Disaster Artist

I love bad movies. I often love them more than good movies. I also love bad hotels, sketchy bars and Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls. I stayed at a West Virginia motel where the clerk was hacksawing the antlers off a deer’s head on the front desk when I checked in, and where my room had spray-painted graffiti and a tiny space heater shoved into the hole in the wall that once housed the HVAC unit. Or the $8 room in Guerrero Negro, Baja California, where sand blew in through the gap under the door all night long. I loved the Arvada Tavern when Coors Light was $1.50 and lesbian softball teams challenged me to arm wrestle them. That’s way more interesting than the new Tavern, where cocktails are $13, and nobody arm wrestles anyone. They’re too busy taking pictures of their drinks.

Cheap and bad give you experience. Swank and luxe just mean you take pictures of bathrooms and food to show people how little you actually experienced. Bad movies are like good character actors: there’s just so much more going on under the surface. There are stories to tell.

I like The Room, the terrible movie written and directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau. It’s cheap and bad. It’s an inexplicable piece of slow-paced, pointless shit. It’s got no theme, subplots that show up and then fade away like cabbage farts, unintended homoerotic tension, and a heavy blanket of claustrophobia and dread that smothers every scene. An ill-defined creepiness is what I took away from it. It made me feel bad and sort of dirty. That feeling is not the intent of the movie, it’s the result of all the terrible decisions made during its production: tiny and dim sets; the static positioning of actors; the casting of confused amateurs. The dialog and story are a shit sandwich with pickles, like how a space alien would imitate human speech and emotion after watching a soap opera for ten minutes. 

The Room is so awkward and painful to watch it becomes fascinating. Like the time Mrs. Filthy filmed me trying to put on pants while drunk. Only, they weren’t pants, they were oven mitts. She did this in hopes of embarrassing me into sobering up. But like I said, so awkward its’s fascinating. I have watched myself hundreds of time, and tried to recreate the scenario dozens of times. No matter how drunk I get, I can’t ever get it as wrong as I did the first time. And now Mrs. Filthy hides her mittens.

There are other crappy movies I enjoy more than The Room, like Miami Connection, Space Mutiny, and Samurai Cop. Mainly because they aren’t as desperate and sad. They don’t creep me out. I like The Room about as much as I do any of the movies Neil Breen has made. But in all of these cases, I have the same questions: Why the fuck did someone make these movies? Why did they think it was a good idea? Why didn’t anyone stop them?

James Franco’s new movie, The Disaster Artist, tries to answer these questions about The Room. It is about the making of the movie, and more importantly, the weird-ass dude who did it. 

Franco plays Tommy Wiseau, an enigma with an unidentifiable accent, like an East German who got his tongue caught in a blender. His face looks like it was smashed to bits and then reconstructed by a blind surgeon with an Erector set. His black hair is long and stringy, and he wears sunglasses at night. He laughs at the wrong times, and doesn’t understand how relationships work. Nobody seems to know where he’s from, or how old he is. He spent six million dollars making a movie that looks like fifty bucks, and nobody knows where that money came from.

Wiseau is an aspiring actor, a very bad one, who keeps getting doors slammed in his face. He can’t understand why he isn’t allowed to do the one thing he dreams of. He wants to be a romantic lead, but the nicest thing anyone can say about him is that he would make a good vampire or Frankenstein. A lot of us keep getting pushed back down into the muck. For most of us, when we’re told we can’t, we stop trying. Others just ignore the criticism and plow ahead.

Wiseau plows ahead despite his lack of talent, inexperience and incompetence, his tenuous grasp on the English language, and thorough misunderstanding of basic social interaction and dramatic structure. Since nobody will hire him to be in their movies, he makes his own. He writes a shitty script, buys film equipment, hires a crew and makes The Room with himself as the star. He plays a flower shop’s favorite customer, a tender lover and trustworthy friend. Then he is betrayed.

The Disaster Artist does a fairly entertaining job of showing us, in a “based on a true story” way how dreams can be fulfilled through sheer force of will. What is heartwarming is that along with making the movie, Wiseau is also able to forge some relationships from those around him. He goes from being a very strange loner to a very strange semi-loner who has earned the grudging compassion of others because he had the balls to followed his dream. For the first time in his life, and because he paid cold hard cash for it, he has friends.

As Wiseau’s friend Greg (played by Franco’s brother Dave) says, “How many people can say they made a movie?” It is an even more monumental achievement to make a movie that sucks, and I’m sure many people rightfully told him so.

There is an underside to this story, too, though, that Franco ignores. Wiseau made a movie, despite the good intentions of the people who told him not to. But he also made it because Hollywood is full of money-grubbing grassfuckers and enablers who were more than happy to take his money. As long as his checks cleared, people were there. This story only ends well because The Room became a cult classic by pure dumb luck. Had it been a smidgen better, Wiseau’s story would end very differently.

The other thing that is disturbing about Franco’s movie is that while he pretends to be trying to make Wiseau the hero, the movie is really about himself. This isn’t his celebration of an outsider. Utimately, it doesn’t want to answer any of the mysterious questions about Wiseau. Instead, Franco celebrates himself for embracing an outsider. It’s a wink to hipsters who also love to laugh at The Room. Evidence of this is that Franco loads the movie with dumb cameos that are fucking pointless. Funny people like Nathan Fielder, Paul Scheer, Bob Odenirk, Jason Mantzoukas and Judd Apatow are all in here, not to use the comedic gifts they have, but so they can get a piece of Tommy Wiseau’s soul. They add nothing other than their celebrity to a movie that is supposed to be about the ultimate non-celebrity. They are the non-outsiders, hired by Franco, to portray outsiders, when there are plenty of talented and available outsiders. You know, the people Franco claims to love.

The ending, too, is artificially uplifting. The Room is immediately a cult hit, and Wiseau embraces the unintended consequences. Not after weeks or months, but during its premier.  This is unrealistic horseshit. Anyone who spent years bringing something to completion, and who still sees it in his own mind as a masterpiece, and who did that despite being told he was an idiot, will not instantly embrace the mocking laughter. It might take some time, and a few royalty checks, before they come to grips with reality. There is a darkness there, that the movie ignores because it is less interested in truth than what it wants to pretend is the truth.

The Disaster Artist is decent because its subject matter is terrific. I just think it could be more honest with itself. It’s not a celebration of the outsider. It’s a patronizing pat on the back from a shitload of people who have made it to the top the traditional way. Three Fingers. If you haven’t seen The Room, go see that instead. It sucks, but it is somehow a more real portrait of Tommy Wiseau.