(Warning: Spoilers)!
We all have those favourite bad movies which have to
be so bad they are incredibly entertaining. For me, it was Troll 2 that sat
there on the pedestal of greatest bad movie, until I watched Doug Walker’s 2010 review of The Room.
Holy friggin’ god was this film entertainingly bad. A
protagonist played by the writer, producer and director who couldn’t act, and a
plot with so many holes there was next to none of it. not to mention all those
memorable catchphrases that’ll stick in my head forever and a script so
diabolically written you could predict it by the time you’d reached that
halfway point on first viewing.
I won’t ramble on about the film too much because
you’ve probably seen it already and know exactly what is to come in this review
of such a well written memoir of such a terrible movie. The author, Greg Sestero,
co-starred alongside Tommy Wiseau as Mark, the protagonist, Johnny’s best
friend who is sleeping with Johnny’s future wife, Lisa.
And because there is so much to cover, this review
is going to be in several posts. The first will follow the sub-plot on how Greg
met Tommy and the worst movie ever was conceived and brought to fruition.
Where
did it all begin?
Sestero starts by recalling the last night out with
Wiseau before shooting began. He tells how Tommy is a manipulative little
bastard who will use all in his power to get an exclusive table in a Hollywood restaurant
without a reservation. Greg explains how he was originally the line producer on
The Room and never intended to act in it as his acting career had all but dried
up by 2002, but Tommy offered him the role of Mark for a ‘life changing’ amount
of money and a new car, which at his then girlfriend’s approval got him
involved.
Every even numbered chapter in this book tells of
how Greg and Tommy got together and became involved in each other’s lives
before making The Room. Our hero then explains how he came to be part of a San
Francisco drama group in the late 90s where he came across the weirdly
accented, long haired man who had the appearance and swagger of ‘a slouchy
teenager in detention’. Eventually, Tommy gets the chance to act and how he
destroyed a Shakespearian sonnet with such elegance, mesmerised young Greg and
led to the duo performing their first scene together.
What
did they get up to?
Other points Greg makes about Tommy, is he owns a
Mercedes-Benz, has his own retail business, complete with cards, and is
obsessed with James Dean. A later chapter has the duo venturing out to Cholame,
California where the rebel without a cause met his end; they even speak to one
of the last men to see him alive, supposedly inspiring Tommy to get more
involved with acting and produce his own movie.
Sestero then goes back even further, explaining how
he became a model and landed several deals in France, owing to his ability to
speak French, before coming back to America to get involved with acting. His parents
do not approve and he gets several roles as an extra, including the God-awful Patch Adams before finding an agent who
starts getting him places.
Tommy then lets Greg rent out his own apartment in
LA and soon Greg finds his first major movie role: the ‘puppet master’ in direct-to-DVD
horror, Retro Puppet Master. Along the way, we find out that Tommy is growing
jealous of Greg and wants to get his own movie roles. Greg, already amazed at
how this socially awkward man who won’t even reveal how he came by so much
money or where he came from, is uneasy about this but eventually grows
accustomed to his friend’s surrealism. Eventually, Tommy moves in with Greg in
the LA apartment and before you know it, Tommy is typing away on the script for
the worst movie ever made.
Most
memorable moments?
Regardless of how much Sestero spills to the outside
world in this memoir, The Room is still shrouded in enough mystery to rival a
19th century gothic novel. You certainly feel uneasy when Greg tells
of the riches Mr Wiseau possesses buy will never, ever reveal where he came
into his fortune. He does later give an account of how he came to America and
how he might have become such a rich
man, but there is always doubt clouding everything our hero has noted.
There’s a very weird point just before Tommy moves
in with Greg, where the long haired loner vanished for nine months, leaving our
hero to get his life back on track before The Room was typed up into a stage
play. Vampires are constantly alluded to when Tommy moves in with Greg and how
he only seems to come out at night to get high on Red Bull and amaze the world with his
personified surrealism.
All in all, you’ll be reading this book and asking
yourself, ‘What The Fuck?’ more times than you can possibly imagine. The life
of Tommy Wiseau and the poor young San Francisco kid whom he dragged into it
will have you laughing ‘til you puke, and make your jaw drop enough times to
have it dislocate itself.
Stay tuned for the next instalment, where I shall be
reviewing Sestero’s memories of how the greatest bad movie was filmed.
Yes, what a story, Mark!
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