With The Passion Of Tennessee Williams
Our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen!
“But at the end of the day,” David always points out. “You’re still just watching a crappy movie!”
If you share his sentiment, then the rest of this update probably won’t make a whole lot of sense to you.
So there’s this movie, right? And it’s called The Room. It was written, directed, and produced by its star, the mysteriously accented, seemingly ageless Tommy Wiseau, for about six million dollars. The film is ostensibly a straight up melodrama about the Christlike Johnny (played by Tommy) whose unbelievable charity and goodness to those around him is not returned when his fiancée Lisa spontaneously decides to start an affair with his best friend, Mark.
And it’s… Well, words can’t describe it better than this scene:
The whole movie is pretty much like that. Major subplots involving drug addiction and terminal cancer are introduced and then never mentioned again, the set design makes no sense whatsoever (in the titular room, a television is placed behind a couch, next to a coffee table adorned with pictures of spoons), the same six establishing shots (including blatant lifts from the opening credits to Full House and Monk) are used constantly, characters parade in and out of Johnny’s house with no introduction for seemingly no reason, and the movie features four of the longest sex scenes in the history of cinema, all of which are heavy on nudity from people you don’t want to see naked and are, at times, seemingly anatomically impossible.
This movie is bad in virtually every way a movie can be bad. Sure, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Out Space was terrible, but it didn’t include any scenes where you spend ten minutes watching the director’s naked, strangely muscular ass pumping as he dryhumps the overweight, topless lead actress.
To be honest, watching this movie I can’t be sure that Tommy Wiseau had even seen a movie before he made it. Maybe his dad had told him a story about a movie once. “Well, Tommy, characters walk around and say things, and then there’s an establishing shot so you know which city you’re in, and then more characters walk around saying more things, and sometimes there’s a sex scene.”
And if that’s the model he was shooting for, then mission fucking accomplished, because The Room is exactly that – two hours of people walking around saying things and occasionally boning, interspersed with about two dozen slow pans back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge. Do the things they’re saying make sense? No – not even in the warped, funhouse reality of the film, let alone in real life. Is there a reason for them to be walking around? Not really – the only reason anybody walks into Johnny’s house is so they can say things and then depart as soon as they’re done saying things. Is there a reason for the sex scenes? Punishment for the audience, maybe.
Since the movie came out, it’s developed a sort of Rocky Horror Picture Show cult following, jumpstarted by celebrities like David Cross and Seth Green. A theater on Sunset Boulevard shows The Room on all five screens on the last Saturday of every month, and people line up around the block to go heckle it, sing along with the execrable soundtrack, and throw plastic spoons every time the camera lingers on Johnny’s framed spoon pictures.
I had already seen The Room on DVD a couple of times, courtesy of Mike, who wisely pirated the movie rather than pay money for it. However, I wanted to see The Room on the big screen, and I was in luck, because Patrick and his friends have gone to The Room showings some 14 times in the past two years and were planning on going again last night.
Was it awesome? Yes, it was awesome. Fans shouted synchronized responses to characters’ asinine questions, yelled actors’ names moments before they would accidentally break character and look at the camera, and yelled ‘BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!’ every time the overweight harpy Lisa walked through the room.
But in addition to being awesome, it was also kind of sad.
Tommy Wiseau was there, you see. He goes to every single showing in LA to drum up the buzz for the movie, and does a quick Q & A before every showing in each theater. The fans love him, they mob him for pictures and autographs, and they inundate him with creepy questions about his sex life. And he plays along, God bless him, acting like he’s a cinematic wizard who doesn’t know how badly his movie stinks.
What’s sad about it is that this movie was certifiably a labor of love for him – he thought he was making the best movie ever, and this is according to interviews with multiple members of the cast and crew who watched his bizarre, Red Bull fueled antics throughout the course of the shoot. He thought The Room was going to set the world ablaze with critical adulation, but instead it – and he – have become a laughing stock for both the filmgoing public and the Hollywood elite.
And he embraces it, which is great, but I can’t imagine what it does to a guy to go out and play MC once a month while thousands of people line up to pay money to mock you and the creative endeavor you spearheaded and sunk six million dollars into. It’s like if Truman Goes To The 2007 Sprague High School Prom was some sort of cult sensation – I don’t know if I’d want to show up every night and watch drunk fans chant, “BOYS DON’T CRY!”
When Tommy stumbled into the theater for our Q & A, wearing baggy jeans with a blazer and white vest, greasy hair hanging to his shoulders, a pair of 80s wraparound shades obscuring his eyes, he received a standing ovation before taking questions.
“Who are some of your influences?” Someone yelled.
“I don’ have influenzes – I influenze ze ozer directors.” Tommy slurred, to great applause.
“Where are you from?” Came another question.
“Alright, clearly you are new to Ze Room, so maybe zomebody who knows about Ze Room wants to tell him about zis, yeah?”
(Tommy Wiseau’s age and nationality are closely guarded secrets. This is one guy whose birth certificate I actually do want to see.)
“How’s progress on The Neighbors?” I shouted, referring to Tommy’s followup sitcom.
And to be honest, I don’t really know what his response was. Part of it was because he was slurring his words like a drunk stroke victim and part of it was because of the accent, but also there came a point at which it seemed like he was just saying words because it seemed like a good thing to do. The most I got was that he wanted to make ten episodes but some third party only paid him for one, and after that his speech had all the cohesive quality of that kid who just got back from the dentist.
Tommy Wiseau is a smart man – not a good filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s got enough going on upstairs to figure out how to milk The Room for all it’s worth (there’s talk of a Blu-Ray release and a 3D version). Unfortunately, this means that whatever his next project is won’t be anywhere near as funny as The Room, because he’ll be trying to make the movie corny and unbearable, which isn’t nearly as fun as laughing at a guy who thinks he’s an auteur. God bless Ed Wood – the poor guy didn’t know how bad he sucked and just kept on trying. Tommy, on the other hand, is going to make a career out of sucking.
But who am I to talk? Mediocrity got Mike and I 700 hits on funnyordie and a bunch of friends who quit watching halfway through the first episode. Maybe Tommy’s got the right idea.
Truman Capps has to admit that The Room is still way better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.