This is a story in five acts. Shakespearean, you might say. Except I’m no Shakespeare when it comes to writing. I’m me and that will have to do. That will have to be enough. That’s what you’re getting. Buckle in, this is going to be a long ride.
Act I: The Room
Let’s start in 2003. Ontario high schools abolished that grade 13, the Ontario Academic Credit. They took it away the year I was going into high school, so I only had to stick around for four years. I didn’t. I did a fifth. A victory lap. My own grade 13 after I already graduated. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I still don’t, really. Do I want to work on movies? Sure. Do I want to write stuff like this? Sure. Do I like my retail jobs that I keep moving up in? Most of the time, yeah. Do I have a plan for my life? Not at all.
Move forward to 2008 or 2009. It was either right before or right after the Christmas holidays. We had to apply to post-secondary schools. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I went with what people thought I should do. I applied to a handful of schools for engineering. “There’s big money in engineering,” my dad would say. “You could be an engineer,” my mom would say. I would essentially flunk out of engineering school three years later. Well, I got the option to flunk out or drop out, and I chose to drop out because it was on my own terms. Same thing, though. Engineering wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it showed.
Those three years of my life were an experience I’ll always cherish, though. I made some good friends during that time of my life. I’m still in contact with these friends. We studied together. We lived together. We still find a few times a year to all get together and hang out, playing board games and catching up on what we’ve missed in each others’ lives. It wasn’t always that way. When I dropped out, I kind of disappeared. I came back into the group when my best friend of the group got married and I’ve been a part of it again since.
One of the things that came out of that group, and something that partially inspired this blog, was a love of bad movies. I kind of always loved movies, good and bad, but it was a tradition within our group to check out bad movies. It still is, sometimes. In recent years, I’ve seen Champagne and Bullets, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and Cats with some of the guys who lived a little closer. During the school years, the best friend who got married would, maybe once a month, grab an ice cream cake and pick a couple bad movies to watch on a Friday night, after a week of stress-filled engineering school shenanigans. Things like Titanic 2 and Sharktopus. This was the same friend who offered to buy my end of the year East Side Mario’s meal if I double featured the first two Human Centipede movies with him. Yeah, this era of my life was very much a fostering time for my love of bad movies.
There was one other friend in that group who was into bad movies, as well. He messaged me one night to tell me about one of the movies he found on the school’s underground file-sharing program. Yeah, a bunch of broke university students at a school known for engineering and software had a full-on pirating file-sharing program at that time. Most schools probably have something like that, actually, because students don’t normally have money to pay for luxuries like entertainment on a regular basis. This friend pointed me in the direction of a specific file on the program. The Room.
I downloaded the movie, headed home for the holidays, and watched it on my own. Maybe that wasn’t the best choice for a first-time watch of The Room. It’s not all that exciting of a movie. It’s kind of boring on a first watch, really. Unless you’re checking it out with other people. Then you can all point out the crazy stuff going on. The spoons. The overacting. The dialogue. The greenscreen for the roof. The lack of a mag in Chris R’s gun. Johnny humping the red dress during his breakdown. Mike’s face during the blowjob and chocolate scene. Replacing Peter halfway through. All the stuff that made it so fun to watch on subsequent viewings. You don’t really get that the first time round.
Once I got back to school, I talked to him about the movie. Our entire group of friends became interested in the mystery that was and is Tommy Wiseau. There was a song about The Room on YouTube about the room that we all knew the lyrics of. Tommy Wiseau had starred in a short film called The House That Drips Blood on Alex that we all watched. The Room and Tommy Wiseau were as much a part of our friend group as any of us were.
There were two theaters downtown in our university’s town that were owned by the same people. One of them was kind of a second-run theater of popular movies. I saw District 9 there. The other one was more of the arthouse kind of theater. One time, they played The Room. We all went to see it. One guy brought a football. I brought spoons. Every time a picture of a spoon appeared on screen, people would throw spoons. I kept hitting the same person in the back of the head. I felt bad, but it was a great time seeing The Room with a group of people in the theater.
I’ve seen The Room a few times since. I think I’m up to maybe eight times checking it out. Some viewings are better than others. I’ve seen it in theaters twice, now. Both of those were fun times. I might watch it again soon, since all the Tommy Wiseau stuff made its way to Tubi. Who knows what the future will bring with my relationship with The Room. The fourteen-year-old about to start high school, hopeful for his future, had no idea the movie even existed. It took that three-year stop in engineering school to meet the movie and fall in love.
Act II: The Disaster Artist
The year is 2013. I’ve been out of school for a year, now. I dropped out of engineering school when my grades weren’t enough to land me a paying co-op job and they wanted to push me back beyond the limit of my program. Things might have worked out if I had been willing to take an unpaid internship, but I had like fifteen dollars in my bank account when I finished my last semester. I needed the money. Plus, I wasn’t really into engineering.
I was now working in the Niagara Falls tourist industry. You know all those tourist trap attractions that take too much of your money while giving too little entertainment? Yeah, I was in one of those. I was the guy taking the money. It ain’t much, but it also wasn’t really honest work. Sometimes we had to lie and cheat to get people in the door. Probably the same kind of stuff Tommy Wiseau had to do to get his six million dollars for The Room. See, I can tie it back in.
I had been writing Sunday “Bad” Movies for nearly a year. One of the posts had been about The Room. It was never going to be a long time before I wrote about one of my favourite bad movies. The perfect opportunity had risen to write about it again for the blog. A book was coming out. Greg Sestero co-wrote a memoir about the time in his life when he met Tommy Wiseau and made The Room. It was called The Disaster Artist.
This was a book I couldn’t pass up on. I pre-ordered that sucker so fast that it was like I was breaking Usain Bolt’s records. Obviously, I wasn’t. I worked in a museum where his record was displayed. With a spelling error. I wasn’t THAT fast. I was quick on that pre-order, though. And since it was the off-season at work, I had a lot of free time to read books. That one was a very quick read. Once I finished the book, I wrote about it as a bonus post for Sunday “Bad” Movies. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to read the book because I was interested. But it wasn’t a bad side-effect.
There was a lot of insight to be had from reading The Disaster Artist. It wasn’t only about the making of the infamous bad movie. It was about the relationship between Greg and Tommy. How they came to know each other. Why they were the way they were. What their roles were. How The Room turned out the way it did. Who Tommy was, while keeping the mystery alive. My love of The Room was still going strong, in the new era of my life.
Act III: The Disaster Artist, Part II
Fast forward to 2017. I decided to go back to school in 2016, at the age of 26. I was now in my second year. I had the friends I made in this school, all of whom were years younger than me. That happens when you restart your education in your mid-20s. You end up in a local college film school with a bunch of people who are mostly fresh out of high school. This was the year when I was 27 and all my college friends were between 19 and 23.
This being a film course with a bunch of film students, I wasn’t the only person familiar with The Room. It had made its rounds by this point. It was nearly a decade since I had first seen it. I had seen it multiple times since then. I had written about it for Sunday “Bad” Movies back in 2013. The other 2013 event around The Room was the release of The Disaster Artist. In 2017, a film adaptation of the book was coming out.
Let me give you a little context about why I was excited about that movie before bringing it back around to being in film school. Yes, I loved The Room. Yes, I had read the book. Those two things were already enough, but I was also excited about who was involved in the movie. Put the James Franco of it all behind us right now. This was still a year or two before the #MeToo movement that would bring his predatorial nature to the forefront. The rest of the cast was filled with people I knew from the comedy scene around that time. Particularly, the comedy podcast scene.
Back when I was in university for engineering, I had started listening to Comedy Bang! Bang! and a few of the podcasts that were associated with it. The podcasts that had crossover because so many people within the comedy scene at that time were friends. When you get beyond James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, and Alison Brie, the rest of the cast list is filled with crazy comedy people. The entire hosting team of How Did This Get Made? (Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas) were in there. Ari Graynor and Andrew Santino, both from the forgotten show I’m Dying Up Here, played some of the memorable actors from The Room. Megan Mullally, Nathan Fielder, Hannibal Burress, Bob Odenkirk, Judd Apatow, Ike Barinholtz, Keegan-Michael Key, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Randall Park, Casey Wilson, and Lizzy Kaplan were all in there, too. That was a cast I was going to like, based on what I had been listening to and watching for years. Yeah, I was excited.
Some of my friends were excited, too. I don’t think they had all seen The Room, but they at least knew about The Room. They knew about Tommy Wiseau. I think we were all planning on seeing the film adaptation of the book about the making of a different movie. But there was one more interesting wrinkle that led to a bunch of us seeing it together.
There was an arthouse theater the next city over from where we went to school. That theater was going above and beyond with the release of The Disaster Artist. They were doing a double feature. First, they would play The Room, and then they would play The Disaster Artist. It didn’t take much to convince my friends that we should do the double feature. We piled into either just my car or my car and another car and headed down to the theater to see both movies.
I don’t have too much to say about the actual double feature. Were there spoons? Of course there were spoons. There’s not going to be a screening of The Room without people bringing spoons to toss during those moments. Was there a football? I think one of my friends brought a foam football. You know, one of those smaller ones that’s not going to hurt someone when it beans them in the head. And then The Disaster Artist was a fun enough movie that I only ever really felt the need to watch a single time. It has been nine years since that double feature and that was still the only time I saw The Disaster Artist.
Act IV: Best F(r)iends
We have arrived at 2018 now. Not even a full year after that double feature, there was another double feature on the horizon. Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero teamed up for a two-part epic. Best F(r)iends had them on the screen together again. They were capitalizing on the newfound popularity of The Room, a popularity that rose with the release of Greg Sestero’s book and rose even more when James Franco adapted it into a film.
It was Christmas season in 2018. In fact, looking up the date, it was only a few days before Christmas in 2018. I had no job at that point. I left my tourism job at the end of the summer in 2018. Part of the reason was to focus on school. The other part was the amount of burnout I felt working in the tourism industry. Every year felt like I was expected to do more with less help and no increases in pay. So I was done. That’s all to say that it was the first Christmas in forever where I didn’t have to worry about work.
There was a screening for the two Best F(r)iends movies scheduled in Toronto. Greg Sestero would be in attendance and would do a Q&A between the parts. A bunch of us who had gone to see The Room and The Disaster Artist agreed to meet in Toronto to attend the screening. We would hang out for a bit first, and then walk our butts over to the theater for the movies and to meet one of the guys behind The Room.
Most of us met at the Go station in Burlington. One of us met up with the rest when we got to Union Station in Toronto. We had a few hours to burn before heading to the theater. We went and got some ramen at a location I don’t remember much about. We also hit up Kensington Market, where we stopped for drinks at a place called Film Café. What I remember most about this stop along our walk to Best F(r)iends was that while we sat there with our drinks, some middle-aged ladies were having a discussion at the next table. I overheard one say “You haven’t watched Love, Actually? It’s not Christmas if you haven’t watched Love, Actually!” It was one of those movie claims that stuck with me as much as when a coworker once told me they “only watch good movies, like Tokyo Drift.”
Once we wrapped up at Film Café, we were off to The Royal Cinema for the double feature and the Q&A with Greg Sestero. It wasn’t too long a walk for a bunch of people in their early-to-mid 20s. We got there and Greg Sestero was in the lobby. He was meeting the people who came into the theater and signing autographs. I brought my copy of The Disaster Artist with me and walked over for an autograph. Greg looked at the book, looked at me, mentioned it was a first edition, and signed it. We talked quick and then I headed into the main seating area with my friends.
I’ve done double features in the theater before. I’ve taken short films to film festivals, where I then sat through a bunch of movies in a row. I once saw Monster Trucks back-to-back with La La Land in the theater, on the same screen. Heck, this wasn’t even the first Tommy Wiseau double feature I had witnessed. I already wrote about that earlier in this post. This one was different. This one was the pinnacle of everything that makes me who I am. It was a Tommy Wiseau double feature with the second most important person in the world of Tommy Wiseau present.
I remember enjoying Best F(r)iends Volumes 1 & 2. They weren’t on the same bad movie level as The Room. There was no way that the duology was going to become as beloved as that original Tommy Wiseau breakthrough had been. But they were weird and brought together two people who had helped shape my bad movie loving brain. This was a formative experience for me. I planned on getting around to them at some point for this blog, and never had a chance. Until now. But I had other fish to fry, first.
Act V: Big Shark
Now we’re in the present day. October 2026 (first day of November as I post this). But I need to take us back to 2019 for a moment. It was two months after I took that trip with my friends to Toronto to meet Greg Sestero and watch the two Best F(r)iends movies. Tommy Wiseau went on a trip with Greg Sestero to New Orleans and roped him into making a trailer for a movie called Big Shark. He had come up with the idea in 2005, shortly after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. This wasn’t a trailer for a real movie. It was simply something that Tommy Wiseau came up with to have a little filmmaking fun.
My group of friends was fully invested in the Tommy Wiseau lore at this point. After getting them to the double feature of The Room and The Disaster Artist, then the double feature of the Best F(r)iends movies, we were all excited for any new Tommy Wiseau. Big Shark was that new thing. And, wouldn’t you know, Tommy wanted to use that fake trailer as a pitch to get a new movie made. We all wanted to see that movie.
Alas, we got hit with the Covid-19 pandemic. The movie couldn’t be filmed. Following the lockdowns and production shutdowns, Greg Sestero pulled out of being involved. He said it was scheduling conflicts. I’m not entirely sure that’s true. When restrictions eased up, Tommy Wiseau got the movie made. He released it in 2023. It was mostly a roadshow movie. He would take it around the country and show it off while in attendance. He would sell his merch. Forever the hustler, that Tommy Wiseau. He also continued editing the film during the roadshow, meaning that the version we get to see now is not the original version that showed during the premiere in Portland, Oregon.
Now we arrive back in 2026. It has been three years since that roadshow happened. Big Shark has been nearly impossible to see outside of select screenings. A movie I anticipated for seven years, and I hadn’t had a chance to watch it. Then the announcement came. At the end of August, Tommy Wiseau posted on his social media that The Room, Best F(r)iends, and Big Shark would hit Tubi on the fourth of September. I know Tubi. A bunch of the recent movies I’ve watched for Sunday “Bad” Movies have been streaming on Tubi. This would be perfect!
I waited impatiently for the day to come. I watched Big Shark. I knew immediately that I would be writing about it as part of my October lineup (only two movies this year, sorry). Of course, it took me over a month to get the post ready and posted. I’ve been writing some longer posts, recently. I’ve been working almost full time. I’ve had other things going on. Sometimes it takes some time to get things written. That’s not the point, here. Let me get back to Big Shark.
Big Shark followed three firefighter friends who tried to stop a big shark from attacking New Orleans. Patrick (Tommy Wiseau) and his girlfriend Sophia (Ashton Leigh) were out fishing on the Mississippi River when he saw a shark in the water. She didn’t believe him. He tried to convince Tim (Isaiah LaBorde) and Georgie (Mak Valeriano) of the danger. They slowly came around to his side. The big shark was using controlled floods to swim the streets of the Big Easy and eat unsuspecting people. The three firefighters had to get rid of the shark.
This was exactly the movie I had been hoping for. Well, maybe not the exact movie. Greg Sestero wasn’t in it. It didn’t feel complete without Greg Sestero. But it did have all the other makings of a classic Tommy Wiseau movie. Even without being quite as memorable as The Room, it had many moments that made it worth the wait.
I should start at the beginning. Patrick, Tim, and Georgie saved some people from a burning building and then were given medals for being such good firefighters. The medals were given out in a theater, as people finished watching a news segment about them saving those people. I think. It was a strange opening, especially when it ended on them getting the medals in a movie theater. I don’t think the city hands out awards like that in locations like that. That was only a precursor to how strange the movie would get.
The next scene to point out is the fishing scene that I put in the summary of Big Shark. Patrick and Sophia fished on the Mississippi River in a place that looked much more like a pond than a river. Patrick claimed that he saw a shark. At no point during the scene was there a shark in the water. The audience was left in the same position as Sophia, questioning if Patrick saw the big shark. Because there was no big shark to be seen. Then they got out of the water and Patrick started singing. That’s a little bit of a theme with Big Shark.
Before we get to more singing, I should mention that Tim got his fair share of odd scenes. They mostly revolved around his spending time in restaurants and bars. The first scene was when his boxer friend relayed a story about what happened during his recent bout. A big shark came in and ate his opponent. The image, which I think was the first time we saw the shark, was something to behold, and only scratched the surface of all the shark stuff to come. It was the shark head coming straight down from above, chomping a boxer, and lifting right back out of the frame. Wild stuff. Tim’s second weird scene was when a strange man at the bar gave him a map of where the shark wanted to be in the water so that the firefighting trio could track it down. It was kind of like a strange alternate universe moment where the bar suddenly became empty. After the quick exchange, the strange man disappeared and the bar was bustling again. Did it actually happen? The map would say yes, but everything else would say no.
Next, I want to take you to a scene outside of the house or apartment that Patrick shared with Sophia. She was upset that he spent so much time focused on the big shark and not enough time focused on him. There was a lot of screaming and yelling between Sophia on the balcony and Patrick standing next to Tim on the sidewalk. Clothes were thrown. The locks were threatened to be changed. Patrick yelled in a way that was very reminiscent of the famous quote from The Room, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa.” It was a scene that meant nothing to the movie. It didn’t factor into anything before or anything that followed. It was this singular force that only existed to exist.
I’ll follow that up with another scene that felt like it was ripped straight out of The Room. The three firefighting heroes of Big Shark headed down to the beach to hunt the shark in the water. Georgie stayed on shore as a lookout. Sadly, the shark didn’t stay in the water and ate Georgie right up. Cue the extended scene of Patrick breaking down in emotion the same way Johnny did at the end of The Room. Minus the humping of the dress, the tearing down of the bedroom, and the suicide. Vocally, though, there was a lot in common. The wailing. The emotion. The heartbreak. It was Tommy Wiseau showing off his chops. Chops that weren’t all that talented at believably conveying the emotion he wanted in the scene. I’ll hear his cries for Georgie as long as I live.
Another scene I won’t soon forget took place on the waterfront in New Orleans. I’m not talking in the water. I mean it took place next to the Mississippi River, on a promenade. Patrick and Tim were watching the water as a bunch of people looked out on the Mississippi. They said they had to hurry up and stop the shark. The shark jumped out of the water, much to their shock, and they ran down the promenade on their way to save the city. None of the other people on the promenade reacted to the shark. They reacted to Patrick and Tim, though. They looked at the men running, but nobody seemed affected by a big shark jumping out of the Mississippi. I’m pretty sure they just shot on location and used the real people as extras without telling them what was going on.
Finally, there was the ending of Big Shark. The two surviving friends blew up the shark. They got back in their little motorboat, lit only by a blue light in the bottom of the boat. Then they started singing. The way the two men sang reminded me of that Saturday Night Live bit on Weekend Update where Kristin Wiig and Fred Armisen would sing a song. One of them would make up the words and the other would try to sing along. It felt like Tommy Wiseau and Isaiah LaBorde did the same thing. They weren’t in tune with each other, on beat with each other, or even singing the same words as each other half the time. This scene was immediately followed by the credits over the cast walking as part of a New Orleans parade. Movie over.
There was a lot to take from Big Shark. It didn’t have the high highs of The Room or the shock value of being introduced to Tommy Wiseau. This was a movie that was made for Tommy Wiseau to make another movie. From an audience perspective, this was a movie that built on the solid bad movie foundation of The Room. It improved in some ways, mostly being shot in real locations rather than a green-screened rooftop in a parking lot. But there were still a whole bunch of weird moments that could only come from the mind of Tommy Wiseau. It was a perfect follow up for fans who had been waiting two decades for a new movie to drop.
And that’s where this five-act story comes to a close. I’m sitting here writing about my history with Tommy Wiseau, from first watching The Room, up to the Tubi release of Big Shark. My life has changed a lot over the nearly twenty years of this relationship. I dropped out of one school, worked a job for seven years, went to another school and graduated, went to another job for six years, started a new job a year ago, started a blog fifteen years ago, saw The Room in theaters twice, The Disaster Artist once, and Best F(r)iends once. I met Greg Sestero and he signed my copy of The Disaster Artist, the book he wrote. That’s a lot of stuff that happened since I first watched The Room by myself back in 2010.
That’s the thing with art. It could be movies, sculptures, books, paintings, or podcasts. You never know which ones will connect with you. Which ones will be more important to your life. The Room ended up being one of those for me. One bad movie that was suggested to me by a friend. The movie didn’t shape my life, but it has existed alongside my life, allowing some interesting insight into where I was at any given point in time. And maybe that’s why it holds a special place in my heart. It’s not just how The Room entertains me. It’s that it has kept giving for years since I first saw it. Not many movies can get a full five act history from me.
Let’s finish with a few notes:
- Tommy Wiseau directed Big Shark. He also directed and starred in The Room, and he played a part in Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance.
- Greg Sestero was in the trailer for Big Shark. He was also in The Room, and he wrote The Disaster Artist.
- Finally, Wayne Douglas Morgan was in both Big Shark and Bending the Rules.
- Have you seen Big Shark? What did you think? Have there been any movies or artists that have given insight to your life? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, or you can find me on Bluesky.
- You can also use Bluesky and the comments to suggest movies I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. I’m open to any suggestions.
- Now we’re at the part where we take a look at what’s coming up in the next post. There were lots of movies I debated checking out next. You know, Tubi’s such a treasure trove of bad movies. But I wanted to step away from Tubi for a moment because I’ve been watching so many movies off Tubi lately. Seven of the last ten posts I wrote were about movies I watched on Tubi. I’m going to dive onto YouTube for a movie from the 1980s called Body Rock. My plan after that will be to check out Hard to Kill, before getting into some Christmas stuff. Hopefully those posts will be shorter than this and the previous one. See you soon for Body Rock.
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