Little League coach. “Come on,” Byron said to Tommy as he showed him how to hold the gun properly. “You can do this!”
By this point, most everyone else had given up maintaining any facade of professionalism. You could see giggling crew members wander into shots. There was no director of photography listed on the slate and no one was keeping track of take numbers—neither of which mattered, as the slate was rarely clear. Scene after scene began with the camera out of focus simply because no one cared enough to check.
This new level of on-set laissez-faireism went unnoticed by Tommy. He was too preoccupied with his own troubles, such as figuring out how to smoothly retrieve his silver prop gun from its box. Why Johnny even has a loaded handgun in his condo is a subject of fevered Room fan debate. When the time came to film the suicide sequence, Tommy decided to stash the prop handgun in a small brown treasure box, which he then placed at the base of Johnny and Lisa’s fireplace—because loaded firearms should always be kept near open flames. For what it’s worth, Tommy’s original Room script contained an even more bizarrely elaborate gun-finding scenario: “JOHNNY GOES INTO THE CLOSET AND THROWS OUT EVERYTHING HE SEES AND FINDS A WOODEN BOX ABOUT THE SIZE OF A SHOEBOX. HE TRIES TO PULL IT OPEN, BUT HE CAN’T. HE THROWS IT TO THE FLOOR BUT IT DOESN’T OPEN. HE KICKS IT, BUT IT STILL DOESN’T OPEN. HE PULLS OUT A PIECE OF METAL [?] FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE CHAIR [?] AND PRIES OPEN THE PADLOCK [!]. HE SUCCEEDS. HE OPENS THE BOX AND TAKES OUT THE GUN. HE IS CRYING.”
With the suicide moment finally out of the way, Byron sent Tommy on a condo-trashing dry run. Tommy finally had his chance to let loose, Charles Foster Kane–style, but he didn’t do anything other than lope around the set, ineptly pantomiming rage. Tommy normally went full-throttle during rehearsals, destroying everything in sight. But now his idea of going crazy was to knock some fake fruit out of a bowl, lazily nudge a couple of candles over with his thigh, and nonchalantly hurl a television out the window. It was the strangely calm tantrum of an overwrought and exhausted man.
In the film, the thing that causes Johnny to lose his mind and trash his condo is the playback of a recorded conversation between Mark and Lisa. Tommy wrote Mark and Lisa’s exchange to include such heartfelt nuggets of passion as “I want your body” and “You are the sparkle of my life.” Juliette and I got a kick out of squirting as much Cheez Whiz over these lines as possible while recording them. The interesting thing about Mark and Lisa’s phone-tapped conversation is that The Room’s audience hears the original conversation they have in real time, on-screen; however, when Johnny plays their conversation back a few seconds later, the recording is different from what the audience just heard—and yes, that difference is actually in the script. It had evidently not occurred to Tommy when he was writing The Room to scroll back half a page and cross-check the two conversations, and Juliette and I didn’t bother correcting the discrepancy. Tommy had his own way of doing things, and this was the way he wanted it. Todd Barron, the DP who’d replaced Graham who’d replaced Raphael, was especially helpful in this respect, in that he had absolutely no concern for the quality of what he was filming, which kept the production moving very nicely. In that sense, and that sense alone, Todd Barron may be the production’s hidden hero.
Once Juliette and I finished recording our mismatched lines, we went back to the set to close out the last scene of the film with Philip Haldiman. The scene in question called for Lisa and Mark and Denny to argue while weeping copiously over Johnny’s corpse. It’s pretty obvious that I mailed in my performance throughout the entire production, but during this scene I didn’t even bother to lick the envelope. Amy, the makeup artist, doused my face with shiny glycerin tears. They didn’t help. I looked like an unconvincingly weepy replicant.
When Tommy got enough raw footage of The Room’s climactic scene, he hurried to the monitor to watch it. Within seconds he was frowning. Tommy wasn’t shy about telling us our performances “didn’t cut it.” Then again, we weren’t alone. Byron pointed out that Tommy’s deep breathing was noticeable throughout his entire performance as dead Johnny. The only thing we filmed that day that Tommy felt was at all “powerful” was the footage of him storming down the staircase like a wild animal, sitting in a chair, and crying out “Why, Lisa? Why? Why? Why?” like someone trying, and painfully failing, to defecate.
After watching the entire suicide and postsuicide sequence several times on the monitor, Tommy turned to us all and said, “We redo Johnny’s suicide in the bedroom set”—as if a different set would fix the problem. There was a collective groan.
I returned to Birns & Sawyer the following afternoon to find a bedroom set in which Tommy Wiseau was preparing to get jaybird naked. This bedroom was maybe the tackiest Room set yet: red walls, a Greek church’s worth of candles, an art-piece wall fountain, and a king-size bed with a sheer cascade of white mosquito netting draped from its canopy. The only surviving element of Johnny and Lisa’s condo was a section of the spiral staircase (now with only one step) that had bee
n relegated to the bedroom’s eerily lit corner.
Tommy informed me I needed to shoot a second love scene in the newly built bedroom set. I argued with him for a bit but eventually gave in; this, like fighting a great white shark, was not a battle man was meant to win. (Ten years later, I’ve never once watched any of my Room love scenes without either leaving the theater, fast-forwarding, or closing my eyes.)
As bad as I felt about doing another love scene, I tried to put it in perspective by considering poor Juliette’s situation. She was being asked, once again, to expose her breasts on camera, and for what? The love scene Tommy wanted to add fit nowhere in the film. I didn’t trust Tommy’s motives in wanting to see young people—whether in casting or rehearsals or while filming—make out in front of him so frequently. Juliette, in an attempt to make things more comfortable, suggested playing an Alicia Keys song. Tommy’s response: “We are not here to promote other people’s work.”
After shooting Lisa’s tryst with Mark, Juliette had to film her love scene with Tommy. This took several days. A lot of productions close their sets during love scenes. Not Tommy’s. He opened the set, asking every member of the production to come in and “help out with lighting.” It started to feel like Tommy didn’t want the love-scene-shooting process to end. He delayed things for no reason and stayed naked far longer than was necessary. (When Tommy, wearing a towel, watched some playbacks with Todd Barron, he pointed at himself on the monitor and said, “Look at all these muscles.”) He made no secret of the fact that he was enjoying his physical contact with Juliette, who was obviously suffering between takes. I think half of the guys on the crew had to suppress every chivalrous impulse they had during filming to keep themselves from pulling Tommy off her—especially during the shot in which Johnny appears to be impregnating Lisa’s navel. In the end, Tommy was so pleased with the footage he shot of his love scene that he felt compelled to use it all in the final film, even going so far as to add an additional Johnny-Lisa love scene using recycled footage. Tommy assumed this would go unnoticed by audiences. It did not.
In the love scene’s final shot, Johnny gets out of bed and walks bare-assed to the bathroom. Tommy thought long and hard about his decision to show his ass. “I need to do it,” he told me. “I have to show my ass or this movie won’t sell.” Yes, Tommy dedicated an entire scene to his ass. He drew inspiration from the example of Brad Pitt, who unveiled his own rear end in Legends of the Fall. Tommy’s butt is visible in the love scenes, of course, but there’s never a full-on unmitigated ass shot until he walks to the bathroom. Tommy insisted on doing numerous takes of this moment; it felt a little bit like he was aiming his ass at us, like the whole scene was an excuse to moon us over and over again. “Unwatched” has never interested Tommy. Not as a human being and not as a performer. I’ve never seen anyone more comfortable being naked around people who resented him.
Tommy stopped shooting only when Byron demanded he end it. “We can’t stop,” Tommy said, “until we know we get it.”
“Tommy!” Byron responded, somewhat desperately. “We definitely got it.”
• • •
With the love scenes in the can, Tommy was free to reshoot his presuicide trashing, this time in Johnny and Lisa’s bedroom. Tommy had one final chance to really show us all what Johnny’s desperation looked like. But he remained an oddly lethargic room wrecker. He trashed a cheap dresser, for instance, by lackadaisically pulling its first two drawers off their runners and casually tipping it over. Yet, amazingly, Tommy’s sleepwalking bedroom rampage didn’t come close to being the craziest part of his performance.
The Room’s original script tells us that Johnny, in the middle of going nuts, finds a “sexy nightgown” and, moments before killing himself, does something highly inappropriate with it. To quote the script itself: “HE REACHES IN AND PULLS OUT MORE OF LISA’S CLOTHES AND THROWS THEM ON THE FLOOR. HE LIES ON THE CLOTHES, UNZIPPING HIS ZIPPER. HE IS BREATHING HARD AND WRITHING WITH PELVIC THRUSTS. WHEN HE FINISHES HE SITS UP AND PICKS UP THE GUN.” I’d read the script several times, but never in a million years did I think Tommy would actually try to film this. Who has sex with his future wife’s clothes moments before shooting himself?
When Tommy initially decided to film the suicide sequence in the living room set, he foreclosed the possibility of including the sexy nightgown in Johnny’s presuicide activities. (A quirk of Tommy’s script is that only occasionally does it indicate where or when a scene is supposed to take place or include any location notes or specifics. There’s no “EXT. GOLDEN GATE PARK—DAY,” say, or “INT. CONDO—NIGHT.” All of this is to say that deciding where to film various scenes in the Room script was basically guesswork.) Now that Tommy was reshooting Johnny’s suicide scene in the bedroom set, the “sexy nightgown” was back in play in the form of Lisa’s red dress.
The cast and crew, who’d never seen a full script, weren’t at all prepared for the moment in which Tommy, writhing around on the bedroom floor, grabbed Lisa’s red dress, held it to his crotch, and proceeded to simulate sex with it. “Wait,” someone nearby me said. “What is he . . . is he . . . Oh, dear God. He is. He’s really . . . Oh, God.” Everyone knew they’d just witnessed one of the most genuinely perverse moments in the history of American cinema. Equally bizarre was the fact that Tommy has Johnny smell the dress after his presumable orgasm. You know you’re in trouble as a dramatist when a character blows his face off and it’s the second-most memorable thing in the scene.
Tommy, to his credit, had at long last come through on his promise. After watching this dress humping, no one was going to sleep for at least two weeks.
Tommy and the red dress, together at last.
The emotional aftermath of Tommy’s dresscapade was hardly an ideal time for the makeup artist to swoop in and start painting Tommy with blood for the second half of Johnny’s suicide sequence, but that’s what had to happen. The blood the makeup artist used to simulate the contents of Johnny’s skull was water dosed with sugary red food coloring. Tommy demanded that someone paint a little blood trickle coming out of the corner of his mouth, even though a man who’d stuck a gun between his teeth and pulled the trigger would display a drastically different level of oral trauma. I couldn’t believe Tommy would skimp so much on the blood effects. This was the payoff of the entire film, wasn’t it? No one wanted an authentically re-created head wound, but Kool-Aid blood?
Tommy kept going on about needing pools of blood everywhere, even in places that didn’t make sense. The effect Tommy wanted, it appeared, was: Dude, I’m dead. Look how dead I am! As one commentator on the film eloquently noted, Johnny’s death sequence “is effectively a teenage boy’s self-pitying fantasy of how, if he killed himself, everyone would regret how mean they had been to him.” Tommy wasn’t lying in blood; he was wallowing in it.
There was one big change-up during this scene. Peter Anway, concerned that the production might never end, had decided to call in an acting coach named Diane to help speed things along. Diane was essentially hired to replace Sandy, as Byron had proved “too aggressive” for Tommy. Diane was smart, sensitive, and determined to help. Before we got ready to film the scene in which Lisa, Denny, and Mark grieve over Johnny, she took us all aside and started telling us what she felt was at stake in the scene. I stopped her, politely, and asked that she follow me to the room where Tommy kept the dailies. The dailies guy was sitting there eating a sandwich. “Hi,” I said. “Could you show Diane some footage from the living room suicide dailies?”
Without saying a word, and without pausing from the ongoing destruction of his sandwich, the dailies guy fired up the playback machine. Diane’s expression started in a place of benign expectation, corkscrewed into abject shock, and mainlined into something like existential confusion. Then she started to laugh. “So,” I said, “that’s where we’re at.”
• • •
The only thing worse than shooting a terrible scene you have no interest in performing is shooting a terrible s
cene you have no interest in performing for the second time. By this point I truly resented Tommy, which made it even harder to feign heartbreak over the death of his asinine character. Cue the return of the glycerin tears.
During a break, Tommy hauled me aside and said, “Look, I need you to deliver something here. This is touchdown. Very important scene. Your chance to be big actor. I need you to do crying thing.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, barely listening to him.
Tommy didn’t go away. In fact, he came closer. “You know what I need from you, right? Remember this day in the car? On Sunset, when I say everything was over with apartment and friendship? Your face was so aggressive. So emotional. This is type you must show for camera.”
In other words, Tommy was asking me to relive one of the most sadistic experiences he’d ever put me through in an attempt to wring some authentic tears from me. He was just as adamant that Mark lean down and kiss Johnny’s large, white, lunar forehead—which is a strange gesture for someone who’s been porking the dead man’s future wife to extend.
In the end, this mournful, dreadful, exhausting, and ridiculous scene ended up taking three days to shoot. Thanks to Bill Meurer’s demand that we stop filming on the Birns & Sawyer lot, this concluded Los Angeles production of The Room. All that Tommy had left to film were San Francisco exterior shots, none of which would involve any actors, scenes, or dialogue.
• • •
Only three crew members offered to help Tommy shoot in San Francisco: Todd Barron; the sound guy, Zsolt; and Joe, who was Todd Barron’s assistant camera operator. Tommy had gone from a fantastically wasteful yet still somehow low-budget thirty-person crew to a guerrilla-style three-person production. In talking over the logistics, Todd Barron brought up the fact that Tommy would need to get San Francisco shooting permits. “Permits nothing,” Tommy said in disgust. “I have certain resources. San Francisco is my city. We film anywhere we want. Let them stop us.”