As long as there has been a film industry I think there is mad men running free, directing films. I believe to direct a film requires a bit of madness, at least it’s madness that makes things interesting. With that said, there are great mad filmmakers: Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lars Van Trier, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, and Stanley Kubrick. Then there are the bad ones. Uwe Boll comes to mind first, but I sort of like Uwe Boll, in fact he reminds me a bit of Tommy Wiseau. Boll has figured out a way, within the German tax code to make his films, Wiseau is an independently wealthy importer who put 6 Million Dollars of his own money up to write, direct, producer, executive producer, and star in his very own creation: The Room.
If you’ve never seen or heard of The Room, your in for a treat. I saw the poster, which featured a deadpan Wiseau and thought it was some stupid horror movie, I was unmoved when it originally played in the Buffalo area. Cut to a few weeks later, I’m at the Village East Cinemas in New York with Beth seeing Lovely Bones and I see the poster again: okay, this wasn’t some local Western New York project that I didn’t have time for during finals week, what is it? Oh man.
The reviews on IMDB are hilarious but the best comes from a writer RCarstairs who writes: “You know that foreign exchange student from high school who used to creep our all the girls with his clumsy leering and broken-English pick up lines? Well he’s all grown up and somebody gave him money to make a film”. He goes on to call the film a “two-hour episode of “Red Shoe Diaries” written and directed by Balki from Perfect Strangers”.
It’s so bad it’s good, a terrible send up of the type of movie you’d watch on HBO at 3AM before high speed internet could show you virtually anything you wanted. As a kid going through puberty I’d probably watch it just for the sex scenes, I lived with my mom and didn’t have a dad to hand me down porno mags. The Room was made in 2003 on a budget of $6 million dollars, at least the cast and crew were well compensated for their troubles, the film looks like it should have cost $250,000.
The reason this budget it about 1000X higher than it should have been was that it Wiseau did not know the difference between 35MM and HD video and shot the film using both formats, side by side (I hope that’s an urban legend). The thing about it is where Wiseau wasn’t involved the performances are okay. You get the sense these actors might not be half bad had they had some direction. The camera work is okay but flat (you can tell the whole film was shot on a set).
The plot of the film is flat out weird involving hilarious soft core sex scenes and an awful lot of thrusting - it’s so poorly done you wonder if Wiseau has ever actually had sex before. Of coarse, in attempt to make it romantic Wiseau implores rose petals. His leading lady disturbingly has been described as a fresh off the bus 18 year old from Texas, Juliet Danielle who has only made one other film. The poor girl probably got scared off by creepy Hollywood types and went back home to teach Bible study.
There are some filmmakers you can tell are making films to get laid, luckily I’m not successful enough for that to ever be a factor and if you ask me that type of behavior will truly hurt your film in the long run, as well as your credibility. But it exists, and so it’s there - I don’t know Wiseau got laid, or if it would matter, he wouldn’t show excitement, here is a one note actor if ever there was one.
His performance is so distracting it becomes hilarious, he’s one note. Also the film introduces ideas and characters quickly with no pay off. I don’t mind it so much as it becomes disorienting. For example the mother of Lisa, the future wife of Johnny (Wiseau’s character) tells us she has breast cancer. It’s never mentioned again. In this moment we have to wonder: is she being truthful or is deceptive to build sympathy. These character dimensions don’t bother me, but the film’s lucid character approach with no justification, often characters walk in and out the unlocked front door, becomes like a sitcom.
Yet, I had a good time with The Room. Consider temporality of a different kind: the time of day you see the flick. At 4PM in the afternoon at your local multiplex this thing is shit. At midnight, after you’ve had a drink (more on that coming up next), it’s a fun time with the right audience. It has a cult following.
The theater that showed The Room was the Hamburg Palace, about 10 miles West of Buffalo, a beautifully maintained single screen movie house where they’ve removed rows of seats to provide leg room (something old theaters rarely have, making me wonder if people were smaller back in the day before GMOs invaded our food). Cultivating an audience is important, the right audience can turn any movie into a fun experience, and I’ve gotta hand it to owners and management of the Palace, while it wasn’t a packed house, it did pretty well I’d say and a good time was had by all, from the vintage sci-fi videos on screen before the show.
Had I not been in Buffalo seeing another work by film amateurs, and I say that kindly - amateurs if not competing with Hollywood have the ability to tell important, regional stories well - I would have been able to see The Big Lebowski at the Palace. That showing inspired the town’s local bars including the one at the local 8-lane bowling Alley next to the theater to offer drink specials inspired by the flick. Awesome idea - it’s this type of thinking that’s going to save the theater industry: Regal, AMC, and Cinemark - take notice.
The Room isn’t unlike Henry’s Fortune, the film I saw prior to this one. That film which deserves my silence because even though I paid $15 to see a “preview” screening is very much a work in progress and can and should be cut to 90 minutes from its 2 hour and 10 minute running time. I am also an amateur, but this frees me to move my camera in untraditional ways. The example I’ll give is a shot in Hollow Spaces where my camera is pointed out of the window of a moving car, and I come inside the car to document a screaming match. No professional DP would do this, it’s way too risky first of all, but fuck it - this is balls to the wall filmmaking, baby.
The Room isn’t that. It’s trying to be, as its tag line says “A film with the passion of Tennessee Williams” - it’s title of coarse is nonsense. The film’s most absurd moment is when Wiseau ease drops on his girlfriend telling her mother that she doesn’t love him.
He leaps on screen after there gone and says “I’ll show them, I’ll tape record everything” - and he removes a cassette tape from his pocket and plugs in a recorder - just in cause, you know, he’s prepared. The Room is pure cinema, focusing on what happens when everything goes wrong. I genuinely liked it at first thinking this is a brilliant stripping away at the layers of artificiality, the clearly faked sex scenes that go on for too long and are anything but erotic, in fact you can call them neurotic, to the dialogue.
In plays and cinema realism is hard. In revisiting Elizabethtown, a Cameron Crowe film I realize how mythological it is: it’s a beatiful film in a lot of ways, sentimental, reflective of an America that exists outside of major cities, like say Hamburg, NY which still has an 8-lane bowling alley downtown - how cool is that? That type of thing made me really happy to see, along with people downtown going to bars, sure they were all locals and all knew each other, but that happens even in major cities (especially Buffalo).
The Room never deserves comparison to Cameron Crowe, but it’s reflective of another reality that does exist - how stupid can these people be? Oh do we really want to go there. Wiseau did it all, including writing the checks, I can imagine if anybody said no, or maybe we should replace you with say Aaron Ekart, he would have them fired. Probably threaten them with “you’ll never work in this town again” or some stupid shit like that. “I’m Tommy Wiseau, bitch” he’d say in monotone.
The film’s relationships are so awkwardly drawn, conclusions arrive without feeling needed that one day I hope to teach a course on narrative filmmaking, I’d show this film as an example of what not to do. While simple it’s shows the importance of a strong script, good casting and good direction. While I’m sure good or even great films have been made by bad directors, and absent producers - the actors, are the variables.
Wiseau in the lead is hilarious: everyone in the film has movie star looks in one way or another - Wiseau is an odd ball, the creepy guy trying to get laid at that film festival party by telling you he’s a producer. But he did it, and the film has had a cult life.
Although a waste of time, any serious film fan must make time for a midnight screening of one of the worst films ever made. It’s up there with the Apple, one of the worst musicals ever made, but everyone there at least was coked out of their mind. (Best line from a song in The Apple: “it’s an natural, natural, natural desire - meet an actual, actual, actual Vampire”) Here I don’t know what the issue was - I think everyone was oblivious to reality and cinema. But you aren’t. And that’s where the fun happens.
With that said I will personally join you next time The Room is in town.
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