An Update on My Relationship with The Room

The date was June 27, 2003. Tommy Wiseau was sitting at a theater, one of two to premiere his new movie, The Room. In attendance were some of the cast and crew, as well as many critics who would be seeing the film for the first time. It was his passion project and he wanted people to love it as much as he did. They didn’t. The audience laughed as Johnny, Mark, and Lisa went through their love triangle tragedy. The future of Tommy Wiseau’s career vanished as quickly as the audience from the theater.

That seemed like it would be the case until Michael Rousselet saw it during its initial two week run. He saw potential in The Room as a midnight movie style good time. He got his friends together and they went to see the movie a few more times before the two-week run ended. The cult following for The Room was starting to pick up steam, and it would grow in popularity throughout the bad film world.

Tommy Wiseau heard about how popular the film had gotten by the end of its run. People were sending emails to say that they enjoyed seeing it in the theater. He booked a few more screenings and the popularity grew. People from outside the Los Angeles area started hearing about The Room. The film started being shared from one person to another. Screenings began popping up around the country and around the world. Word had grown and The Room became a cult hit.

I wrote about The Room back in 2013. I had seen it six times at that point. The first time was on my own. I saw it with friends a few times. And I saw it in the theater. That was all before watching it for the Sunday “Bad’ Movies, which was viewing number six. The post went up on my other blog, well before I made a separate one for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. And for any normal person, that would be the end of writing about The Room. For me, though, it was just the beginning.

A few months after watching The Room for the Sunday “Bad” Movies blog, a book came out. Greg Sestero had written The Disaster Artist about his experience with Tommy Wiseau in both friendship and behind the scenes for The Room. He had help writing it, with Tom Bissell stepping in to do some writing and polishing. It recounted how Greg met Tommy. It poked fun at the mystery behind Tommy’s origins that didn’t need to be a mystery. The book gave a good look at the antics that went into making The Room including Tommy’s desire to make the character of Johnny reveal himself as a vampire. It was a wild read.

I read the entire book in the fall of 2013 during my downtime at work. We would always have two people working and you would be on cash for an hour then doing some basic touch-ups and cleaning inside for an hour before returning to the cash booth. It was a pretty easy job at the time. It was also off season so there wasn’t a lot of cleaning to do and even less to do on cash when the customers weren’t there. I had my book to get me through how slow it was.

When I finished the book, I wrote about it for the blog. It wasn’t nearly the best writing I’ve ever done. The piece for The Disaster Artist was the first time that I had written about a book since my book reports in school six years earlier. The post for The Disaster Artist was me fumbling through what I enjoyed about the book. I enjoyed how the book jumped back and forth between two storylines, giving one a chapter, then the other a chapter, until they eventually came together in the end. I liked how I got more insight into The Room and the people behind it. It was a positive post that was a little messy in the writing. But which of my posts isn’t a little messy?

A movie was announced soon after the book was released. James Franco was to play Tommy Wiseau and Dave Franco signed on to play Greg Sestero. When it finally came out in 2017, there was a star studded cast. The Francos were joined by Seth Rogen, Paul Scheer, Zac Efron, Ari Graynor, Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, Josh Hutcherson, Hannibal Buress, Jason Mantzoukas, Megan Mullally, June Diane Raphael, Nathan Fielder, Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith, Bob Odenkirk, and Bryan Cranston, among many many others. A lot of famous comedians and actors wanted to appear because they knew of the movie, loved the movie, or loved the idea of The Disaster Artist.

The Cineplex and Landmard Cinemas in the area weren’t playing The Disaster Artist when it came out. The niche audience for it was probably throwing them off. They wouldn’t have expected a big audience for a movie about the making of a movie with a cult following. I was a little sad because it was one of my most anticipated movies of 2017. Luckily for me, one of the other students in my film program tipped me off to an arthouse theater that had opened in the area. That theater was playing a double feature of The Room and The Disaster Artist.

That’s how a few friends and I ended up in the theater watching The Room and The Disaster Artist. First up was The Room. If I’m remembering right, two out of the four of us had seen it before. We knew what we were getting into. I was between one of my friends who had never seen it and a random drunk stranger who had never seen it. And let me tell you, it was a ride from beginning to end. The drunk gentleman and his wife were laughing it up the whole time. Before and after the movie, he was sharing his thoughts with me. It was a bonding between two people over a Tommy Wiseau classic.

During the intermission between the two films, the drunk couple went to get more beer. They came back and sat behind us. I don’t remember who was in their seats by this time. But the lights went down. The light of the screen came up. On came The Disaster Artist. I had my issues with the movie. Namely, as much praise as he was getting, I don’t think James Franco was good. He was playing Tommy Wiseau in this sort of winking at the screen way, hamming it up while everyone else was playing things relatively straight. The rest of the cast was good, with Seth Rogen and Paul Scheer being the highlights, but I was disappointed by James Franco in the Wiseau role. I still liked the movie.

After that, a year went by without any real updates. Everything in the relationship between myself and The Room was at a relative standstill. I hadn’t seen it again. I wasn’t reading a book about it. No movie had come out based on a book about the making of it. There was nothing. Then an opportunity struck in late 2018. There was an event in Toronto that I could make the two-hour trip to get to. It was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. I got in my car, drove to Burlington. I met up with the friends I had seen The Disaster Artist with, got on a train, and headed to the big city.

This event was a double feature screening of Best F(r)iends Volume 1 and Volume 2. Greg Sestero was going to be there. There would be a Q&A between the two movies and a photo op before and after the event. There was no way I was going to pass up this opportunity. Being a fan of The Room and The Disaster Artist, this was something that I had to do.

The first thing we did when we got there was to get in line for a picture with Greg Sestero. I brought by first edition copy of The Disaster Artist to get him to sign, and he made note of it being one of the earliest copies of the book. Then we got our pictures and went into the theater to take our seats. There was an introduction by Greg Sestero where he mentioned that the movie was written in a weekend while he was high. Then the movie began and we all understood.

I’m not going to get into the movies because I’ll probably cover them at a later date. Let’s just say that I saw them both, saw a Greg Sestero Q&A, and got a picture with and autograph from the man himself. It was the next step in my appreciation of everything The Room. I put the picture up on Instagram and Greg Sestero ended up hitting like on it.

And that’s where I’m at with The Room at this point in time. In the six years since the original post I wrote for The Room, I read a book about the making of the movie, watched a movie based on the book, rewatched The Room, met Greg Sestero, and watched two movies that he wrote and that starred him and Tommy Wiseau.

What does the future hold for my relationship with The Room? I’ll end up seeing it again, for sure. I’ll rewatch The Disaster Artist and the two Best F(r)iends movies. If I get the chance to see any of them in theaters again, I’ll make sure to go. When more movies and things come out about The Room or anything related to The Room, I’ll check them out. Oh, and there’s that comic that Philip Haldiman wrote. I haven’t read that yet. All of these seem like things that will happen in the future. Maybe that will lead to another post like this.

There are a few things that should be mentioned before the end of this post. One is that I wrote about The Room for week 25. I wrote about The Disaster Artist for week 53, the one-year anniversary of the blog. And the final thing is that this week’s post is Babylon A.D. Check all of those out. There will be another post next week and another bonus post next month. See you then.