The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  Shortly before leaving, Tommy hit Birns & Sawyer yet again for provisions and wound up dropping some serious coin on long-distance lenses for both his 35mm and HD cameras, expensive filters, more Arriflex lighting equipment, carrying cases, and a fancy new Canon still camera. After purchasing all this, Tommy called me and announced that it was time to pick up my new car—on one condition, which was that I join his three-man crew in San Francisco.

  This didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I love the Bay Area and had been thinking about visiting home to recover after filming anyway. So I agreed. There was another Tommy catch, however, which was that Tommy planned to pick out my car for me. Tommy, I learned, wanted to buy me an SUV, for the transparent reason that he needed a large vehicle to transport all his freshly purchased equipment to San Francisco. I wished Tommy could do something, anything, that didn’t feel so creepily calculated.

  At a car dealership on La Brea Tommy picked out the SUV he wanted within thirty seconds of arrival. The sales guy was ecstatic to find a customer so bizarrely determined to buy. Everything was going well until the man asked Tommy for identification. At this, Tommy crossed his arms and stepped back. “I’m businessman,” he said. “No identification necessary.”

  The sales guy tried to roll with this unanticipated punch. “Okay,” he said. “I respect that. But I can’t sell you a car without seeing some identification.”

  “You should accept check,” Tommy said.

  “Sorry,” the salesperson said, smiling politely. “It’s company policy. We need to see identification.”

  Again Tommy refused. I pulled Tommy aside and said that showing one’s identification was a pretty reasonable request.

  “No,” Tommy said. “They play games here. I’m businessman. I don’t have time for this bullshit.”

  “Tommy, you can’t drive off in an expensive car after leaving a personal check. What if it bounces?”

  “Check will not bounce. Who are you kidding?”

  “Okay, but they don’t know that.”

  Tommy walked back over to the salesperson and made him a “revised final” offer, which was that Tommy would consent to a cashier’s check and allow the salesperson to look at but not handle his driver’s license. The salesperson, no longer amused, told Tommy that this was not going to happen.

  Tommy threw up his arms. “You know what? I have to leave now. Final offer. You want to make money or not?”

  “Sorry,” the sales guy said. “We don’t have a deal.”

  From there we headed to a slightly seedy dealership in Santa Monica, where the salesperson agreed to accept a cashier’s check with no questions asked. I dropped Tommy off at his house and went to pick up Amber in my brand-new SUV, figuring it would be a fun surprise for her, if nothing else. She’d just returned from San Diego and I wanted us to have a nice dinner together before I took off for San Francisco. She liked the car but, beyond that, didn’t have much to say to me. Over the last few months, it felt like we had become two boats figuring out how to navigate the same narrow waterway. Later, at her favorite restaurant, Amber started crying. When I asked what was wrong, Amber looked up at me with hopeless eyes and said, “Greg, I can’t do this anymore.”

  I knew Amber and I weren’t going to be together forever; we were always better friends than romantic partners. But Amber knew me better than anyone, and had been with me through every painful twist and turn of the last year. We’d outgrown each other, but still her letting me go hurt more than I would have thought.

  I dropped Amber off at her place and returned home. When I walked into my apartment, the phone was ringing. I half hoped it would be her. It was, of course, Tommy. “We need to get ready for San Francisco! We leave tonight! Your girl can wait.” I packed and left for Tommy’s.

  When he answered his door, Tommy looked at me and said, “What happened to your face? Your eyes are all red. My God.”

  I took three steps into his house and collapsed on the first soft piece of furniture I saw. I realized I’d felt happier and freer with my beat-up Lumina and a three-figure bank account. “Amber and I just broke up,” I told Tommy.

  Tommy said, “Oh,” and paused. Then he waved it away. “Don’t worry about this. You’ll have dozens of girls. She’ll be jealous.” Tommy’s Planet had a strangely simple emotional economy.

  Tommy whipped out the new still camera he’d bought earlier that day and started snapping shots of me. “Look at your eyes! My God. Somebody is so sad tonight! How much did you love her on scale from one to ten? Can you smile little bit or is this all end of the world? You are not smiling at all. Greg, what is the problem?”

  “Tommy!” I said, covering his lens. “What do you think is the problem?”

  “Hey,” Tommy said, setting the camera aside, “let’s talk about it, then. Oh! I have good idea. Why don’t we do scene in San Francisco? We can use your emotion. You can talk about your girl in this scene. Talk about Johnny’s problems with girl and his life. This will make you feel better, trust me.”

  I just stared at him. I couldn’t believe he was actually suggesting this. “No. We’re not going to shoot a scene about Amber in San Francisco.”

  Tommy sat down next to me. “No, you see. It will help. Let’s write scene now. Don’t be so sad.” He gave my knee a cheer-up smack and stood. “All right? We do scene now.”

  A scene? I was so drained of energy and motivation that I said nothing as Tommy left the room to fetch his laptop. Upon his return he handed it to me; Final Draft was open on his screen. Tommy began pacing in front of the sofa. “Okay,” he said. “So maybe we’re in coffee shop, talking about life and women. Right? Johnny and Mark talking. So let’s talk. What happened to you with your girl tonight? I’m listening now.”

  I thought about this question. What did happen, anyway?

  “Wait!” Tommy said. “I’ve got idea! Write this dialogue down: ‘Relationships never work. I don’t know why I waste time on it. Girls are so difficult. They spend long time in bathroom.’ ” Tommy made an insistent gesture that I type. I did. I didn’t much like what I was typing, but I typed it all out.

  With that, Tommy started describing other ideas for San Francisco scenes. One took place in a flower shop and involved Johnny buying a dozen red roses for Lisa. The other involved Johnny and Mark playing football and jogging in Golden Gate Park. I started to wonder if Tommy was even emotionally capable of finishing The Room. Maybe his real plan was to keep filming it forever—or for as long as people kept typing out his ideas for him.

  We left for San Francisco at 10:00 p.m. On the way up, Tommy drank a six-pack of Red Bull, sang along to three rounds of Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting,” and was asleep and drooling on his own shoulder by Fresno. The ride’s remaining three hours were still and silent. Just a few more days, I kept thinking, and I could finally stop worrying about money for a while and go back to focusing on what I came to L.A. to do in the first place. My debt to Tommy was paid. My spirits began to lift a little. By 1:00 a.m., we were crossing the Bay Bridge. Of course, that’s when Tommy chose to wake up. Vampire trick.

  sixteen

  Don’t Be Shocked

  Don’t you take the past and just put it in a room in the basement and lock the door and never go in there? That’s what I do. And then you meet someone special and all you want to do is toss them the key. Say, “Open up, step inside.” But you can’t because it’s dark. And there are demons.

  —Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley

  Our first scheduled exterior shot was a city view from a Sausalito harbor, located just over the Golden Gate Bridge. Todd Barron, Joe, Zsolt, and I were all staying at an Embassy Suites; Tommy slept at his condo on Guerrero Street. Remarkably, Tommy showed up at our hotel that morning, upbeat and exactly on time, which, if I’m not mistaken, shook Heaven itself from its cloudy foundations.

  The crew followed us to Sausalito. As I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, Tommy gazed out the window. “On this trip,” he said, noddin
g slowly, “you may find out several secrets about me. Don’t be shocked.”

  At Sausalito Harbor, Tommy took to pep-talking Todd Barron, Joe, and Zsolt as they set up for the first exterior: “We want big feature movie quality. We need fancy San Francisco buildings. The long shots. Really shoot nice way, okay?” They shot the cityscape quickly and packed up for the next location, which was a peak overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Filming the opening shots of The Room on location in San Francisco. From left: Tommy, Todd Barron, Joe Pacella, Zsolt Magyar, and me.

  We parked at the top of the mountain and set up. Tommy paced behind Joe and Todd Barron as they started shooting, saying things like, “You need to really do good job here, okay? We need entire bridge. We may need to do two to three shots.”

  “Yep,” Todd Barron said as he looked through the camera’s eyepiece. But Tommy persisted, oblivious to the fact that he was walking in and out of their shot. “No Mickey Mouse stuff here,” he said.

  Joe—a funny, brusque New Yorker by birth—was the only crew member, aside from Zsolt, who’d lasted the duration of the Room shoot. He’d always been professional, but it appeared his patience was about to expire. Joe inhaled, exhaled, and turned to face Tommy. “Tommy. We know what you want. We’re getting it for you. You need to back off while we’re shooting. We can’t do anything with you getting in the way.”

  Tommy took a step backward. “My God, Joey, you so aggressive! I call you Joey from now on, okay?”

  Joe almost smiled. “Yeah, Tommy. Okay.” With that Joe went back to doing his job.

  Zsolt and I were watching all this transpire from a distance of fifteen feet or so. “How could Tommy have ever had a real job?” Zsolt asked me in his thick Hungarian accent. “He’s unable to understand such simple things.” Then Zsolt turned to me. “Has he ever even told you where he’s from?”

  • • •

  Pierre arrives in San Francisco on a Greyhound bus from New Orleans. The ride has taken several days, and Pierre is still unable to believe how big this country is. Either immediately or shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Pierre starts calling himself Thomas.

  Thomas carries his two black suitcases off the bus. He is wearing a beret; his shaggy dark brown curls have been tucked up into it. He also has with him a check from a local bank in Chalmette, Louisiana, for $2,011—his wages from the grocery store—but he is unable to find a bank willing to cash it. Someone at some point told Thomas about lodging at the YMCA on Leavenworth Avenue. He checks into it immediately.

  San Francisco is the first city Thomas has seen that feels like home to him. “My city”: That’s how he will always refer to San Francisco. It’s almost as if the city’s been waiting for Thomas to arrive; San Francisco is in the middle of a glorious cultural rebirth wrapped up in a socially calamitous urban-blight collapse. In 1978, there is probably no better place for a deeply peculiar person to be.

  Thomas wanders around the city for two days. He loves the Embarcadero area, Chinatown, the Wharf, but it’s Alcatraz that captures his imagination. It reminds him, in its severity, of something the Soviets might have built. To him, Alcatraz is scary and dire and secret. He visits the old rock several times.

  Thomas needs work. After a week he picks up the Chronicle and hunts the want ads. One catches his eye: a man is looking for someone to sell yo-yos on the Wharf. He calls the number in the ad from a pay phone in Union Square. The man refuses to give Thomas his name but tells him to meet him at a coffee shop near Fisherman’s Wharf the next day.

  At the Wharf coffee shop, an older man with a clean-shaven head walks in and sits down across from Thomas, who is by now quite scared. The deal the man proposes is this: Thomas will sell the yo-yos for him to tourists at an ambitious markup and receive a small percentage of the profits. Thomas agrees to middleman the yo-yos. He later claims to have done so well for himself that he eventually began to wonder, Why don’t I sell my own yo-yos?

  And so Thomas, through means unknown, buys a gross of yo-yos and toy birds directly from the supplier, severing his business arrangement with the bald man. The toy birds Thomas sells are popular in Europe—particularly at the Eiffel Tower—but they are not commonly seen in America. Day after day, night after night, Thomas throws his toy birds into the seaside air; they sail up, circle around, and dutifully return to him. Thomas becomes so skilled at throwing these little avian boomerangs that tourists routinely applaud. He’s making money, so much money that he moves to his own apartment in the Tenderloin. At night he sometimes hears gunshots, but so what? In what other country could he have come so far, so fast? He’s grateful to America; his love for the place grows.

  Thomas earns a Wharf nickname: the Birdman. He changes his legal name to Thomas Pierre Wiseau, taking the French word for “bird,” oiseau, and swapping out the O for the W of his birth name. Thomas Wiseau. Thomas Bird. Thomas the Birdman.

  Thomas’s story grows increasingly murky after his legal name change. He lived harshly, he will later say. Totally day-to-day. Other times he will claim to have been making so much money that he carried bags of bills home to the Tenderloin every night. Part of his story involves an Italian restaurant on the Wharf he claims had mob connections. According to Thomas, one day he tried to use its bathroom but was thrown out because he was not a paying customer. Instead of getting mad, Thomas decides to apply for a job there. He’s turned away. It becomes a game: Every week he applies for a job at the restaurant and every week he’s turned away. Then, one day, a busboy quits in the middle of a busy shift. The restaurant’s manager, panicking, looks outside and sees the Birdman doing his act for a crowd of tourists. The manager sends a runner out to communicate the following message: We’ve got a job, Birdman, starting immediately, if you want it.

  Yet again Thomas proves himself to be a ferociously hard worker. When he’s not bussing tables he’s working the Wharf. Or so he claims. This is how, according to Thomas, he quietly, and improbably, amassed his first fortune.

  Then he meets two people who will have a fateful impact on his life. The first is a young woman he spots while bussing tables, whom he will later describe as “so beautiful” that he walked into a door and hit his head the first time he saw her. On Valentine’s Day, Thomas makes sure he has roses for her; on her birthday, he gives her a toy bird. Eventually he will give her a $1,500 platinum diamond engagement ring. They move across the bridge, to Sausalito, where Thomas does various jobs—hospital worker, city supervisor—before achieving lasting success as a full-fledged “retail man.” He is immensely happy for the first time in his life—until, that is, the woman betrays him (“multiple times,” according to Thomas), which drives him into some unspecified breakdown and results in a panic-filled move back to San Francisco proper.

  What parts of these stories are true? What parts of these stories are plausible?

  Sometime after his breakup, Thomas meets Drew Caffrey, who becomes a father figure to him. It is through his connection with Caffrey that Thomas opens up a booth in an indoor marketplace beside the reputedly mobbed-up restaurant. From his humble stall, Thomas now sells pleather jackets, trinkets, toy birds, key chains, jewelry, and clothing he claims to have designed. He’s not some transient, Wharf-loitering Birdman anymore. He has business cards now; they list his address as Wharf Park Shops, Jefferson Street, Number C. Setting up a booth like this must have cost Thomas money. He must have needed a vendor license. Did Thomas get these funds from Drew Caffrey or simply reach into one of his “bags of money”? Did the reputedly mobbed-up restaurant have anything to do with his access to Chinese junk suppliers?

  Tommy in one of his early San Francisco shops during the “Birdman” era.

  Soon he moves his small operation into a large building on Beach Street—an actual retail space. Somehow, Thomas eventually comes to own this entire building. From where does a junk-peddling, pleather-pushing, self-described “little kid” earn the money to buy an optimally located building in such a short period of time? Where d
oes he then find the money to knock down the old building and to build on its foundation a new, steel-accented, four-story headquarters? Thomas maintains that the secret to his string of startling successes was—and continues to be—his shrewd ability to identify new markets and new things to sell. Perhaps Thomas P. Wiseau really is some kind of business savant. As in all things, the simplest explanation is probably the right one. However, this is a man whose skin Occam’s Razor cannot cut. The enigma of Thomas P. Wiseau is that there never seems to be a simplest explanation.

  Thomas will later say, cryptically and often, that Drew Caffrey was central to his inimitable rise. When asked how, though, Thomas cavils, saying only that Caffrey was kind, smoked a pipe, wore a cowboy hat, and taught him “many things about life.”

  Street Fashions is so successful that Thomas buys more properties. One building is on Sutter, another on Dore. The self-described “King of Levi’s” sells jeans with missing belt loops and botched stitching. Even so, Street Fashions opens up more stores, one of them on Haight Street, registered to something called TPW Corporation. Years later, Thomas will sell the Sutter Street building for $2.9 million. A fortune—an empire—founded on yo-yos and toy birds.

  Tragically, in 1995, one of Thomas’s buildings—the one on Dore Street—burns down in a fire that spreads to nearby buildings, and in this blaze, a man gruesomely dies. Thomas submits a video to his insurance company detailing his damages. This video is tastelessly scored to classical music, includes local-news footage of the burned man’s death announcement, and contains testimony from a material witness who affirms Thomas’s damages and good character. When this witness stops praising Thomas, the cameraman eggs him on to continue: “Anything else you can say good things about Thomas?” Thomas, of course, is the cameraman. The material witness, who for some reason wears a white lab coat, is Drew Caffrey. It all seems like a small, strange movie.