The Room
The Room is a 2003 American independent romantic drama film written, directed, and produced by Tommy Wiseau, who also stars in the film alongside Juliette Danielle and Greg Sestero. Set in San Francisco, the film is centered around a melodramatic love triangle between amiable banker Johnny, his deceptive fiancée Lisa, and his conflicted best friend Mark. The work was reportedly intended to be semi-autobiographical in nature. According to Wiseau, the title alludes to the potential of a room to be the site of both good and bad events. The stage play from which the film is derived was so named due to its events taking place entirely in a single room.
A number of publications have labeled The Room as one of the worst films ever made, one even describing it as "the Citizen Kane of bad movies". Originally shown only in a limited number of California theaters, The Room quickly became a cult film due to its bizarre and unconventional storytelling, technical and narrative issues, and Wiseau's performance. Although Wiseau has retrospectively described the film as a black comedy, audiences have generally viewed it as a poorly made drama, an opinion shared by some of the cast. Although the film was a box-office bomb, home-media sales and notoriety following its initial release significantly increased its public profile.
The Disaster Artist, Sestero's memoir of the making of The Room, was co-written with Tom Bissell and published in 2013. A film of the same title based on the book, directed by and starring James Franco, was released on December 1, 2017; the book and film received widespread acclaim and numerous award nominations. A spiritual successor starring Bob Odenkirk is set to be released at an unspecified date; it was initially planned to be released in 2023, which would have coincided with the twentieth anniversary of The Room.
Plot
Johnny is a successful banker who lives in a San Francisco townhouse with his fiancée Lisa, who has become disenchanted with their relationship. She seduces his best friend, Mark, and the two begin a secret affair. Having overheard Lisa confessing her infidelity to her mother, Johnny attaches a tape recorder to their phone in an attempt to identify her lover by recording their phone conversations.Johnny and Mark rescue Denny, a neighboring college student whom Johnny financially and emotionally supports, from a fight with an armed drug dealer, Chris-R. Denny confesses to Johnny that he lusts after Lisa, and though he sympathises with him, Johnny encourages him to pursue one of his classmates instead.
When Lisa starts falsely claiming that Johnny has become physically abusive, Johnny becomes depressed and calls upon both Mark and his psychologist, Peter, for advice. Mark confides to Peter on the rooftop that he feels guilty about his affair. When Peter deduces that the affair is with Lisa, Mark suspends him over the roof's edge before relenting.
At a surprise birthday party for Johnny, Johnny's friend Steven catches Lisa and Mark kissing while the other guests are outside and chastises them. To distract Johnny, Lisa falsely announces that they are expecting a child. At the end of the evening, Lisa and Mark flaunt their affair, leading to a physical altercation between Mark and Johnny, which culminates in Johnny kicking everyone out.
Johnny locks himself in the bathroom and berates Lisa for betraying him, prompting her to call Mark. Johnny retrieves the cassette recorder that he attached to the phone and listens to the intimate call. He has a nervous breakdown, furiously destroying his apartment, and commits suicide by shooting himself in the mouth. Lisa tells Mark that they are finally free to be together, but he rejects her, angry over her manipulative behaviour towards Johnny. Together with Denny, they wait by Johnny's body for the police to arrive.
Cast
Production
Development
Tommy Wiseau wrote The Room as a play in 2001, after seeing the film The Talented Mr. Ripley. He then adapted the play into a book, which he was unable to get published. Frustrated, Wiseau instead decided to adapt the play into a film, producing it himself in order to maintain creative control.Wiseau has been secretive about how he obtained funding for the project, but he told Entertainment Weekly that he made some of the money by importing leather jackets from Korea. According to The Disaster Artist, Wiseau was already independently wealthy at the time production began. Over several years, he claims to have amassed a fortune through entrepreneurship and real estate development in Los Angeles and San Francisco, a story Sestero found impossible to believe. Although many of the people involved with the project feared that the film was part of a money laundering scheme for organized crime, Sestero also found this possibility unlikely. Wiseau spent the entire budget for The Room on production and marketing; Wiseau stated that the film was relatively expensive because many members of the cast and crew had to be replaced. According to Sestero, Wiseau made numerous poor decisions during filming that unnecessarily inflated the film's budget, such as building sets for sequences that could have been filmed on location, purchasing production equipment rather than renting it, and filming scenes multiple times using different sets. Wiseau also forgot his lines and place on camera, resulting in minutes-long dialogue sequences taking hours or days to shoot. Wiseau's antics on the set further caused the film's cost to skyrocket, according to Sestero.
According to Sestero and Greg Ellery, Wiseau rented a studio at the Birns & Sawyer film lot and bought a "complete Beginning Director package", which included two film and HD cameras; Wiseau was confused about the differences between 35 mm film and high-definition video, yet he wanted to be the first director to film an entire movie simultaneously in two formats. He achieved this goal by using a custom-built apparatus that housed both cameras side by side and required two crews to operate. However, only the 35 mm film footage was used in the final cut.
Casting
Wiseau selected actors from thousands of head shots, although most of the cast had never been in a feature film prior to The Room. Sestero had limited film experience and agreed to work as part of the production crew only as a favor to Wiseau, whom he had been friends with for some time before production began. Sestero then agreed to play the character "Mark" after Wiseau fired the original actor on the first day of filming. Sestero was uncomfortable filming his sex scenes and was allowed to keep his jeans on while shooting them.According to Greg Ellery, Juliette Danielle had "just gotten off the bus from Texas" when the shooting began, and "the cast watched in horror" as Wiseau jumped on Danielle, immediately beginning to film their "love scene". Sestero disputed this, stating that the sex scenes were among the last filmed. Wiseau said that Danielle was originally one of three or four understudies for the Lisa character and was selected after the original actress left the production. According to Sestero, the original actress was "Latina" and came from an unidentified South American country; according to Danielle, the actress was closer to Wiseau's age with a "random" accent. Danielle had been cast as Michelle but was given the Lisa role when the original actress was dismissed because her "personality... didn't seem to fit" the character. Danielle corroborates that multiple actors were dismissed from the production prior to filming, including another actress hired to play Michelle.
Even though Kyle Vogt told the production team that he had only a limited amount of time for the project, not all of his scenes were filmed by the time his schedule ran out. Despite the fact that Peter was to play a pivotal role in the climax, Vogt left the production; his lines in the last half of the film were given to Ellery, whose character is never introduced, explained, or addressed by name.
Writing
The original script was significantly longer than the one used and featured a series of lengthy monologues; it was edited on-set by the cast and script supervisor Sandy Schklair, who found much of the dialogue incomprehensible. An anonymous cast member told Entertainment Weekly that the script contained "stuff that was just unsayable. I know it's hard to imagine there was stuff that was worse. But there was." Sestero mentions that Wiseau was adamant characters say their lines as written, but that several cast members slipped in ad libs that made the final cut.Much of the dialogue is repetitive, especially Johnny's. His speech contains several catchphrases: he begins almost every conversation with "Oh, hi!" or "Oh, hi !". To dismissively end conversations, many characters use the phrase "Don't worry about it", and almost every male character discusses Lisa's physical attractiveness. Lisa often stops discussions about Johnny by saying "I don't want to talk about it."
In The Disaster Artist, Sestero recalls that Wiseau planned a subplot in which Johnny was revealed to be a vampire because of Wiseau's fascination with them. Sestero recounts how Wiseau tasked the crew with devising a way for Johnny's Mercedes-Benz to fly across the San Francisco skyline, revealing Johnny's vampiric nature.