The Disaster Artist Read online

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  The Players

  Author’s Note

  ONE

  “Oh, Hi, Mark”

  TWO

  La France a Gagné

  THREE

  “Do You Have Some Secrets?”

  FOUR

  Tommy’s Planet

  FIVE

  “People Are Very Strange These Days”

  SIX

  Too Young to Die

  SEVEN

  “Where’s My Fucking Money?”

  EIGHT

  May All Your Dreams Come True

  NINE

  “You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!”

  TEN

  Do You Have the Guts to Take Me?

  ELEVEN

  “I’ll Record Everything”

  TWELVE

  I’m Not Waiting for Hollywood

  THIRTEEN

  “Leave Your Stupid Comments in Your Pocket”

  FOURTEEN

  Highway of Hell

  FIFTEEN

  “God, Forgive Me”

  SIXTEEN

  Don’t Be Shocked

  SEVENTEEN

  This Is My Life

  Acknowledgments

  About Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell

  To my family, with my love and gratitude

  Joe Gillis:

  Maybe it’s a little long, and maybe there’s some repetitions . . . but you’re not a professional writer.

  Norma Desmond:

  I wrote that with my heart.

  Joe Gillis:

  Sure you did. That’s what makes it great.

  —Sunset Boulevard (1950)

  I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.

  —Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

  This play can be played without any age restriction. It will work if the chemistry between all the characters makes sense. Human behavior and betrayal applies to all of us. It exists within ourselves. You love somebody. Do you? What is love? You think you have everything, but you don’t have anything. You have to have hope and spirit. Be an optimist. But can you handle all your human behavior or other’s behavior? You don’t want to be good, but great.

  —Director’s Note, The Room (2001), by Tommy P. Wiseau

  The Players

  Tommy Wiseau

  Johnny / writer, director, producer

  Don [sic]

  the other Mark

  Brianna Tate

  the other Michelle

  Philip Haldiman

  Denny

  Dan Janjigian

  Chris-R

  Scott Holmes

  Mike

  Juliette Danielle

  Lisa

  Carolyn Minnott

  Claudette

  Robyn Paris

  Michelle

  Kyle Vogt

  Peter

  Greg Ellery

  Steven

  Bill Meurer

  Birns & Sawyer owner

  Peter Anway

  Birns & Sawyer rep

  Raphael Smadja

  director of photography no. 1

  Sandy Schklair

  script supervisor

  Safowa Bright

  costume designer

  Amy Von Brock

  makeup artist

  Zsolt Magyar

  sound mixer

  “Merce”

  art department

  Graham Futerfas

  director of photography no. 2

  Todd Barron

  director of photography no. 3

  Byron

  stagehand / director of yelling

  Joe Pacella

  camera assistant

  Author’s Note

  Imagine a movie so incomprehensible that you find yourself compelled to watch it over and over again. You become desperate to learn how (if) on earth it was conceived: Who made it, and for what purpose?

  This book is about what might be the world’s most improbable Hollywood success story. At its center is an enigmatic filmmaker who claims, among many other things, to be a vampire. This man speaks with a thick European accent, the derivation of which he won’t identify. He also refuses to reveal his age or the origins of his seemingly vast fortune. His name is Tommy Wiseau; and the film he wrote, directed, produced, starred in, and poured $6 million into is a disastrous specimen of cinematic hubris called The Room.

  The Room is—despite its ostensibly simple plot—perhaps the most casually surreal film ever made. To put it simply, The Room doesn’t work in any way films have evolved to work over the last century of filmmaking. It’s filled with red herrings, shots of locations that are never visited, and entire conversations comprised of non sequiturs. It is, essentially, one gigantic plot hole. For many, experiencing The Room is both wildly exhilarating and supremely dislocating. The film engenders an obsessive fascination, instantly luring you into its odd, convoluted world. Tommy Wiseau intended The Room to be a serious American drama, a cautionary tale about love and friendship, but it became something else entirely—a perfectly literal comedy of errors.

  A typical reaction to the film, at its Copenhagen premiere.

  Yet since its 2003 release, The Room has spread across the United States, and now the world, with viral unstoppability. Many believe that The Room’s unfathomable incompetence elevates it to something like Bizarro-world brilliance. It’s revered for its inadequacy and its peerless ability to induce uncontrollable laughter from beginning to end. It may be the most wonderfully terrible one hour and thirty-nine minutes ever committed to celluloid.

  And I was in it.

  In 1998, as a nineteen-year-old aspiring actor, I enrolled in an acting class in San Francisco. It was there that I met Tommy Wiseau, an encounter that had an unforeseeable impact on the direction of my life. Tommy and I were opposites in every conceivable way, though we shared a common dream: a career in entertainment. This chance meeting inspired a journey neither I nor anyone else could have imagined.

  This book is a personal account of that journey—the one that led to the phenomenon that is The Room. It is, I hope, a tale of heart, sadness, and blind artistic courage. The story it tells is as much about the power of believing in oneself as it is about the perils that can arise in conquering self-imposed limitations.

  The conversations and events depicted herein are true and have been rendered as I recall them. The material in this book not derived from my observations and experience is the documented result of on-the-record interviews with Tommy and other persons concerned. I have also used as reference The Room’s original script, photographs, and hours of behind-the-scenes production footage. The footage in particular was used to accurately describe scenes related to the filming process. Minimal liberties have been taken to streamline the narrative. In combining and condensing some conversations or events, I have done so with the hope of maintaining their integrity while also accurately capturing their mood and spirit.

  • • •

  Upon its debut, The Room was a spectacular bomb, pulling in all of $1,800 during its initial two-week Los Angeles run. It wasn’t until the last weekend of the film’s short release that the seeds of its eventual cultural salvation were planted. While passing a movie theater, two young film students named Michael Rousselet and Scott Gairdner noticed a sign on the ticket booth that read: NO REFUNDS. Below t
he sign was this blurb from a review: “Watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head.” They were sold.

  The crazy cult of The Room. From left: Michael Rousselet, comedian David Cross, and Scott Gairdner.

  The Room mesmerized Rousselet and Gairdner. They rallied others to experience the film and soon enough a cult was born. These young men and women created many of The Room’s now famous audience participation rituals, and for several years served as the vanguard of an unofficial underground fan club. They simply wouldn’t let the film die, going so far as to camp outside one theater to demand its continuance. The combination of their enthusiasm and Tommy’s hapless guerrilla marketing made the film an L.A. in-joke and an entertainment industry curiosity. Before long, the cream of Hollywood’s comedy community developed a particular affinity for Tommy’s film, hosting private Room parties and parodying it in their work. Slowly, the film’s cult status gained momentum, and by 2009, The Room had entered the mainstream. It was featured in Entertainment Weekly, Time, and Harper’s and covered on CNN, FOX News, and ABC World News; it also began airing annually on national television. Following the media blitz, The Room emerged as a top-selling independent film, and to this day it screens to sold-out crowds worldwide.

  Tommy plays football with Room fans outside Prince Charles Cinema in London.

  The Room heats up the South Pole!

  The magic of The Room derives from one thing: No one interprets the world the way Tommy Wiseau does. He is the key to The Room’s mystery as well as the engine of its success. Tommy had always predicted his film would become a classic, embraced worldwide—a notion that could not have seemed less likely. Yet he was right. The Room became every bit the blockbuster that Tommy had envisioned, though not, of course, in the way he envisioned. Despite The Room’s reputation as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies,” Tommy continues to believe that his is the greatest film of all time.

  In the end, the phenomenon of The Room has allowed me to realize that, in life, anything is possible. The Room is a drama that is also a comedy that is also an existential cry for help that is finally a testament to human endurance. It has made me reconsider what defines artistic success or failure. If art is expression, can it fail? Is success simply a matter of what one does with failure?

  Many of us want to embark on a creative life and never take the chance—too stifled by our self-awareness or fear to try. All the odds were against Tommy Wiseau becoming a filmmaker, yet something pushed him to go for it—something powerful enough to inspire a global phenomenon. Ten years after wrapping The Room, and living my life in its strange wake, I realize how much the experience has changed me, and how grateful I am for that. By now millions of people have stood before the great, mysterious closed door that is The Room, peering through its keyhole with a mixture of joy and bewilderment. My hope is that I have unlocked this door and welcomed everyone, at long last, inside.

  Greg Sestero

  South Pasadena, CA

  October 2012

  Meeting fans in Dublin, Ireland.

  one

  “Oh, Hi, Mark”

  Betty Schaefer:

  I’d always heard you had some talent.

  Joe Gillis:

  That was last year. This year I’m trying to earn a living.

  —Sunset Boulevard

  Tommy Wiseau has always been an eccentric dresser, but on a late-summer night in 2002 he was turning the heads of every model, weirdo, transvestite, and face-lift artist in and around Hollywood’s Palm Restaurant. People couldn’t stop looking at him; I couldn’t stop looking at him. Even today, a decade later, I still can’t unsee Tommy’s outfit: nighttime sunglasses, a dark blazer as loose and baggy as rain gear, sand-colored cargo pants with pockets filled to capacity (was he smuggling potatoes?), a white tank top, clunky Frankenstein combat boots, and two belts. Yes, two belts. The first belt was at home in its loops; the second draped down in back to cup Tommy’s backside, which was, he always claimed, the point: “It keeps my ass up. Plus it feels good.” And then there was Tommy himself: short and muscular; his face as lumpy and white as an abandoned draft of a sculpture; his enormous snow-shovel jaw; his long, thick, impossibly black hair, seemingly dyed in Magic Marker ink—and currently sopping wet. Moments before we walked in, Tommy had dumped a bottle of Arrowhead water over his head to keep “this poofy stuff” from afflicting his considerable curls. He had also refused to let the Palm’s valet park his silver SL500 Mercedes-Benz, worried the guy would fart in his seat.

  At this point I’d known Tommy for almost half a decade. Tommy and I looked more like Marvel Comics nemeses than people who could be friends. I was a tall, sandy-blond Northern California kid. Tommy, meanwhile, appeared to have been grown somewhere dark and moist. I knew exactly where Tommy and I fit in among the Palm’s mixture of Hollywood sharks, minnows, and tourists. I was twenty-four years old—a minnow, like Tommy. That meant we had at least thirty minutes to wait for a table. Upon entering the restaurant, I could see various diners consulting their mental Rolodexes, trying to place Tommy. Gene Simmons after three months in the Gobi Desert? The Hunchback of Notre Dame following corrective surgery? An escaped Muppet? The drummer from Ratt?

  “I don’t wait in the line,” Tommy said, speaking to me over his shoulder. He marched up to the Palm’s hostess. I kept my distance, as I always did at times like this, and waited for the inevitable moment in which Tommy spoke and the person to whom he was speaking tried to make geographical sense of his pronunciation, which sounded like an Eastern European accent that had been hit by a Parisian bus. The hostess asked Tommy if he had a reservation.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “We have table reservation.”

  “And what’s the name?” she said, slightly sarcastically, but only slightly, because who knew whether Ratt was on the verge of releasing a Greatest Hits album? Her job required carefully hedging one’s fame-related bets.

  “Ron,” Tommy said.

  She checked her list. “Sorry,” she said, tapping her pencil on the page. “There’s no Ron here.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Tommy said. “It’s Robert.”

  She looked down. “There’s no Robert here, either.”

  Tommy laughed. “Wait, I remember now. Try John.”

  The hostess found the name John near the bottom of her list.

  “John,” she said. “Party of four?”

  “Yes, yes,” Tommy said, summoning me over to bring him one party member closer to accuracy.

  I don’t know who “John, party of four” actually was, but the hostess snagged a wine menu and began walking us to our table.

  I followed Tommy and the hostess through the Palm’s dim interior and looked at the dozens of movie-star caricatures that lined its walls. There was Jack Nicholson, Bette Davis, O. J. Simpson—which made me wonder: What, exactly, did you have to do to get banished from the wall of the Palm? I noticed some starry faces sitting at the tables, too. Well, maybe not starry, but midsize astral phenomena: sports broadcaster Al Michaels, colleague to my beloved John Madden; Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Josie Maran; the cohost on our local ABC News. There were also lots of faces unknown to me but obviously connected. These mostly middle-aged men and women talked show business at conversational levels, and real show business sotto voce. The waiters were all older, beefy guys who smelled of expensive aftershave and had big, white, manicured nails; they were such smooth operators, they almost managed to convince you it didn’t matter that you weren’t famous. The air in the Palm was very expensive. Everything, other than the food, tasted like money.

  “Excuse me,” Tommy said indignantly, after the hostess showed us to our table. “Excuse me but no. I don’t sit here. I want booth.” Tommy always insisted on a booth.

  “Sir, our booths are reserved.”

  But Tommy was nothing if not unrelenting. I think the hostess figured she had two options: Give Tommy a booth or call animal control to tranq him. Through a combination of lying, grandstanding, and bullying, Tommy and I we
re now seated in a booth in the nicest section of the Palm. As soon as Tommy sat down he flagged someone down and said he was “starving” and ready to order.

  “I don’t work here,” the person said.

  Whenever Tommy is in a restaurant, he always orders a glass of hot water. I’ve never seen a waiter or waitress do anything but balk at the request.

  Here’s how the Palm’s waiter handled it: “I’m sorry. Did you say a glass of—?”

  Tommy: “Hot water. Yes. This is what I am saying.”

  “A lemon maybe or—?”

  “Look, why you give me hard time? Do I speak Chinese? This is simple request, my God. Are you tipsy or something? And more bread with raisin stuff.”

  We were at the Palm to celebrate. The following morning, official production would begin on The Room, a film Tommy had conceived, written, produced, cast, and was now directing and set to star in. If you’d known Tommy as long as I had, the beginning of The Room’s production was a miracle of biblical significance. I’d worked on the film with him, on and off, since its inception. My most recent and intense job on the film was working as Tommy’s line producer. When we began, I had no idea what a line producer was. Neither did Tommy. Basically, I was doing anything that needed to be done. I scheduled all auditions, meetings, and rehearsals; ran the casting sessions; helped find equipment; and, most challenging, made sure Tommy didn’t sabotage his own film. In a sense I was his outside-world translator, since no one knew him better than I did. I was also in charge of writing the checks that were flying out the door of Wiseau-Films like doves in search of dry land. For all this, Tommy was paying me a decent wage, plus “perks,” which was what Tommy called food. With Tommy’s vanity project about to begin, my plan was to walk into my eight-dollars-an-hour retail job at French Connection the next day and quit. I hoped never again to fold something I wasn’t going to wear myself.