The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

I stayed in the Bay Area for the next week to decompress and visit family. Tommy was also staying in San Francisco (“For business,” he said) and a few days later asked if I could help him move some stuff with my SUV.

  When I went to pick Tommy up, his condo was more chaotic than I’d ever seen it. Among the bags of trash and clothing were piles of photos and papers, some of which had been scattered across his coffee table. Tommy was in too good of a mood to bother apologizing for the mess. The moment I walked in, he said he had something to show me. With that, he vanished into another room.

  I picked up one of the pictures and saw a younger, smiling, fresh-faced Tommy with the Street Fashions USA logo superimposed above him; I figured it was an old promo card. I also noticed an ID tag from a 1993 Las Vegas retailer convention and, next to that, a TPW Inc. business card, with his name misspelled: THOMAS P. WISAU.

  Tommy came back into the room holding up a VHS tape: “This is surprise for you! At first I thought I was not going to show you, but then I change my mind. So here you go! Your present.”

  “What is it?”

  “We watch,” he said, “and you find out.”

  It was the first rough cut of The Room. I now learned that Tommy had asked his editor to piece together footage of the movie as it was being filmed. That meant this rough cut didn’t have any of the San Francisco footage. It also wasn’t yet sound-synched, dubbed, or instrumentally scored, but it was something to behold all the same. Tommy had used placeholder music (Journey, Sade, and Bon Jovi) as a temporary soundtrack. The first Johnny-Lisa sex scene, for instance, was backed up by Bon Jovi’s “Always.” In fact, the scene ran for the exact duration of the song, which is six minutes—twice as long as in The Room’s final cut.

  At one point in the film, I glanced over at Tommy, who was beaming. He was filled with such joy and pride. This movie and moment was his, it belonged to him, and I wanted to let Tommy savor it. I imagined him enjoying many future solo screenings in his living room, staring at the television, smiling like he was now, and being, in that moment, the movie star he knew he could be. This was his glorious $6 million home movie.

  Right before we left, Tommy handed me a copy of the rough cut to take home. “Watch with your family,” he said. “Your mother will be shocked.”

  After loading up my car with merchandise from the Street Fashions USA on Beach Street, Tommy directed me to a store on Haight Street, fifteen minutes away, to unload. It was another Street Fashions location.

  “As you can see,” he said as he unlocked the door, “somebody is powerful person.” It appeared Tommy was having a liquidation sale. All the merchandise had been thrown carelessly onto the shelves. He’d posted homemade SALE signs on the windows. He’d even placed a sky-tracker spotlight outside the front door. “I’m changing business,” he said. “I think I do movies now.”

  I returned to my folks’ house that evening, rough cut in hand. My brother David and his girlfriend, who were living in Sacramento, had come to visit for the night. After we’d caught up, David looked at me knowingly. “So,” he said, “guess how old Tommy is?” My brother and I had a long-running debate about Tommy’s real age, which continued even after Tommy’s driver’s license had appeared to confirm that he really was in his early thirties. (“There’s no way,” my brother had said, “that Tommy’s only seven years older than me.”)

  It turned out David’s girlfriend had a friend with state government connections. According to public record, Tommy was born much earlier than 1968. It was nice to know David and I weren’t crazy, but after I considered the lengths to which Tommy had gone to conceal his age, my feelings turned a bit heavy. Suddenly I saw Tommy in an even sadder light. Was there anything about himself that Tommy actually accepted? I hoped that, in some way, completing The Room would help him begin to embrace who he really was.

  With popcorn popped, my family and I settled in to watch the film. Within the first few minutes, everyone was laughing so hard they could barely breathe. “Greg,” David said, “this is . . . It’s incredible. Imagine playing this in front of a packed house. They think they’re going to watch some intense, dramatic movie—and then this comes on. You could retire off this thing!”

  “I have to show this to my friends,” his girlfriend kept saying, over and over again. My mother absolutely lost it when Tommy says to Lisa, “In a few minutes, bitch.” My father—a dear, restrained, altogether good-hearted man who enjoys the daily newspaper’s crossword puzzle, Seinfeld, and going to bed at 9:00 p.m.—was laughing so hard he had to take off his glasses every few minutes to wipe the tears from his eyes. Not a scene transpired without someone crying out: “Wait!” “Rewind.” “Pause!” It was striking to see my family loving this cinematic abomination as much as they were. The room was filled with laughter from beginning to end—huge, bright, joyful laughter. We finished watching it at 1:00 a.m. Our cheeks hurt, our stomachs ached, and we felt closer to one another than we had in a long time.

  Although I didn’t know it, my family in Danville, California, had become The Room’s collective Patient Zero. Their response to The Room was a powerful indicator of what this film would do on a much larger scale.

  It was not until June 1, 2003—eight months later—that I discovered that any other audience would ever have the chance to see The Room. I received an invitation from Wiseau-Films cordially inviting me, and a guest, to the world premiere of The Room, taking place on Friday, June 27, 2003, at 7:00 p.m., in Los Angeles.

  Invitation to the premiere of The Room, June 27, 2003—a day that would change the face of American cinema.

  seventeen

  This Is My Life

  So they were turning after all, those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her.

  —Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

  I think it’s time we all moved on.

  —Dickie Greenleaf, The Talented Mr. Ripley

  By the time premiere night rolled around, it had been a long time since I’d spoken to Tommy; he’d vanished into the postproduction minutiae of The Room. The last time I had seen him was at his editor’s studio in Burbank, shortly after the film wrapped. I’d been called in to dub some of my dialogue due to the fact that the sound had been improperly recorded for most of the film. Tommy also insisted on recording dialogue for a PG-rated version of The Room, which he hoped would be suitable for prime-time television broadcast; lines like “manipulative bitch” became “manipulative witch.” He didn’t seem to consider that a much bigger roadblock to his prime-time broadcast version of The Room might be its eleven minutes of sex scenes.

  My visit with Tommy and Eric Chase, the film’s editor, in Burbank made clear that their working relationship was that of two mountain goats repeatedly butting heads. Tommy’s mantra during the editing process: “I repeat, nothing will be cut.” Nevertheless, a portion of every editing session involved Eric trying to convince Tommy that various scenes either needed to be shortened or lost entirely. “This slows down the film,” Eric would say of one scene. “No, it doesn’t,” Tommy would respond. “This scene has no relevance to anything whatsoever,” Eric would say about another scene. “Yes,” Tommy would counter, “it does.”

  Eric was troubled by the lack of continuity. He struggled to make it clear to Tommy that editing couldn’t solve every problem. But Tommy saw no problems. The biggest issue was the inclusion of the Lisa-Mark love scene Tommy insisted on wedging into The Room’s last fifteen minutes, which resulted in a small time warp that no editing tricks could convincingly account for. “How,” Eric asked Tommy, “am I supposed to edit this? Lisa says she’s getting ready for ‘the party tonight.’ Then it’s night, and there’s no party. Then it’s day, and she’s still getting ready for the party! And you want a love scene thrown in there?” Tommy’s response: “Yes. This is the way I see it.”

  Eric’s greatest battle was trying to convince Tommy to lose the scene in which Johnny bares
his naked ass. Eric’s reasoning: The shot scared his wife. Tommy refused. The one battle Eric did manage to win was convincing Tommy to trim three minutes from Johnny and Lisa’s first sex scene. With the exception of the alternate Chris-R alley scene, Johnny’s living room death, and all of the HD camera footage, everything else Tommy shot was somehow squeezed into The Room’s final edit.

  This “everything stays” mentality extended itself to Tommy’s Wiseau-Films production logo, which plays before the movie proper begins. Tommy had had two logo sequences designed. The first was a speck of silver light morphing into a shiny silver W, which then explodes into a spinning Wiseau-Films globe. The second option was another, slightly different Wiseau-Films globe that also forms out of the nebular emptiness of space. Tommy had trouble choosing between the two logos. While only one plays in the theatrical cut of the film, both run—one right after the other—on the DVD version.

  Another duel Eric lost involved The Room’s opening credits. Eric was unable to convince Tommy to follow traditional auteur protocol and list all his credits on one screen: Written, Produced, and Directed by Tommy Wiseau. Instead, Tommy elected to dedicate a separate screen to each of his duties. Executive Producer: Tommy Wiseau; Writer: Tommy Wiseau; Producer: Tommy Wiseau; Director: Tommy Wiseau. Tommy’s scent is all over the film before it even begins.

  Tommy’s style proved more fitting for the next item on his prepremiere Room to-do list: guerrilla marketing. On April 1, 2003, the good people of Hollywood awoke to find Tommy’s face plastered on a billboard on Highland Avenue, a few blocks down from the Kodak Theater, where the Oscars are held. The ad featured a cropped version of one of Tommy’s favorite headshots of himself: lowered face, pursed lips, and eyes filled with furiously blank focus. It was terrifying. Beneath Tommy’s mug was the film’s tagline: “Can you really trust anyone?” I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie billboard that did less to communicate what the movie it was ostensibly advertising was about. Tommy’s billboard could have been an ad for an industrial film about the dangers of radon or some experimental foreign crime caper. The one thing the billboard probably wasn’t selling was what the movie actually was: an earnest love-triangle melodrama.

  “We do no different than big sharks,” Tommy would say. After all, he’d studied closely how the big sharks designed their billboards. They featured language like Only in Theaters and Now Playing and had MPAA ratings and logos belonging to Dolby Digital and Kodak film. So Tommy’s billboard contained the same information and corporate heraldry. It read Now Playing and Only in Theaters despite the fact that it wasn’t playing in any theater. This made the billboard’s one decidedly non–big shark touch—a Room screening RSVP hotline (which was Tommy’s home phone number at the time)—rather touching. The Room billboard was Tommy’s most impressive and costly bit of marketing. Most studios book a one-month billboard run for their major releases. Tommy’s billboard didn’t come down until five years later, during which time it became an odd Hollywood landmark.

  The billboard over Highland Avenue. Feel free to call for screening info!

  His other marketing attempts were just as bold. Tommy, for instance, impetuously phoned Paramount Studios to inquire about distribution for The Room. He was told to drop off the film at the Paramount lot for their consideration. It normally takes two weeks for a studio to respond, but Tommy was summoned back to Paramount to pick up The Room within twenty-four hours. He was unbowed by this. “Well,” he said, “they lost. I just do myself.”

  Rejection seemed to fill Tommy’s tank with rocket fuel. After the Paramount debacle, Tommy hired a publicist named Ed Lozzi and kicked off a full-scale publicity campaign. Tommy then tried to reserve Grauman’s Chinese Theatre for The Room’s premiere. No dice. He did, however, successfully secure a four-wall distribution deal—a process by which a studio rents a movie theater for a period of time and receives all of the box office revenue—with Laemmle Theaters. The Room would premiere at the Laemmle on Fairfax and Beverly (which had recently become a $2.75/ticket theater), followed by a two-week run at a Laemmle theater in the Valley. Why pay to keep The Room in theaters for two weeks? Because having a film play for two weeks in theaters was a prerequisite for all films submitted to the Academy Awards, which had always been Tommy’s ultimate goal.

  The media blitzkrieg announcing The Room’s imminent premiere included late-night television commercials, local print ads, and a JumboTron that ran a Room trailer above Sunset Boulevard for weeks. Tommy’s self-scribed promotional material claimed that his film had “the passion of Tennesee [sic] Williams” and cited nonexistent critics from nonexistent outlets. This was Entertainment Today’s rave: “Wiseau is multi-talented and mysterious, since he is a true Cajun from New Orleans. . . . This electrifying drama is about love and ultimate betrayal.” And here was praise courtesy of something called Beverly Hills 90210: “If you’ve been missing Tennesse [yes, sic] Williams films, the ‘new Williams’ is a ragin’ Cajun.”

  Tommy didn’t leave a restaurant or restroom without depositing a Room postcard. Some of my friends, including Amber and even Don, called me to talk about Tommy’s bombardment of Room advertisements. Between local TV, news publications, the JumboTron, eating establishments, lavatories, and the billboard, Tommy had Los Angeles covered. The Room was everywhere.

  • • •

  On the evening of The Room’s premiere, I put on the closest thing to black-tie attire I had: the oversize shirt and pants from my Room tuxedo. Then I drove over to Tommy’s house.

  Me in my ill-fitted evening wear with Dan Janjigian and friends.

  When I arrived, Tommy was pacing in his driveway, talking on his cell phone, his white tuxedo blouse unbuttoned halfway. He looked agitated, sweaty, and vaguely debauched. Next to him was a rented van and boxes of gift bags full of promotional Room swag: soundtracks, T-shirts, and a making-of photo book. As I approached, he hung up and finished loading the last few boxes into the van. He saw me notice the silk girdle circling his midsection and mistakenly assumed I disapproved. “So what?” he said. “I have to keep my stomach tight! I won’t have big stomach because you tell me so.”

  I laughed as I reached down to pick up a box. “Be careful,” Tommy said. “I do lifting. I don’t want you to hurt your stitches.” It took a moment, but I eventually figured out what he meant by this: Tommy had convinced himself that I’d undergone cosmetic surgery on my stomach. A decade later, I’m still confused as to why exactly he believed this.

  As we loaded the last boxes into the van, Tommy’s mind was churning out even more fantastical theories: “We receive phone calls. I think I suspect something, you know what I’m saying? These phone calls is not normal. It’s obsession, if you really think about it.” Translation: Tommy suspected the hang-ups on his answering machine were either famous people or jealous studio executives. He hadn’t seemed to consider that these hang-ups were more probably curious people calling the RSVP number he’d recently plastered on a billboard in the middle of Hollywood.

  Tommy and I went inside to grab the last of the boxes. His house was practically empty. “I wasn’t going to tell you,” he said, “but I have new house now. In very exclusive neighborhood.” Tommy also told me that he’d closed all of his Street Fashions stores and bought a building in Los Angeles. He wanted to create his own private Paramount Studios.

  We were in the limo by 5:30 p.m. Tommy taped Room posters on each window before climbing aboard. The limo rolled out of Tommy’s driveway and started heading in the opposite direction of the theater, over Laurel Canyon, toward the Valley. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Tommy poured a can of Red Bull into a champagne glass. “We have very exclusive guests coming,” he told me. “So behave yourself.” Tommy was anxious and grew increasingly so, taking more frequent sips of Red Bull the closer we got to the Valley. He clearly wanted to impress his mystery guests.

  The limo turned onto Magnolia Boulevard and made a right into a small private lane before stopping in the driv
eway of a handsome town house. Two women of a certain age, one blond and one redheaded, both done up in old-school red-carpet-ready attire, emerged. Tommy got out of the limo and waited for them door-side. Both women were overtaken with excitement at the sight of Tommy, hugging and kissing him. As the women ducked into the limo, Tommy introduced us. Karen, the blond and older of the two, was the widow of director Stanley Kramer, who is most famous for directing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and giving Marlon Brando his first film role in The Men. The other woman was Karen and Stanley’s daughter, Kat, who’d been named after her godmother, Katharine Hepburn.

  From left: Carolyn Minnott, Tommy, and Kat Kramer at The Room’s premiere.

  As the limo headed back toward Hollywood, Kat, who was wearing an impressively red hat, began telling me all about the fun she’d had with Tommy over the last few months. “I introduced Tommy to De Niro and Faye Dunaway,” she said, and laughed. “I don’t think he knew who they were at first!” I later found out that Kat was referring to an AFI tribute to Robert De Niro that she’d attended with Tommy. I had no idea how they’d met but found the pairing interesting nonetheless. I knew Tommy’s dream had always been to be like Brando. And here he was, on the way to his first movie’s premiere, with the widow and daughter of the director who gave Brando his start. It was a long-shot connection, but to Tommy this must have seemed like fate.

  Tommy, whose nerves had finally calmed, told the driver to turn onto Hollywood Boulevard for an impromptu pit stop in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. As the limo idled, Tommy grabbed an armful of Room paraphernalia, sprung up through the sunroof, and began shouting, “Hey, everyone! You’re invited!” Then he started launching Room T-shirts and invites to anyone and everyone passing by. Soon enough a crowd of excited tourists had gathered around the limo. Tommy was now swinging a Room T-shirt in a helicopter motion above his head, saying, “Come to feature movie premiere!” The limo, mercifully, started moving and Tommy threw the T-shirt into the crowd. “You’re all invited!” He descended back into the limo, smiling. “Okay,” he told the driver, “time to go to the Fairfax!”