Tommy Wiseau, Hollywood genius – watching ‘The Room’

Whilst watching Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, there came a point when I was wondering whether Wiseau had purposely made a bad movie. “No one,” I thought, “Could make a movie like this, not ironically,” I thought. And therein lies the genius of Tommy Wiseau. In the “grande” tradition of Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau has crafted a great work of terrible art. The Room is a marvellously inept and terrible film that has gained a cult following. Its reputation has grown and Wiseau has created a new career as a camp auteur. Watching The Room is an unforgettable experience in the same way that watching a building implode is unforgettable. It’s mesmerising and hypnotic in its sheer badness. And Wiseau is the wily genius behind it.

I recently attended a screening of The Room at the Prince Charles Cinema in Soho. I took a friend who was interested and curious after seeing the James Franco film, The Disaster Artist. The screening included a Q&A with Wiseau as well as a sneak preview of his newest film. Watching the film is an experience and Room vets will know it’s an immersive, interactive experience, akin to midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show or Sound of Music sing-a-longs. Members of the audience cheer, shout, and hoot at the screen, often singing along with the film’s idiotic catchphrases. Hale storms of plastic spoons suddenly happen whenever spoon-centric decor is seen on screen. The audience roars “Meanwhile, back in San Francisco” whenever establishing shots of the city flash on screen.

Before the film was shown, people lined up to have a chance to ask Wiseau a question. He appeared in front of the screen in character mode. His eyes were shielded by dark glasses, even though it was evening and we were in a dark cinema. He had his recognisable mane of Howard Stern-like hair. He fielded questions with the smooth polish and practised grace of a pro. If a question or answer was going no where, he just simply said, “Let’s move one,” and asked for another question. Once the Q&A time was finished, he dashed off, never to appear again. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel.

As we sat and watched the film, I was wondering how he felt about his magnus opus being consumed in the way that it was. If he was in the lobby of the Prince Charles, sitting at the bar, did he hear the explosive laughter from inside the screening room? And if so, what did he think?

Part of my experience with The Room is trying to suss out if Wiseau is in on the joke. Is he an outsider artist? A performance artist? A comedian? Has he created an Andy Kaufman-esque character that we all struggle to figure out if it’s real? Or is he a genius marketer, able to make some mighty fine lemonade out of some garbage lemons?

It’s difficult to guess any of this, watching The Room. It’s a melodrama, aiming for Douglas Sirk, but falling short. The plot – and I use that lofty term loosely – is a darkly romantic tale of Johnny (Wiseau), a kind and successful banker who is in love with Lisa (Juliette Danielle). Unfortunately, Lisa is no longer in love with Johnny, and instead has eyes for Johnny’s best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero, author of The Disaster Artist). Accompanying his love triangle are tangential characters who sorta drift in and out when the script remembers them. These characters include Denny (Philip Haldiman), a young college student who inexplicably is supported by Johnny, both emotionally and financially; Peter (Kyle Vogt), a psychologist friend who seems to serve no purpose in appearing in the film; and Michelle and Mike (Robyn Harris and Scott Holmes), a couple who are friends with Lisa and Johnny. None of these story lines get much attention and are weirdly cut off and abandoned for the main conflict involving Lisa, Johnny, and Mark.

As the film progresses, Johnny discovers the affair and is completely devastated by the betrayal. He expresses his distress by baying woodenly. He grimaces and squints his eyes and recites his lines like a hostage reading out a ransom note. Wiseau writes himself a plum part and he approaches the role in a fascinating way – almost genius, really. It would be stupid to try and assess Wiseau’s performance in the same way one would judge an Al Pacino performance or a Robert DeNiro performance. He’s not a traditional actor. In fact, he’s not an actor at all. The genius in his non-performance is that he twists and bends his fictional universe and therefore his stilted, stunned delivery makes sense in the diegesis of the film. When Johnny is drunk, Wiseau is seen as working hard to convince us he’s drunk – we see the effort – and we are helpfully told “I’m wasted” This is the kind of acting that I’d refer to as postmodern acting, in that we see the artifice behind his acting. This isn’t a naturalistic performance, nor is it Method; Wiseau is never not Wiseau as Johnny. This performance is more than just a bad performance – we’ve seen millions of those from actors more skilled than Wiseau – yet, the sheer awkward incompetence of Wiseau is breathtaking. When he’s delivering his lines in that idiosyncratic, yet bad, way, I’m reminded of The Shaggs’ “My Pal Foot Foot.”

In the cinema, audiences shouted in delight whenever characters did anything nonsensical or foolish. The script is a missmash of scenes, some that pick up a loose thread of a subplot only to toss it. These ridiculous distractions further give the film its nutty brilliance. In one scene, we witness Denny facing off with a tough drug dealer, and the exchange approaches After School Special territory, but then that story line is abandoned. In another scene, Johnny and his friends on ill-fitting tuxes and go out to toss a football scene – there’s no explanation for the tuxes nor do we learn why the guys are going out to toss the football, but there you go. When Lisa is confronted by her gold digging mother, Claudette (Carolyn Minnott), she learns that her mother has cancer with a glib announcement, “The tests came back. I definitely have breast cancer,” in a tone one would use to order pizza – and then the cancer subplot disappears.

As a director, Wiseau is even more gloriously kacked than as a screenwriter or actor. The story contains awful dialogue and Wiseau has his characters behave in strange, erratic ways. One minute, Johnny is badly emoting and lamenting some injustice, and in the next, he’s cheerful and sunny, giggling inappropriately. He strenuously denies hitting Lisa, shouting “I did not hit her!” punctuating his denial by angrily throwing a bottle of water on the ground, before switching gears and offering a genial, “Oh, hi, Mark.” After Mark shares a dark anecdote about a woman being beaten by her boyfriend, Johnny laughs and exclaims, “What a story, Mark!” as if he were imitating Yakov Smirnoff.

When he directs outdoor scenes, they take place on rooftops, but the green screen is obvious. Wiseau’s sex scenes with Danielle are a shoddy copy/paste of one sex scene. The camera work is often confused, zooming in and out spontaneously. The staging of the scenes is amateurish (no one ever remembers to close doors in The Room) Wiseau cannot extract performances from his actors, and they’re left stranded, to do the work on their own, mostly failing.

So The Room is a mess. But a brilliant mess. A glorious mess. A transcendent mess. There are lots of bad movies – many made by artists far more talented and resourceful than Wiseau. Just the other day, I watched Netflix’s Otherhood, directed by Cindy Chupack, a writer whose resume includes such sterling work as Sex and the City and Modern Family. Yet, her film Otherhood was nearly unwatchable, despite it having a tonier budget than The Room, better actors, and far more resources. But The Room is a brilliant work of curio art, whilst Otherhood is just bland, Hollywood junk. It rests comfortably in cliches – while The Room dares us to react to cliches – and Otherhood‘s awfulness is defined by its bland, safeness. The Room is dangerous in that Wiseau takes the concept of cinema and movie-watching and tears the rules apart. He sets fire to Syd Field’s oeuvre, approaching film making with a context all his won.