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A Primer on The Room, continued
By Matt Singer
on 03/24/2009
Juliette Danielle in "The Room," Wiseau Films, 2003
26:10
Lisa coerces Johnny into getting drunk with her, despite his protests that he doesn't drink alcohol. Then the pair have sex again, in a sequence blatantly recycled from outtakes of their first sex scene love scene.
27:12
An establishing shot of Johnny's San Francisco neighborhood reveals he lives on the same block as the Tanners from "Full House." Everywhere Johnny looks, there's a face of somebody who needs him. Or, conversely, someone who wants to have sex with his fiancé.
35:09
On the roof of the building, Denny is attacked by a drug dealer and then rescued by Johnny and Mark. After some oddly repetitive grilling from Lisa and Claudette (Denny: "I owe him some money!" Lisa: "What kind of money?" Denny: "I owe him some money!" Lisa: "What kind of money?"), the entire subplot is abandoned. Thinking that the rest of the story might have been left on the cutting room floor, I watched the "Deleted Scenes" special feature on “The Room” DVD, which consists entirely of this same sequence done line for line in an alley instead of on the rooftop.
38:48
Wiseau has a unique way of chuckling through his lines no matter how inappropriate the laughter is. In this scene, Mark tells a horrifying story about a woman beaten by her boyfriend after he catches her sleeping around. "What a story, Mark!" laughs Johnny. "I'm so happy I have you as my best friend and I love Lisa so much."
40:32
Mark exits the scene and Denny enters. No reference is made to Denny's ongoing drug problem, his debts, his gun fight with his dealer, the impending civil or criminal trials, or anything like that. Instead, Denny confesses his love for Lisa to Johnny. Rather than being disgusted and saying something along the lines of, "You're a peeping tom, you get to intrude on my pillow fights with my wife and now you're going to tell me you love her, you pervert?" Johnny is pleased to hear Denny's revelation. And yet even Denny knows what he is saying is inherently wrong. "Lisa's your future wife!" he rightfully observes, but Johnny insists that Denny shouldn't worry about it. Like every other subplot in “The Room,” Denny's secret love for Lisa is immediately forgotten.
46:11
In the midst of a fight with Lisa about their relationship, Wiseau erupts with his signature line: "You are TEARING me APART, Lisa!" The moment, beyond its obvious echoes of James Dean's iconic breakdown in "Rebel Without a Cause," illustrates the "passionate intent" that author Jack Stevenson describes in his book "Land of a Thousand Balconies" as one of the crucial ingredients to all great camp films. Such films, Stevenson writes, are "the product of pure passion, on whatever grand or pathetic scale, somehow gone strangely awry... pure camp is created against all odds by the naïve, stubborn director who in the cynical, hardball, bottom line movie business can still foolishly dream he is creating a masterpiece without money, technical sophistication, or (orthodox) talent." In this excessively melodramatic outburst, Wiseau's favorite scene in the movie according to this YouTube interview announces, however ineptly, how deeply he feels about this project.
Suspicious of Lisa, Johnny decides to spy on her by pulling the cord out of his telephone and plugging it into a tape recorder, inserting a standard blank cassette and hitting play -- he leaves it running for the rest of the movie. Though he never flips the tape over, replaces the tape with a blank one, changes the recorder's batteries, or even glances over at it to make sure it's functioning properly once in the rest of the movie, this tactic actually works.
1:01:34
In another infamous and inexplicable sequence, Denny, Mark, and their friend Peter (Kyle Vogt) show up at Tommy's house in tuxedos. Vague references are made to Tommy's wedding photos, though no explanation is given why these would be taken on a day Tommy wasn't getting married, or why you would take wedding photos without the bride, but it's a moot point anyway, since they don't take any pictures. Instead, they go play football. In an alley. In tuxedos. Three feet apart. On his interview on the DVD, Wiseau insists this was not an accident and that playing football, in an alley, in tuxedos, three feet apart, is really fun and encourages anyone watching to try it.
1:20:09
A guy named Matt attending Johnny's birthday party catches Mark and Lisa making out and gives them both a talking to. Mark replies, "You don't understand anything, Matt. Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!" This is how I imagine the conversation going, verbatim, if I ever meet Tommy Wiseau.
1:30:32
“The Room”'s bid for status as "The ‘Citizen Kane’ of bad movies" is greatly enhanced by the fact that the movie ends, à la “Kane,” with its embittered and abandoned protagonist tearing up his house, smashing everything in sight until he stumbles upon an object that holds a special place in his heart. For Charles Foster Kane, that was a snow globe; for Johnny, it is the dress he brought Lisa in the film's very first scene. But give credit to Wiseau for going farther than his predecessor ever dared: in his version, the devastated hero takes this crucial keepsake and simulates having sex with it while moaning in agony. Eat it, Orson Welles. You've just been outdone.
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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.
