In 2001, when Tommy Wiseau took his play/novel The Room to Hollywood in an attempt to find backing for, what he claims is, a story reminiscent of the work of Tennessee Williams, it was justifiably refused by everyone in the industry. The quest should’ve stopped there – any person with their feet even anywhere vaguely near the Earth’s surface would’ve admitted defeat, sunk into a deep ranging depression, and ultimately got a job at Carphone Warehouse. But not Tommy Wiseau.
No, it’s not charisma, determination and an appreciation of art that drives a man like that forward, it’s the dangerous combination of blind ignorance and flawed self-assurance. He proceeded to set up a business importing fake leather jackets from Korea and landed himself a comfortable $6 million over a few years. Again, at this stage any sensible person would have looked at themselves in the mirror and thought; ‘Hey, it might not be honourable, it might not be my dream, but I’m making big bucks and at least I don’t work at Carphone Warehouse.’ Not Tommy Wiseau. In 2003, he proceeded to use the money he made to rent out a studio for 8 months and film his damned abomination.
The result, The Room, is beautiful in the same way that an eight-year-old girl holding a smoking gun to your face while two dogs violently fuck each other just out of the corner of your eye might be. It’s rubber-necking a car crash, it’s casually glancing at the couple arguing out on the tube. It’s perverse, grotesque and wrong but it’s fucking awesome.
Tommy Wiseau has, in a single fell swoop, managed to do what decades of Hollywood PR, multi-billion dollar budgets and all-star casts have failed to do and created a genuine cinema experience. Sure, the film is basically 2 hours of unfinished plotlines, shooting inconsistencies, pointless, heavy handed metaphor, over-long and frankly, impossible sex-scenes, godawful acting, terrible dubbing, ridiculous set-design, laughable dialogue, random characters and Tommy Wiseau’s unbelievably wrinkly ass but, like Tim Henman, nothing unites an audience better than failure.
From the opening credits, viewers stand on seats, cheering Wiseau’s myriad roles (Executive Producer, Producer, Writer, Director, Casting Director, Lead Actor), screaming every time a new character appears in the bafflingly accessible apartment (‘Shut the door!’ ‘Who are you?!’) or the socially inept man-boy Denny appears (‘Hey Denny!’). Audience members chant ‘Go! Go! Go!..’ every time one of the fatuous panning scenes of the Golden Gate appears on screen or ‘Where are we?!’ when the extended montages of San Francisco sights divide up the painful and biologically disputable sex-scenes.
Even unguarded misogyny and overt masculinism get a look in. It seems every time more than two male characters are on screen there is, inexplicably, a football being thrown around, even in a scene in an alley way no wider than a metre or so. In fact, throughout the film, characters seem to possess the power to materialise objects out of thin air and just as quickly make them vanish. It’s also customary to shout ‘Because you’re a woman!’ every time one of the female characters faces some minor difficulty (such as, at one point, briefly-mentioned breast cancer).
It would be easy to go on but I don’t want to spoil it. There’s simply no point during viewing that you’re ever bored or even insulted by this cinematic vomit. The Prince Charles cinema play it once a month and for a tenner you even get a guide to watching The Room. Get yourself over there, ready with a little booze in you and, trust me on this, a bag full of plastic spoons.
Words – Tobias Revell