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"Everyone Betray Me!": A Primer on "The Room"
By Matt Singer
on 03/24/2009
Writer/director/star/producer and executive producer Tommy Wiseau in "The Room," Wiseau Films, 2003
Seated in front of a mantle upon which rests a football, a basketball, a bouquet of roses and a poster of his face, a man with a mysterious accent speaks about a movie. "Everything you see and experience was done meticulously with meticulous planning and with a lot of preparation," he says before adding, "This is the finished product," in case that was not made clear by the film itself.
The man is Tommy Wiseau. His film is called "The Room," which Wiseau wrote, directed, starred in, produced and executive produced (he receives on screen credit for both producing titles). No one knows where he or his accent comes from; Wiseau gives interviews, but is notoriously stingy with details about his personal life. Like the Coneheads, he claims a vague past in France. Like the Coneheads, his accent is most certainly not French. When Wiseau speaks in "The Room," he sounds like Borat trying to do an impression of Christopher Walken playing a mental patient.
Wiseau's film, made on a $6 million budget (that also included marketing costs) and shot simultaneously on both 35mm and HD ("I was confused about these two formats," the director explains) opened in Los Angeles in 2003 to nonexistent business and disastrous reviews. But the few who saw it loved it, and the legend of the strange little film about a love triangle between a dim-witted banker (Wiseau), an unfaithful layabout (Juliette Danielle), and his himbo best friend (Greg Sestero) began to spread. Soon, Wiseau was encouraged to try the film as a midnight feature at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood. It worked, and a cult began to grow. Now, after six years of successful monthly screenings in L.A., the film is hitting the road. After a midnight screening in New York sold out weeks in advance, the Village East had to add a second, and later a third screening to accommodate demand. Those sold out as well.
If you were shut out at the Village East -- like myself -- or the film hasn't yet come to your hometown, you can still host your own "The Room" party. The film is available on Amazon (the DVD includes the aforementioned interview where Wiseau talks meticulously about his meticulousness) and the following minute-by-minute viewer's guide is humbly submitted to lead you through your journey.
03:15
After a long day at the office, Johnny (Wiseau) returns home and gives his fiancé Lisa (Danielle) a sexy new red dress. Their foreplay is interrupted by Denny (Philip Haldiman), their teenage neighbor and Johnny's quasi-adoptive son, who barges into the apartment unannounced and refuses to leave. When Johnny and Lisa head upstairs to their bedroom, Denny refuses to take the hint. He follows, jumps onto their bed and announces, with a little too much enthusiasm, "I just like to watch you guys!" Instead of recoiling appropriately in horror, Johnny and Lisa laugh and start a pillow fight. Incredibly, this is only the third creepiest moment in "The Room."
05:20
Once Denny finally exits, Johnny and Lisa have sex. Like all of "The Room"'s numerous sex scenes, it is a gauzy affair scored to a nondescript slow jam, with lots of slo-mo thrusting and showers of rose petals. Several shots come from the perspective of a water sculpture near Johnny and Lisa's bed, with water trickling down in front of the lens so that the camera looks like it's been placed inside of a toilet. Listen closely around the 7:42 mark for a weirdly cartoonish kissing sound effect of the kind you'd expect to hear in a "Merrie Melodies" cartoon when Bugs kisses Elmer Fudd. If you meet Wiseau, do not refer to this as a sex scene. Speaking with LAist, he declared "It's a love scene. That's what I call it."
10:12
Though she appeared entirely happy whilst making sweet, sweet love to Johnny, the two-faced Lisa unburdens herself to her mother Claudette (Carolyn Minnott) one scene later, insisting that their relationship makes her miserable. Claudette urges Lisa to remain with Johnny anyway because he can provide her with financial security. Later in the film, Claudette will dramatically announce she is dying of breast cancer and Lisa dismissively insists she is fine. I guess Lisa was right, because the issue is dropped and never brought up again.
12:29
As Lisa calls Mark (Greg Sestero), Johnny's hunky best friend and her secret paramour, the camera lingers on a framed picture of a spoon. "The Room" cultists have become obsessed with the spoon picture, and throw plastic spoons, "Rocky Horror"-style, whenever it appears onscreen. The spoon picture appears inside Johnny and Lisa's living room, the film's most frequent setting. But is this room the room? On the DVD, Wiseau ducks the question. Wherever the definitive room is, he says, is "a special place, a private place, a place where you can be safe. And it's not 'a' room but it's 'the' room!" I have no idea what this means.
21:18
If you want your "Room" party catered authentically, you can order Johnny's favorite pizza, as revealed in this scene. He likes half Canadian bacon with pineapple, half artichoke and pesto, light on the cheese. Johnny is so delighted when he learns Lisa has already ordered the pizza he declares, "You think about everything!" Curiously, when the pizza arrives, it looks suspiciously like a regular pie. Way to go, prop department.
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Great article.. I watched this on Adult Swim last night thanks to their April Fool's Day programming, and your run down had me remembering everything and laughing out loud.
"NO LISA YOU DWIVE ME CWAZY!"
DarfNader
Wiseau was on the Tim and Eric's Awesome Show: Great Job! and I foolishly thought he was not for real. Tim and Eric had asked him to "make a movie" about the two of them and what resulted was just an excuse for him to do sex... sorry... LOVE scenes with the woman who was to play agaist him, and who he insisted was a famous actress and obviously wasn't. Hilarious and so very strange.
Liz
Oh hi Mark,
Seeing "The Room" with an audience is the only way to appreciate this fine film.
I heard they are on sale in NYC www.tinyurl.com/theroomnewyork!
Todd
>>1:20:09 A guy named Matt ....
This is incorrect. That character's name is credited as "Steven" (played by Greg Ellery) even though it's never actually mentioned. What the Mark character is saying in this scene is "man," and not "Matt."
Leigh
where can I buy this movie!?!
Rebecca
This article made me laugh as hard as the movie!
Brickyardjimmy
Leigh. You can buy this film online at amazon.com or anywhere else dvd's are available. Wherever you go, you'll most certainly find my review of this masterpiece:
In case you're not convinced to buy it yet- here it is:
It's like sitting on an atom bomb that's about to explode, 12 January 2004
Author: Brickyard Jimmy from Los Angeles, CA
I have now seen Mr. Tommy Wiseau's cinematic tour-de-force, `The Room' three times. With each viewing, `The Room' becomes more complexly entangled in and inseparable from my own life. I no longer know where The Room ends and I begin.
It is, without question, the worst film ever made. Including movies made on beta max video cameras in special education high school classes. But this comment is in no way meant to be discouraging. Because while The Room is the worst movie ever made it is also the greatest way to spend a blisteringly fast 100 minutes in the dark. Simply put, `The Room' will change your life.
It's not just the dreadful acting or the sub-normal screenplay or the bewildering direction or the musical score so soaked in melodrama that you will throw up on yourself or the lunatic-making cinematography; no, there is something so magically wrong with this movie that it can only be the product of divine intervention. If you took the greatest filmmakers in history and gave them all the task of purposefully creating a film as spectacularly horrible as this not one of them, with all their knowledge and skill, could make anything that could even be considered as a contender. Not one line or scene would rival any moment in The Room.
The centerpiece of this filmic holocaust is Mr. Tommy Wiseau himself. Without him, it would still be the worst movie ever made, but with him it is the greatest worst movie ever made. Tommy has been described as a Cajun, a Croatian cyborg, possibly from Belgium, clearly a product of Denmark, or maybe even not from this world or dimension. All of these things are true at any one moment. He is a tantalizing mystery stuffed inside an enigma wrapped in bacon and smothered in cheese. You will fall in love with this man even as you are repelled by him from the first moment he steps onto screen with his long Louis the Fourteenth style black locks and thick triangular shoulders packed into an oddly fitting suit, and his metallic steroid destroyed skin. Tommy looks out of place, out of time and out of this world. There has never been anything else like him. Nor will there ever be.
The Room begins with `Johnny' (Tommy Wiseau) and his incomprehensibly evil fiancée `Lisa' (played by a woman with incongruously colored eyebrows and a propensity for removing her shirt) engaging in some light frottage, joined by, Denny, (played with a deft sense of the absurd by Phillip Haldiman), their sexually confused teenage neighbor who is clearly suffering from a form of aged decrepitude. When Denny, who looks like the human version of Gleek the monkey from Superfriends, says, in a slightly creepy yet playful tone of voice, `I like to watch!' as Johnny and Lisa roll around the bed in a pre-intercourse ritual revolving around rose petals, you know you are in for a very special movie.
After a lengthy lovemaking scene (not to worry if you miss it the first time, they show it again in its entirety later in the movie) in which Tommy's bizarre scaly torso and over-anatomized rear-end are lovingly depicted over and over again as he appears to hump Lisa's hip, we discover that Lisa, for no particular reason, has become bored with Tommy's incessant lovemaking and decides to leave him.
Just when you think the movie might lapse into an ordinary, pedestrian sort of badness, Johnny's best friend Mark, a man who's job seems to be to wear James Brolin's beard from Amityville Horror, shows up and electrifies the screen with a performance so wooden that it belongs in the lumber section of Home Depot. Incidentally, Mark is played by Greg Sestero, who, in addition to being described as a department store mannequin, was also the line producer on `The Room' and one of Tommy Wiseau's five (5!!!!!) assistants on the movie. Lisa forces Mark, amid his paltry, unconvincing protests, to have an affair with her on their uncomfortable circular stairs. For no apparent reason Lisa decides that she is made of pure evil and wants to torture her angelic and insanely devoted fiancé, Johnny.
Lisa receives pointed advice from her mother who casually announces that she is dying of breast cancer and then never mentions it again. But Lisa is determined to make Johnny's life a living hell, in spite of the fact that she, according to her mother, "cannot survive on her own in the cutthroat 'computer business'". But not before they recycle the sex scene from earlier in the movie where we get another bird's eye view of Johnny's ludicrous naked body. Denny gets into trouble with a drug dealer. Mark shaves his beard. Tommy gets drunk on an unusual cocktail made from mixing whiskey and vodka. Lisa lies and tells everyone that Tommy hit her in a drunken rage.
A balding psychologist appears out of nowhere, offers some advice, then apparently dies while softly falling on the ground in an attempt to catch a football thrown by Mark.
All of these seemingly disparate events build up to two cathartic moments. The first is when Tommy expressively yells at Lisa with the line `You are tearing me apart Lisa!'. You will cheer at this line as you realize that the film has been tearing you apart the whole time. And the second is at Tommy's birthday party where the worst actor that has ever been born plays a unidentified man wearing a silk shirt who utters a phrase that perfectly describes the experience of watching The Room,
`It feels like I'm sitting on atom bomb that is going to explode!'
The shocking ending will leave you pleading for some kind of sequel.
See this film at all costs. See it twice. Or three times. Or as one kid that I met from Woodland Hills has, 12 times! See it until you can recite every precious line of dialogue this movie has to offer. Let The Room become your new religion and Tommy Wiseau your prophet preaching the gospel according to Johnny.
My dream is to someday buy a theater and run The Room 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until the print disintegrates. I hope it becomes your dream as well.
Anyone headed to ComiCon this week? I heard Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero will be doing a signing on Thurs. and Sat. 3PM at the mimoco booth ##4938. It's gonna be awesome.
Meg
I thought the picture of him simulating sex with the dress was a low-budget death scene and he'd shot himself (for some reason) in the gut. They say he's making a sequel - what do want to bet it sucks miserably on account of he won't be serious this time? (Though how he was serious in the first place is completely beyond me.) This play-by-play actually makes me want to see the - film? I guess it HAS to be called that, there's no other word.
daniel warren
This is all i have to say. I watched this 'spectacle' last night. I missed the three gratuitous love scenes. I didn't laugh as much as my friends said i should but i did determine one thing. Tommy Wiseau is mentally handicapped. Here's what this explains. Plot holes. His slurred delivery of lines. The fact in interviews he speaks grammatically incorrect. Everyone who acts with him actually delivers lines like they had trouble memorizing them to create a semblance in the fictional universe (i.e. if you put real actors next to WIseau he would look like Corky from life goes on). Wiseau has an Asperger like symptom of tossing footballs, hence the six scenes involving them and the fact that he didn't axe them. Assuming this to be true, The Room should make you weep tears of joy and make any rotten tomato film critic who hasn't stepped foot behind a camera feel like a douche. And for wannabe directors, here is the ultimate motivation, you can't make the worse movie ever. Oh I forgot that Wiseau wasted 6 million dollars on the project, which would define him as a, 'fucking', retard.
