The Disaster Artist -

[Fibonacci]

The Disaster Artist
My Life Inside The Room,
The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made


Greg Sestero
&
Tom Bissel​

CONTENTS:

Spoiler

ONE "Oh, Hi, Mark"

TWO La France a Gagné

THREE "Do You Have Some Secrets?"

FOUR Tommy's Planet

FIVE "People Are Very Strange These Days"

SIX Too Young to Die

SEVEN "Where's My Fucking Money?"

EIGHT May All Your Dreams Come True

NINE "You Are Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!"

TEN Do You Have the Guts to Take Me?

ELEVEN "I'll Record Everything"

TWELVE I'm Not Waiting for Hollywood

THIRTEEN "Leave Your Stupid Comments in Your Pocket"

FOURTEEN Highway of Hell

FIFTEEN "God, Forgive Me"

SIXTEEN Don't Be Shocked

SEVENTEEN This Is My Life

Note: I will try to update with entire chapters as I find the time. Please let me know of any errors you find in my transcriptions so I can fix them.

 

[Fibonacci]

ONE:

"Oh, Hi, Mark"​

Tommy Wiseau has always been an eccentric dresser, but on a late-summer night in 2002 he was turning the heads of every model, weirdo, transvestite, and face-lift artist in and around Hollywood's Palm Restaurant. People couldn't stop looking at him; I couldn't stop looking at him. Even today, a decade later, I still can't unsee Tommy's outfit: nighttime sunglasses, a dark blazer as loose and baggy as rain gear, sand-colored cargo pants with pockets filled to capacity (was he smuggling potatoes?), a white tank top, clunky Frankenstein combat boots, and two belts. Yes, two belts. The first belt was at home in its loops; the second draped down in back to cup Tommy's backside, which was, he always claimed, the point: "It keeps my ass up. Plus it feels good." And then there was Tommy himself: short and muscular; his face as lumpy and white as an abandoned draft of a sculpture; his enormous snow-shovel jaw; his long, thick, impossibly black hair, seemingly dyed in Magic Marker ink - and currently sopping wet. Moments before we walked in, Tommy had dumped a bottle of Arrowhead water over his head to keep "this poofy stuff" from afflicting his considerable curls. He had also refused to let the Palm's valet park his silver SL500 Mercedes-Benz, worried the guy would fart in his seat.

At this point I'd known Tommy for almost half a decade. Tommy and I looked more like Marvel Comics nemeses than people who could be friends. I was a tall, sandy-blond Northern California kid. Tommy, meanwhile, appeared to have been grown somewhere dark and moist. I knew exactly where Tommy and I fit in among the Palm's mixture of Hollywood sharks, minnows, and tourists. I was twenty-four years old - a minnow, like Tommy. That meant we had at least thirty minutes to wait for a table. Upon entering the restaurant, I could see various diners consulting their mental Rolodexes, trying to place Tommy. Gene Simmons after three months in the Gobi Desert? The Hunchback of Notre Dame following corrective surgery? An escaped Muppet? The drummer from Ratt?

"I don't wait in line," Tommy said, speaking to me over his shoulder. He marched up to the Palm's hostess. I kept my distance, as I always did at times like this, and waited for the inevitable moment in which Tommy spoke and the person to whom he was speaking tried to make geographical sense of his pronunciation, which sounded like an Eastern European accent that had been hit by a Parisian bus. The hostess asked Tommy if he had a reservation.

"Oh, yes," he said. "We have table reservation."
"And what's the name?" she replied, slightly sarcastically, but only slightly, because who knew whether Ratt was on the verge of releasing a Greatest Hits album? Her job required carefully hedging one's fame-related bets.
"Ron," Tommy said.
She checked her list. "Sorry," she said, tapping her pencil on the page. "There's no Ron here."
"Oh, sorry," Tommy said. "It's Robert."
She looked down. "There's no Robert here, either".
Tommy laughed. "Wait, I remember now. Try John."
The hostess found the name John near the bottom of her list.
"John," she said. "Party of four?"
"Yes, yes," Tommy said, summoning me over to bring him one party member closer to accuracy.
I don't know who "John, party of four" actually was, but the hostess snagged a wine menu and began walking us to our table.

I followed Tommy and the hostess through the Palm's dim interior and looked at the dozens of movie-star caricatures that lined its walls. There was Jack Nicholson, Bette Davis, O.J. Simpson - which made me wonder: What, exactly, did you have to do to get banished from the wall of the Palm? I noticed some starry faces sitting at the tables, too. Well, maybe not starry, but midsize astral phenomena: sports broadcaster Al Michaels, colleague to my beloved John Madden; Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Josie Maran; the cohost on our local ABC News. There were also lots of faces unknown to me but obviously connected. These mostly middle-aged men and women talked show business at conversational levels, and real show business sotto voce. The waiters were all older, beefy guys who smelled of expensive aftershave and had big, white, manicured nails; they were such smooth operators, they almost managed to convince you it didn't matter that you weren't famous. The air in the Palm was very expensive. Everything, other than the food, tasted like money.

"Excuse me," Tommy said indignantly, after the hostess showed us to our table. "Excuse me but no. I don't sit here. I want booth." Tommy always insisted on a booth.
"Sir, our booths are reserved."
But Tommy was nothing if not unrelenting. I think the hostess figured she had two options: Give Tommy a booth or call animal control to tranq him. Through a combination of lying, grandstanding, and bullying, Tommy and I were now seated in a booth in the nicest section of the Palm. As soon as Tommy sat down he flagged someone down and said he was "starving" and ready to order.
"I don't work here," the person said.

Whenever Tommy is in a restaurant, he always orders a glass of hot water. I've never seen a waiter or waitress do anything but balk at the request.
Here's how the Palm's waiter handled it: "I'm sorry. Did you say a glass of-?"
Tommy: "Hot water. Yes. This is what I am saying."
"A lemon maybe or-?"
"Look, why you give me hard time? Do I speak Chinese? This is simple request, my God. Are you tipsy or something? And more bread with raisin stuff."

We were at the Palm to celebrate. The following morning, official production would begin on The Room, a film Tommy had conceived, written, produced, cast, and was now directing and set to star in. If you'd known Tommy as long as I had, the beginning of The Room's production was a miracle of biblical significance. I'd worked on the film with him, on and off, since its inception. My most recent and intense job on the film was working as Tommy's line producer. When we began, I had no idea what a line producer was. Neither did Tommy. Basically, I was doing anything that needed to be done. I scheduled all auditions, meetings, and rehearsals; ran the casting sessions; helped find equipment; and, most challenging, made sure Tommy didn't sabotage his own film. In a sense I was his outside-world translator, since no one knew him better than I did. I was also in charge of writing the checks that were flying out the door of Wiseau-Films like doves in search of dry land. For all this, Tommy was paying me a decent wage, plus "perks", which was what Tommy called food. With Tommy's vanity project about to begin, my plan was to walk into my eight-dollars-an-hour retail job at French Connection the next day and quit. I hoped never again to fold something I wasn't going to wear myself.

"So," Tommy said, taking off his sunglasses. His eyes were red with veiny lightning. "We are in production. How do you feel?" He started to wrangle his hair into a scrunchie-secured ponytail.
"It's great," I said.
Tommy was looking at me directly, which didn't happen that often.
He was sensitive about his left eyelid, which drooped noticeably, and he rarely held anyone's gaze. When he did talk to someone he'd try to hold his face to the left, which he thought was his best angle.
"Are you nervous little bit?" Tommy asked.
"For what?"
"For big day tomorrow."
"Should I be nervous?"
He shrugged. As we ate, we talked a little more, and things in the Palm started to wind down. Nine p.m. is, however, Tommy's noon, so as the Palm became emptier and more sedate, Tommy grew more and more energetic. I had to get home for a number of reasons, not the least of which was my girlfriend, Amber. She wasn't a fan of Tommy's and hated it when I wasn't with her on her nights off.

Tommy leaned forward. He'd never touched his hot water. "What you think now about The Room?"
I'd told Tommy what I thought about The Room several times, which was that the script didn't make any sense. Characters' motivations changed from scene to scene, important plot points were raised and then dropped, and all of the dialogue sounded exactly the same, which is to say, it sounded exactly like Tommy's unique understanding of the English language. But nothing I said would ever change his view of The Room, so what did it matter? I thought the film offered a fascinating glimpse into Tommy's life. But I couldn't imagine anyone anywhere would be able to decipher it, let alone pay money to see it.
"You know what I think about The Room," I said. "Why are you asking me this now?"
"Because tomorrow is very important day. It will go to the history. Touchdown. No one can take away. Our top-of-mountain day! We begin to shoot." He smiled and leaned back. "I can't believe this, if you really think about it."
"Yeah. Congratulations. You deserve it."
Tommy looked at me, his face slack. "This 'yeah' is not convincing. You are not happy?"

I was happy. I was also, at that moment, distracted. I'd accidentally caught eyes with a young brunette across the restaurant, which I think she mistakenly took as an invitation. She and her blond friend were checking out our table. And now, suddenly, they were coming over. Dressed up, both of them. Heels, both of them. Young, both of them. The blond woman looked like an agent's assistant maybe meeting her slightly racier, less securely employed friend for a night of whatever they felt like they could get away with. They had sparkly eyes and hello-there smiles and were holding half-drunk glasses of wine, which were clearly not their first drinks of the evening.

They motioned for Tommy and me to scoot in so they could join us.
"Just wanted to come over and say hey," the brunette said. "Thought you were cute."
We awkwardly shook hands, introduced ourselves. Greg. Tommy. Miranda. Sam. Our booth smelled like it had been hit with a precision strike of apples-and-vanilla perfume.
Conversation, haltingly, began. Yeah, the food was great. Oh, that's so funny! My bare arm was touched once, twice. Tommy was glowering, backing away into some small, irritated corner of his mind. He stayed there for a bit, before, out of nowhere, he asked the girls, "So what do you do besides drink?"
They exchanged a quick, decisive look. I could almost see the mischief in their eyes flicker out at the same time. "Excuse me?" Miranda said.
Tommy sighed. "I ask what do you do? Any job or anything? What do you offer besides the vodka?"
Miranda looked into her wineglass questioningly, and then over at me. There was nothing I could say. Miranda and Sam stood up. Yes. Well. It was nice meeting you, Greg. Yeah, thanks. You, too. We'll see you around. Sure. Take care, then. Absolutely.
After they left, I looked at Tommy and shook my head. "Girls are crazy," he said.

The waiter arrived and asked to see Tommy's identification. This wasn't unusual. Our bill was huge, and Tommy was paying with his credit card, which wasn't reading. Tommy, however, refused to show the waiter identification, eventually announcing, "I have a right under law of California!" Then the waiter made it clear to Tommy that the Los Angeles Police Department was only a phone call away. Tommy got angry and allowed the waiter to glimpse his driver's license beneath a murky plastic lining in his wallet. The waiter said he was sorry, but Tommy had to remove the identification. "Very disrespectful!" Tommy said. "I'm sorry but you are completely off the wall." The waiter, finally, acceded.
Tommy stormed out. I lingered behind, apologizing to every member of the staff I saw. I'd become accustomed to this; it was how I paid for our dinners.

Outside the Palm, we waited for the valet to drive Tommy's Benz around. (He had apparently forgotten about the dangers of valet farting.) I dreaded the look on the valet's face when Tommy tipped him. On a hundred-dollar dinner tab, Tommy would often tip five dollars. Sometimes the recipients of Tommy's tips would come back to him, with an air of wounded dignity, and ask, "Have I done something wrong?" And Tommy would say, "Be happy with what you have." Tommy must have been feeling a little guilty about what went down inside the Palm, because the valet didn't seem scandalized by the tip Tommy gave him.

We headed east on Santa Monica. Traffic was light, but Tommy was nevertheless driving at his standard speed of twenty miles below the legal limit. I wondered, sometimes, what drivers on the freeways of Greater Los Angeles thought when they passed Tommy. Expecting to see some centenarian crypt keeper behind the wheel, they instead saw a Cro-Magnon profile, wild black hair, and Blade Runner sunglasses.

Coincidentally, at the first stoplight, Miranda and Sam from the Palm pulled up beside us. I looked over and smile-waved. They, of course, burst out laughing. Tommy powered down the passenger window and said, as loud as he could, "Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha! Ha! Ha!" Horrified, they pulled away from the stoplight as though from a terrible accident. I sank into my seat. This was another way in which I passed the time in Tommy's company: trying to disappear.
Tommy looked over at me and said, "You look great, by the way. Like Spartacus."

Tommy loved movies, though I wasn't sure he'd seen anything made after 1965. I think he thought I looked like Spartacus because for the first time in my life I was wearing a beard. While working on the casting of The Room, which took months longer than it should have, I had let the beard - along with my relationship - just sort of go. Though Amber hated it, I'd grown to like the beard. There was something invigoratingly Viking about it.
"Spartacus?" I said. At that point, I had never seen Spartacus, but I gathered Tommy's observation was accurate. A few years later I finally watched it. Spartacus does not have a beard.
The car began to roll forward again. "So listen now," Tommy said. "This is very important. You have to do The Room."
"I am doing The Room."
"This is not what I mean. I mean you must act in The Room. Perform. You have to play Mark."

We'd been over this. Many, many times. Tommy claimed that he'd written the part of Mark - who in the script betrays his best friend, Johnny (Tommy's character), by sleeping with Johnny's future wife, Lisa - for me. I was never sure how to take this.

In the four years that I'd known Tommy, he'd come to my aid on numerous occasions. If it weren't for Tommy, I never would have moved to Los Angeles. Now he was making a film - a film that meant the world to him. So I was happy to help him. But act in it? That was an entirely different level of obligation. I knew what good films looked like. The Room was not going to be a good film. It was probably going to require divine intervention just for Tommy to finish the thing.

This was to say nothing of the fact that the role of Mark had already been cast.
"What do you think about this?" Tommy asked.
"I think," I said, "that Don is already playing Mark." The actor's named was Dan, but Tommy always called him Don, so I had to call him that, too.
Tommy was quiet for a block. Gobs of oncoming headlights filled the car and withdrew. We were now traveling ten miles below Tommy's standard twenty miles below the speed limit, all while he veered into other lanes. Men on bicycles were passing us. The cars not honking at us should have been.
"What if we do something?" Tommy said. "What if we give you very good money?"
We? The leadership structure of Wiseau-Films was simple: Tommy was the founder, president, chief executive officer, treasurer, legal department, brand manager, administrative assistant (under the pseudonym of "John"), phone answerer, and mail opener. He claimed to have four other producers backing him on The Room, but no one, including me, had met them. A few months before, Tommy had offered me the salary-less title of "Vice President of Wiseau-Films," and even gone so far as to print business cards with my name on them. I had politely declined.

Tommy was now stopped at a green light with his brights on. I motioned for him to drive, but he was busy being incredibly determined to convince me to play Mark. "Just listen what I say; forget these honking people. What if we give you good money to play Mark? What do you say about that?"
What, I wondered, was up his sleeve here?

I had called Don in when he responded to an ad Tommy placed in Backstage West. During the audition process, Tommy had made Don expose his bare backside, which was humiliating for him and deeply uncomfortable for the cameraman (me). For reasons that were never completely clear, Tommy didn't like Don, possibly due to his vaguely entitled rich-kid vibe. (Tommy was rich now, but he hadn't always been, and no one dislikes each other more than the circumstantially different rich.) Regardless, two months ago Tommy had Don sign a contract; Don had been rehearsing ever since. He'd even finagled a part in the film for his roommate. As far as Don or Don's roommate or anyone else involved in The Room's production knew, I was a "summer intern" at Wiseau-Films.

Tommy's car was still stranded at the La Cienega stoplight. I couldn't believe he would spring this on me hours before filming began. Things were finally simple: The Room was being made. But Tommy had to make things unsimple. He couldn't proceed unless he was under heavy fire.

To make matters worse, Don had also made friends with other cast members - especially Brianna, who was playing a character named Michelle. If Tommy got rid of him, for no reason, on the day filming began, I felt certain everyone would revolt. These were the kinds of details that tended to escape Tommy's notice.

Tommy, finally, pulled away from the light. Within moments he was serenely piloting his Benz down Santa Monica, waiting for me to say something. "I can't do it," I said.
He didn't look over at me. "I always intended you to play the Mark. Okay. So you have to do it, you see. This is your chance. Don't blow it. You will miss the boat." Now he looked over at me. "What is your problem?"
"Don is Mark. End of conversation."
Tommy turned away. "Forget this guy. He can't perform shit. The love scenes? He's plastic. There's nothing there. Everything is flat."
"Love scenes? Tommy. Are you kidding me?"
"I say there's nothing there. I would fire this guy. No matter what I fire this guy. So this is your chance."
"There's no way I'd ever do a love scene the way you've rehearsed them. I won't do it."
"Fine, then. I make special arrangement for you. During love scene, you don't have to show your ass. You keep your pants on. We do the way you feel comfortable. But this is your last chance. We pay you some very good money."

Tommy kept hitting the "very good money" point because he knew I didn't have any. Out of curiosity - but also, I suppose, out of greed - I asked Tommy what he would pay.
And Tommy told me.
"Huh" is what I said. Holy shit is what I thought. This could put me back in the game. I could stay in L.A. once the movie was done and not have to go back home to San Francisco a failure. This could be the thing I had to so I could do what I wanted to do. "That's a lot of money. Are you sure?"
"Yes, we pay very well."
"What would you do about Don?" As much as I needed the money, I was trying to push away this... number Tommy had dropped in my lap. "Everyone likes Don. If you fire him, you'll piss everyone off. People might quit." I wanted to avoid another casting ordeal. The fact is dams have been built in the time it took to cast The Room - a film with only eight parts to be cast.

Tommy finally turned onto my street, Flores, where I could see my car - a 1991 Chevy Lumina a grandfather would have felt square driving - parked beneath the smeary light of a streetlamp. Amber's car was parked behind mine. I was thinking of the car I could finally buy with the money Tommy had just offered me, when he said, "What about we also get you new car?"
The week before I'd tried to drive a few blocks to buy some groceries and my car broke down halfway there. My Lumina was keeping half of Hollywood's mechanics employed. "Tommy," I said, "I just don't know. Let me think about it." My voice was weak, small, and therefore revealing. Tommy had me now, and he knew it.
He pulled up to my place. "Don't worry about this Don guy. We take care of him, okay?"
"You're talking like a mobster."
"No, not mobster. So this is my idea. You show tomorrow, and we tell everyone producers want to see you on the camera for future project. And we shoot you on the 35mm film. For him we say we roll the film but we shoot the video. No worry. We delete everything. It's over. Very simple."
It was just crazy enough not to work at all.
"Don," I told Tommy," will figure out in ten minutes what's really going on."
"Don't worry about that. We take care of it."

At that point I told myself a few things. I told myself (a) Tommy wanted Don out, and I couldn't do anything to stop that; (b) a new car meant new confidence, and new confidence meant better auditions, and better auditions meant booking work; (c) this movie was, probably, never going to be finished, and it certainly wasn't going to be released; and (d) pushing Don out of the film would be doing him a favor. Really. "Greg," Tommy said, "I don't have time for games. I need response."
"Give me an hour," I said, and got out of the car. Immediately I noticed Amber standing by the front door of my building. I could tell from her expression that she was about to leave because she was sick of waiting for me, sick of Tommy, sick of The Room, and sick of my beard. It occured to me, as I walked toward her, that I'd let my beard come in not only because The Room's casting process had overwhelmed me, but maybe also because I liked having another barrier between her and me. Which was surely why Amber hated it so much.

Amber was a makeup artist from San Diego who prided herself on being a cool chick, and she was a cool chick. She had dark, wavy hair, and was feisty in the way short girls with confidence can be feisty. Spicy feisty. Stare-you-down feisty. She stared me down all the time, even though I had almost a foot on her.

We'd been dating for a year and a half; it was time to either move in together or move on. Unhappily, I didn't want to do either. A month previous I'd sort of preempted the move-in-or-move-on conversation by using the money Tommy was paying me to lease an apartment in an Old Hollywood building with a dense palm-tree perimeter and a great view of the Hills. Amber loved the place so much that she started spending all of her time there.

"Well, hello," she said coolly. "What took you so long?"
"Guess."
Tommy was pulling away now, after awkwardly staring for too long. He beeped. Not a fun little bye-bye beep, but a long, sustained beeeeeeep.
"So," she said, arms folded, "how's Tommy?"
Whatever Amber and I had, she was obviously as close to being over it as I was. Which hurt, oddly.
Tommy was now at the end of the street, beginning an agonized turn, still beeping. At least, now, they were little beeps. Beep beep. Beep beep. 'Bye, Tommy. Amber watched with an expression of disgust as his Benz disappeared around the corner.
"Greg," she said, "what is this Tommy thing getting you? He's taking over our lives. Try something else. Get that job at EA Sports you're always talking about. Being around Tommy is just too hard on you."
"Tommy," I said, "just offered me the role of Mark."
Her head was shaking; she was still on guard. "So? He's offered you that part, like, a hundred times."
"Yeah, but this time he offered to pay me for it."
Her head was no longer shaking. "How much?"
I told her, after which she became very quiet. Above us, wind flapped in the palms.
"And a car," I said. "He also offered to buy me a new car."
Amber looked puzzled. "Isn't somebody already playing Mark?"
I described Tommy's absurd scheme. We stood there, looking at each other. I assumed she thought I was a terrible person for even considering it. I decided to tell Tommy no thanks. "Okay," I said, turning to go inside. "I'll go tell him."
Amber was still looking at me. "Tell him what?"
I froze midstep. "What do you think I should tell him?"
"I think you should tell him yes. You're going to be on set all day anyway, right? Fuck it. Do it."
I was shocked. "You want me to do it?"
"Yeah. Do you think the other guy would give a shit about you if the situation was reversed?"
I didn't know, honestly. Maybe he would have.
"I don't know. Nothing about it feels right."
"It's a lot of money."
Amber was right about that; we'd been struggling. And remember, I thought to myself, Don is a rich kid. Actually, I had no idea if Don was a rich kid. It just seemed like he was, and right now I was very fond of that impression. "You're right," I said. "I'll do it."
"Good," Amber said - there was, I noticed, no joy or victory in her voice - and we walked inside. The phone was heavy in my hand as I dialed Tommy's number. While Tommy's cell rang, I imagined him making one of his semi-truck-slow turns onto another street. No. He was probably still driving down Fountain, the next street over. When Tommy picked up I asked him where he was. "I am on the Fountain," he said. "So what's the story? I have no time to beat the bush."
"I'll do it."
"Greg," Tommy said, "I think you make great decision."

 

[Watcher]

Are you posting up the entire book Fib? O.o

 

[Judge Holden]

Are you posting up the entire book Fib? O.o

It is a public service to the people here.

 

[exball]

You're doing God's work here Fib.

 

[LM 697]

Joke's on you. I already read it months ago.

 

[TrippinKahlua]

I couldn't find it in a book store. I'll be glad to read it like this.

 

[Something Vague]

I'll still support the authors and buy the original copy. Besides, nothing beats the actual book experience of cracking open and reading a book. Still, thanks! I'll read this in the meantime

 

[Jackolantern]

This is amazing. Especially Tommy freaking out Mirabda and Sam. "HAHAHAHA"

 

[Dork Of Ages]

Thank you so much, Fib. If I can't buy the book when I am in the US in the next few days, this will work.

 

[Fibonacci]

TWO:

La France a Gagné​

I saw Home Alone in Walnut Creek, California, on Christmas Day 1990, when I was twelve. After the movie I immediately got to work on writing the sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in Disney World. The plot hinged on Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) boarding the wrong plane and winding up in Disney World, where he runs into his slightly older neighbor Drake (Greg Sestero). There, Drake and Kevin get into various monkeyshines while avoiding a crack team of bandits recently escaped from a Florida state penitentiary. I created a soundtrack, drew up a poster, and threw together a marketing campaign. When I finished the script, I remember thinking that soon I'd be on set in Orland and skipping eighth grade.

Next, I did what all twelve-year-old screenwriters do, which was call information and ask for the phone number of 20th Century Fox. I got through to someone at Fox, though for some reason I was given the runaround. Incensed, I called information again and asked for the address of John Hughes's production company in Chicago. Then I sent Hughes my screenplay directly.

My mother teased me about my dream of getting my movie made, but that only fueled my aspirations. I checked the mail every day after school, hoping to prove her wrong.
A month later my mom walked into my bedroom holding a brown envelope. She looked stunned. "It's from Hughes Productions," she said.
I tore open the package like I was about to find Wonka's Golden Ticket. Sad news - my screenplay was being returned - but attached to the pages was a handwritten note from John Hughes himself. "Believe in yourself," he told me in closing, "have patience, and always follow your heart." Writing a random little boy a note of encouragement was merely a small, dashed-off kindness on Hughes's part, but at the time it meant a lot to me. It still does. In the intervening years, I've learned that many people can afford to be that kind, but of those who can, most don't.
After reading Hughes's letter, I knew I'd found my calling.

I love my mother. She is a wonderful human being: strong, tough, loving, practical, and beautiful. We get along and have always gotten along, save for one key area: my choice of career.

The first thing to know about my mother is that she's French-Sicilian. I'd like you to think for a moment about the temperamental implications of that genetic combination. My mother wanted me to becomes a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer, a doctor. For my mother, "I want to be an actor" was roughly analogous to "I want to be homeless." Oddly - or not oddly at all - my mom had once wanted to be an opera singer. "If it were that easy," she said when I asked about this, "I would have done it."

In retrospect, the way my mother went about discouraging me from acting was, tactically speaking, all wrong. She could have sat me down and said, "Greg, look. This is an incredibly hard thing to do, and even many of the most talented actors barely survive. You might be great and still not make it. Is that the kind of chance you want to take?" But she didn't say that. What she said was, "You are going to learn the hard way , and the worst part of it is you had your parents to warn you, unlike all those loser Hollywood runaways you see in the streets." It was hard to hear this from her. My mother was the one person I wanted to be proud of me.

With my dad it was different. His idea of solid parenting has always been to say, "Just do what you can to enjoy life, because it sure goes by fast." But with my father so low-key, my mother's voice dominated. "Most people have nothing to lose," she would tell me. "Gregory, you have a lot to lose." It wound up feeling like that, which meant I lost a lot. I didn't go out for high school drama, for instance, because I was afraid of not being good. I persisted in reading about acting, though, and remember my stomach dropping when I learned that Jack Nicholson stumbled through 350 auditions before getting his first small part. By the end of my junior year, I was fear-stifled and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn't apply to colleges; I didn't have a plan. Nothing felt right.

It was around this time that I watched another movie that had a huge influence on me: Legends of the Fall. I believed that Tristan Ludlow (Brad Pitt) was on a quest for self-understanding similar to mine, though mine, I hoped, would have fewer bear attacks. The morning after I saw the film, I noticed an ad in the Contra Costa Times for Stars, a San Francisco talent agency, that was seeking new clients. I decided to send them photos, and after a couple of weeks, someone from Stars called me in for a meeting.

A month and a half later, Stars had gotten me a gig to model in Milan. This overlapped with what would have been the beginning of my senior year of high school. I worked out an ad hoc "independent study" with my school, and suddenly I was landing at Malpensa Airport and blinking in the glorious Italian sunshine.

I got off to a frantic start, attending castings all over the city, many of which had four hundred models waiting for hours in line to be seen. This was about as intimidating as anything I could imagine. For the first time, though, I didn't let my fear control me. Just because I was sheltered didn't mean I wasn't good; it didn't mean I should quit. That said, I was greatly rattled by the beauty of the Italian women and by the alien qualities of the fashion world as seen through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old California boy who wanted to act. I made the mistake of voicing this aspiration to fashion people: "I'm doing this to act," I'd say. "You should be doing this to model," I was told (rightly, too, I now know).

Every moment of every day felt newly, freshly incredible. I did shoots in Florence and Venice and Lake Como. On my off days I hung out with other young models near the Duomo. In Paris I got the chance to work for Jean-Paul Gaultier. I met the fashion editor of Vanity Fair, who playfully asked me, "Your mom let you out of the house?" (Not exactly, I didn't say).

After six months in Europe I returned home to San Francisco. I didn't plan on modeling again because I wanted to focus on acting exclusively. Models, I knew, had a hard time being taken seriously as actors - sometimes for very good reason. I asked my print agent, Lisa, if she would submit me for whatever movies or television shows were filming in the Bay Area. Lisa found this request amusing: "It sort of sounds, Greg, like you want to fly up the ladder."

Lisa reminded me of the many things I didn't have: an acting résumé, an acting headshot, or any training. But I was adamant that she try anyway. To Lisa's and my shock, I quickly scored a bit part in Nash Bridges as Joel, an upset guy who'd seen a murder. After I got sides, I spent three days throwing everything I had into them. My two lines in the scene were "Yes" and "No." This is it, I thought. My break. My rocket start up the ladder. Except that it wasn't. Phil Jackson, my sports hero, once said, "It wasn't the last hit that broke the rock but the thousands of hits that came before it." My part on Nash Bridges was one tiny hit.

I shot the part in Oakland with Don Johnson himself. During the shoot, I met an actor named Peter Gregory, who was up from Los Angeles doing a guest-star turn on the show. We talked a bit on set. Gregory offered me some big brother-type advice. He told me I had a "young Rob Lowe" thing going in my favor, a kind of likable innocence, and that if I wanted to do well, I had to figure out a way to give that aspect of myself some kind of edge. "You don't want to be just another pretty face," he said. "Pretty boys are a dime a dozen in L.A." The most helpful thing Peter mentioned was the name of his agent, Judy Schoen, which I filed away for immediate use. My scheme: Call Judy Schoen and say, "Hello, Peter Gregory recommended you to me." Which was only slightly a lie. Peter told me I shouldn't have any trouble attracting a Los Angeles agent, so why not start with his?
When I came home and told my mother I was going to send out feelers with L.A. agents, she said, "If you do that, if you go to L.A., mon cher, then you are on your own. I'm not helping you at all."

Before I could contact Judy Schoen, I booked a few things you would have needed a high-powered microscope to see me in. These parts are called "being a background performer" in polite company and "being a fucking extra" if you're talking to other actors. One such gig was Gattaca, the Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurma sci-fi movie directed by Andrew Niccol, in which a brief flash of my face can be seen among wanted Gattacan citizens. I was also a "featured extra" (my favorite movie-language contradiction in terms) in Metro, which starred Eddie Murphy and Michael Rapaport. The on-set casting person plucked me from a teeming mass of extras and stuck me right behind Murphy for a scene in a tavern that wound up getting cut.

Shortly after my background performing triumph in Metro, I called Judy Schoen. To her credit, she actually took my call. I explained that I'd recently done Nash Bridges with her client Peter Gregory. Soon I'd be coming down to Los Angeles; I'd love to meet with her.
"Well," she said in a hard-ass, cigarettey voice, "don't come down here just for me."
I drove down, a few days later, just for her.

Judy turned out to be unexpectedly kind in person. "The first thing you need," she told me, "is to get tape. Also training. You need good training." She put her cigarette down and looked at me. "What if I asked you to intensify a scene? Would you know what I meant?" I didn't answer. "I thought so," she said. "Come back to me with tape and training under your belt and we'll talk." I went back to San Francisco with I've got to get tape, I've got to get training, running through my head like numbers on a stock-exchange ticker.

I enrolled in classes at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, whose alumni included Denzel Washington, Teri Hatcher, Winona Ryder, and Danny Glover. Then I got as many jobs as possible, because my eventual move to Los Angeles was not going to be cheap. I ushered at Golden Gate Theatre in the Tenderloin; I shuffled papers at an investment firm; I filed documents at my father's land-development company.

I'd been studying at A.C.T. for six months when I called Judy Schoen again to update her on my progress. I didn't get her directly, so I left a message. The next day I walked by my father's office and saw him talking on the phone. From the startled way he looked up, I knew the conversation he was having somehow involved me. "Yeah," my father kept saying. "Yeah, I know. She's screwed up. I agree. I wouldn't deal with her. I'll let him know." He put the phone down. Whatever this was, it was bad.
"Dad?" I said.
His eyes lifted heavily to me mine. "Your mother talked to that agent. She said Mom was rude or harassing to her assistant, so now she doesn't want to hear from you anymore. So it's over. You need to let it go."

My mother, being French, can ruffle and alarm people not accustomed to more, shall we say, Gallic forms of no-nonsense directness. It's not rudeness, or not intended as rudeness, but try telling that to Judy Schoen's assistant, who called me back and got my mother, "Don't ever fucking call my office again. I'm not interested in your son."

I'd spent the last six months doing everything I could to get represented by Judy Schoen and it had all collapsed in one thirty-second conversation. I went home immediately and confronted my mother, who had an interesting appraisal of the day's events. Her first point was that Hollywood people, as she'd long argued, were "flakes and thieves." Her second point was that this was exactly the sort of thing she'd been warning me about. Her third point was that Hollywood didn't work in the way the rest of the world worked. You needed to have connections, rely on the casting couch, or be rich. I, in turn, had one point, which I repeated to her again and again: She should have let me return that phone call and not taken it upon herself to torch the one connection I had. Other than that I had nothing to say; soon enough, neither did she.

Several weeks later, my mother was driving my brother to Los Angeles for a dental school interview. She offered a spot in the car for me, too, so I could meet with some Hollywood agents. I knew this was her way of apologizing.

I went despite having been unable to make any appointments with agents. "By referral only" is basically the model of every legitimate agency in Los Angeles. Thus, operating out of complete hopelessness, I decided to crash the offices of Cunningham-Escott-Dipene, a prominent talent agency I knew of mainly because they represented Mark Hamill. My hope was that every law known to govern the entertainment industry would cease to exist for the few minutes I was there.

My crash of CED's offices went exactly as it should have gone. Did I have an appointment or referral? I didn't and was asked to leave. I began to make a case for myself and heard my voice develop a worrying quiver, so I stopped, nodded, and walked out.

A month later I got an unexpected bit of good news when my San Francisco agency booked me for two commercials. One of them was for Ford, in which I portrayed a college guy hanging out with his girl. A Ford truck goes by and it's so amazing, we wave at it. It made no sense, but it got me my SAG card and a few residual checks - which was helpful.

Less helpful were my classes at A.C.T. Students didn't get a lot of time onstage and the place had an intimidating vibe. So I asked around: Where else did people seek training in San Francisco? One name that kept coming up was Jean Shelton. I went to see her and, after a short conversation, she let me in.

It was now April 1998. I was almost twenty years old. After a week in Shelton's class, the good news kept coming: I got a call from a casting director working with Tom Shadyac on a film called Patch Adams; Robin Williams was the star. The casting director had seen my headshot and thought I might be right for a character who didn't have any dialogue but would be prominently featured in several funeral-scene close-ups as the dead girl's grief-stricken brother. I was cast and drove out to Napa Valley. My mother didn't understand why I was driving so far to shoot a scene in which I had no lines.

I arrived in St. Helena - the town where we were shooting - around seven in the morning. I was given my funeral wardrobe and then waited around like everyone else. Out of nowhere, my name was called over the loudspeaker. The line producer, incredibly, wanted to speak to me. She said she thought it would be good for me to talk to Robin, because I was a member of his on-screen family. A little intimacy, she said, might be nice.

Robin Williams is a longtime resident of San Francisco; I grew up watching him on local television. I thought he might find it funny if I greeted him by referencing one of his local bits: an odd character named Handsome Williams, whom he created right around the time of Mork & Mindy. When I approached Williams he was slowly pacing a few feet from his trailer. The line producer, walking ahead of me, sped up to prepare Williams for my arrival. I was about to talk to an actor whose work I admired and who had only weeks ago won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. When I got close he smiled and stuck out his hand.
"Handsome Williams," I said, excited, smiling, as I shook his large, hairy loaf of a hand.
Williams stared at me blankly. "Handsome?" he said. He'd stopped shaking my hand. He had no idea what I was referring to. He was too focused on the scene he was about to shoot to remember some goofy old bit he'd done.
"Handsome Williams," I said again, unhelpfully. I felt all the soft parts of my face get blood-gushingly warm. Williams let go of my hand, gracefully putting the misunderstanding behind us. He began to explain to me, in a very calm voice, that the scene we were shooting today was an intensely emotional part of the film for him. My job, consequently, was to stand there and radiate sadness. He was very kind, and actually pretty helpful, and after some polite chitchat he thanked me for being part of the film and walked off.

I was shown to the mark on which I was supposed to stand for the duration of the scene. Next to me was a guy I mistakenly assumed was another extra. In fact, he was a young actor I hadn't yet heard of, though he'd already done terrific work: Philip Seymour Hoffman. I tried to make a little small talk with him, but he was also in the zone or trying to get there and sent back my way some palpable energy indicating that I should just shut the fuck up already, which I did.

Tom Shadyac, the director, suddenly appeared, and walked back and forth in front of us, occasionally suggesting a few microarrangements. Shadyac was very cool, in a rich-hippe kind of way. He'd already done a few huge movies, Ace Ventura among them, but carried himself in such a manner that his authority always seemed pleasant and gentle. Eventually he zeroed in on me. "I'm going to go a little bit tighter on him," he said to someone trailing him, "and then we're going to do a little bit more with him later." Then he spoke to me directly: "Really great, Greg," he said. "Thank you." By now I knew enough not to say anything. Not even a thank-you for remembering my name, which truly was above and beyond. I just nodded.

After we finished shooting, I drove around instead of going home. I had been a competent featured extra - nothing more, nothing less - but it was enough to feel like I'd done something real. I'd stood still and looked appropriately grief-hammered and Shadyac got exactly what he'd wanted from me. A few weeks before, I'd been ready to give up. Maybe I wasn't crazy to need to do this.

As if in validation of my reborn drive, a bunch of auditions came in at once, including one for Trip Fontaine in The Virgin Suicides, the character Josh Hartnett wound up playing. My audition tape was forwarded on to a Los Angeles casting director, who told my agent she thought I had something she could use down the line. Shortly after this, a San Francisco casting director whom I'd read for a few times brought me in for another part and said, "I don't know what you're doing, but every time you come in here, you're getting better. Keep it up." But nothing happened and nothing kept happening, and I could only live on the supportive words of a couple of casting directors for so long.

You know you're in somewhat dire personal straits when the best news of the month is that France has won the World Cup. On July 13, 1998, two days before my twentieth birthday, I walked into Jean Shelton's class. I was still buzzing: France had won the World Cup! Why wasn't anyone else as excited as I was about this?

It turned out that someone was - my classmate Murad, a young French-speaking Tunisian guy. After class started, I heard Murad say, in a whisper, "La France a gagné." France won. I had spoken French with Murad a few times and figured he was talking to me. I winched around in my seat but Murad wasn't speaking to me. He was addressing, or rather trying to address, another guy to his left, who was sitting alone, several seats away. This guy had a rather piratical face and presence, with a sour expression and long, messy black hair. The pirate just stared at Murad. That France had won was evidently of no immediate concern to him. "Yeah, right," the pirate said finally. "La France a gagné." Then he looked back at the stage.

It was such a strange reaction. His accent, at least from what I could hear, didn't quite sound French, which he obviously knew and spoke. He looked older in everything but his attitude; he sat in his seat like a slouchy teenager in detention. The more closely I studied him, the odder he appeared. He seemed half comic book character, half hair-metal icon. Was this guy French? If so, why was he so indifferent about France's victory?

I had no idea how significant this moment would be in my life. This was the first time I saw the man who called himself Tommy Wiseau.

 

[TastyWoodenBadge]

Greg's Home Alone 2 actually sounds better than the real Home Alone 2

 

[Jackolantern]

This book is amazing.
I met Sestero and Wiseau a few years ago. Greg is reay nice fella and very self-deprecatingly funny. Wiseau is a deranged asshole.

 

[Fibonacci]

THREE:

"Do You Have Some Secrets?"​

On the first day of The Room's production it was my job to make sure Tommy got up and to the set on time. This would remain my job for the entirety of filming, during which Tommy was routinely three to four hours late. In my defense, Tommy's interior clock is more attuned to the circadian frequencies of a bat or possum than a man. He typically goes to bed around six or seven in the morning and gets up at three or four in the afternoon. Yet he was insisting on morning shoots for The Room.

After quitting my job at French Connection I parked my Lumina in Tommy's driveway. I walked through his front door, which was ajar, and called his name. No answer. There was a kettle of boiling water on his stove, whistling away. I took the nearly empty kettle off and went upstairs. Tommy's bedroom door was closed but I heard him make a few grumbly noises, one of which sounded like "Five minutes." I went back downstairs and sat on his couch, where I found a note from him to me that said: "You will receive majority of candy (95%) when completion of production. I'm not Santa Claus." "Candy" was Tommy's unusually creepy slang for money. It was typical Tommy behavior to delay revealing an agreement's fine print until after the handshake. After twenty minutes, I went back upstairs and knocked on his door. "Five minutes," Tommy said again. I realized, sitting there on his couch, that there was a pretty significant loophole in Tommy's payment plan: What if we never completed production?

Tommy briefly appeared on the staircase, looking disheveled. "We take your car, okay?"
"Okay," I said. "But why?"
"Because these people talk if they see my car." He started heading back to his room.
"We're late," I said. "When will you be ready to go?"
"Five minutes," he said.

Soon I was lying down on the couch. Tommy's plan was kind of ingenious when I thought about it. How better to incentivize my involvement in the film? How else to convince me to wait on his couch for an hour after he told me he'd only be five minutes?

What was Tommy doing? Primping, getting dressed, getting undressed, reprimping, doing pull-ups, getting dressed, primping again, falling asleep. At one point I marched up the stairs to inform Tommy that he couldn't be two hours late on the first day of filming his own movie. But before I could give him this blast of tough-love truth, Tommy walked out of his bedroom wearing white surgical gloves stained to the wrist with black hair dye. Tommy had actually decided to redye his hair before heading over to the set. I went back downstairs and started watching Spy Game. Tommy had hundreds of DVDs scattered all over the floor, though I'm not sure he watched many of them. By the time Spy Game was over, Tommy was ready to go. We were four hours late now - and we hadn't even stopped at 7-Eleven for Tommy's customary five cans of Red Bull. I think this could be deemed an inauspicious beginning.

The Room was being filmed on the Highland Avenue lot of Birns & Sawyer, which over the last five decades had become a legendary provider of cameras and equipment to mainstream Hollywood film and television productions. Birns & Sawyer's owner. Bill Meurer, had made the unusual decision to let Tommy use the company's parking lot and small studio space because Tommy had made the breathtakingly expensive decision to purchase, rather than rent, all his equipment. This was a million-dollar investment that not even a large Hollywood studio would dare. Camera and filmmaking technology is always improving and anything regarded as cutting-edge will be obsolete within twelve months. Tommy's purchases included two Panasonic HD cameras, a 35mm film camera, a dozen extremely expensive lenses, and a moving truck full of Arriflex lighting equipment. With one careless gesture Tommy threw a century of prevailing film-production wisdom into the wind.

Probably the most wasteful and pointless aspect of The Room's production was Tommy's decision to simultaneously shoot his movie with both a 35mm film camera and a high-definition (HD) camera. In 2002, an HD and 35mm film camera cost around $250,000 combined; the lenses ran from $20,000 to $40,000 apiece. And, of course, you had to hire an entirely different crew to operate this stuff. Tommy had a mount constructed that was able to accommodate both the 35mm camera and HD camera at the same time, meaning Tommy needed two different crews and two different lighting systems on set at all times. The film veterans on set had no idea why Tommy was doing this. Tommy was doing this because he wanted to be the first filmmaker to ever do so. He never stopped to ask himself why no one else had tried.

I navigated my loud, coughing Lumina through the parked trucks and construction equipment toward Tommy's reserved spot, which had been ostentatiously blocked off with large orange cones. Guess who put them there?

The best description I ever heard of Tommy was that he looks like one of the anonymous, Uzi-lugging goons who appeared for two seconds in a Jean-Claude Van Damme film before getting kicked off a catwalk. That's what Tommy looked like now, sans Uzi. This particular day, he was wearing tennis shoes, black slacks, a loose and billowy dark blue dress shirt, and sunglasses, his hair secured in a ponytail by his favorite purple scrunchie. As we walked from the car to the set, he was yelling in every direction: "Why are you standing around like Statue of Liberty? You, do your job! You, move those here! And you film operators, don't touch anything for HD. Be delicate! We need to hurry! There is no time to waste!" Everyone stared back at him with expressions that said, Are you fucking kidding me? Tommy was ludicrously late for his own shoot and his first leadership step was to hassle the crew? It was not a hot day, but already I was sweating.

The Room's crew had been provided by Birns & Sawyer, largely thanks to Bill Meurer and his sales rep, Peter Anway, who realized Tommy was going to need help operating all this expensive equipment that he knew less than nothing about. Meurer and Anway's ultimate motive was to keep this production afloat for at least thirty days, which was the period Tommy had to return the pricey equipment he'd bought from them. Still, providing Tommy with a crew was an act of legitimate kindness on Meurer's part. It gave Tommy access to some cinematic veterans, among them Raphael Smadja, a French-born director of photography who'd done a ton of work in reality television. These were savvy and competent professionals, which meant they were completely unprepared for dealing with someone like Tommy.

Peter Anway had worked hard to convince Tommy that the production would need a script supervisor. In terms of emotional coherence and dramatic logic, Tommy's script may as well have been written in crayon. Tommy wanted to make sure that The Room was legitimate in the eyes of Birns & Sawyer, so Raphael Smadja brought his old friend Sandy Schklair in to meet Tommy.

Sandy had twenty-five years of experience in film and television, most of it in a script-supervising capacity. With his untucked flowered shirt, Selleck mustache, and hefty glasses, Sandy looked about as non-L.A. as it was possible to look. He was friendly and funny most of the time - though his work on The Room nearly drove him mad. Years later Sandy would claim to have directed the lion's share of The Room, which is a bit like claiming to have been the Hindenburg's principal aeronautics engineer.

Sandy later told me his first thought when he met Tommy was to wonder why his arctic skin didn't sizzle when it came into contact with direct sunlight. He figured Tommy was probably some spoiled wild child from an oil-rich Bulgarian family who'd been paid by his parents to vacate the motherland and never come back. In their meeting, while Tommy described The Room to Sandy, Raphael - who had already signed on - was standing off to the side, out of Tommy's line of sight, with his hands pressed prayerfully together, silently begging Sandy to come aboard. To Sandy, Tommy seemed delusional, inexperienced, and rich, so why not?

Sandy was the only person on set, besides me, who'd been given a complete script of The Room. He'd done considerable work on it, mostly turning its dreadful dialogue ("Promotion! Promotion! That's all I hear about. Here is your coffee and English muffin and burn your mouth.") into linguistic units human beings could exchange. Beyond that, Sandy couldn't do more without rewriting everything from scratch, which Tommy would not tolerate and which Sandy had no stomach for. Sandy saw the script for what it was: unintelligible and shot to the core with a curiously unexamined homoeroticism. But a job was a job.

One of the first things Tommy did after arriving on set was check in with Raphael, who was clearly puzzled as to why Tommy was so late. His wan smile was balanced atop his little silver soul patch. Raphael was standoffish, the opposite of the gregarious, talkative Sandy. He seemed to take the fact that he was working on something as low grade as The Room personally. But he softened to me considerably when he found out I spoke French, and became more open as production wore on.

Once it was established that Raphael was eager to get going, Tommy checked in with The Room's costume designer, Safowa Bright, another decent and conscientious on-set presence. Tommy had given her a miniscule budget and so she spent much of her time despairingly combing through L.A. thrift stores to piece together outfits. The result was a "Wardrobe" unit consisting of a single homeless-shelter rack of clothing and a few plastic laundry tubs. Safowa also had to deal with Tommy's eccentric design whims. Unsurprisingly, many of The Room's costumes would turn out to be baffling at best and catastrophic at worst.

Tommy's final stop was to see Amy Von Brock, The Room's makeup artist, who'd been assigned a dusty, pathetic station to the immediate right of the stage door. Amy had no place for a mirror or a table on which to set her many brushes. After seeing Catering's table, monopolized by Tommy's hot-water keg, she was already deeply frustrated, when Tommy plunked himself down in her chair, demanding that none of his "nest" show. I had to translate that: In Tommyese, nest means scalp, though I couldn't begin to tell you why. While Tommy's nest was being covered up, he told Amy that he wanted every actor's moles to be concealed, too. Amy looked at me. I shrugged. This experience was not going to be easy on her.

I hadn't seen The Room's interior sets in anything resembling finished shape, so I headed over to Birns & Sawyer's small studio space to have a look. Several crew members - who, as a favor to Anway, were working below their normal rates under the assumption that the film was low budget - were staring daggers into the $6,000 private bathroom Tommy had constructed for himself near the back of the stage. This bathroom had everything: separate plumbing, extrasoft toilet paper, a vanity mirror, a sink. One thing it didn't have: a door. Instead it had a little blue curtain for a partition.

This was weird for so many reasons. For one, Birns & Sawyer had a clean, roomy bathroom facility eighty feet away from Tommy's little toilet ego shrine. For another, was he really going to void his bowels in the middle of the studio, separated from the people with whom he was working only by a flimsy curtain?
One of the crew hissed, "What is a private bathroom doing in here?"
"This guy had enough money to build his own bathroom? Why doesn't he just use the normal bathroom, like everyone else?"
"That's fucking ridiculous. With what we're being paid? That. Is. Fucking. Ridiculous."
"I am totally shitting in that thing every time he's not looking."
The studio door opened behind us. "Greg!" Tommy shouted from the doorway. "Greg, I need you here. We do rehearsal!" Some crew members had stuck around and were staring at Tommy with openly mutinous expressions. "Don't talk to Greg," Tommy said to them. "Leave him alone. I talk to Greg."

Tommy dragged me outside, where he spotted the man operating the 35mm camera. He proceeded to give him the secret lowdown as to how he wanted to film Don and me today. In the ten seconds Tommy spoke to him, the camera operator's face underwent at least five distinct changes of expression: puzzlement, dismay, shock, incredulousness, and finally bleak acceptance.

I hated myself for having any part in this. I knew if I did the right thing and walked away from being Mark, it also meant walking away from a life-changing amount of money - and at the time I didn't believe enough in myself to feel I could have earned that amount another way. I felt my weaknesses were being exploited - and I was letting it happen. Maybe that's why I was dispirited: Tommy had made me realize that I had a price. I knew what Tommy was doing to Don was duplicitous and even cruel. But now I was struck afresh by how incredibly wasteful an idea this was. Tommy was wasting the cameramen's time, and obviously Don's time, but also the lighting people's time, and the sound guy's time, and the makeup person's time, and the costume designer's time - all because he didn't want to engage Don directly. It was strange: Tommy normally thrived within the black light of confrontation.

The actors were all waiting around for Tommy to start doing something. It was, after all, hours past their call time. Tommy was insistent that the entire cast, even those who weren't shooting that day, be on set, all day, every day of filming. He loved to spontaneously include actors in scene they were not originally written into. If you were an actor on The Room, every day was a surprise.

"Everyone," Tommy said, waving his arms, "now please listen. I need crew here, too." With everyone gathered around, I looked at the actors with whom I'd grown so familiar over the last few months: Scott Holmes (who was playing Mike - and who was eventually credited as "Mike Holmes" because Tommy forgot his real name), Philip Haldiman (Denny), Juliette Danielle (Lisa), Carolyn Minnott (Lisa's mother, Claudette), Brianna Tate (Lisa's friend Michelle), Dan Janjigian (the uniquely named Chris-R), and Don himself, who already looked suspicious. Everyone seemed wiped out. Months of Tommy's drama, loony rehearsals, vicious arguments, and a blowout between Tommy and the cast just days before had left us all on edge.
"So," he said, "Greg is here, as you know. And I have news that we want to see him - producers want to see Greg - for future project. So he's going to do couple scenes today on film with you guys. Producers want him on the film, okay. That's what they say" - he shrugged - "so we need to organize cameras, et cetera, et cetera."
The cast tried to wrap their minds around this odd announcement. "Who's he playing?" Brianna asked.
Tommy answered: "He's going to be playing the Mark for rehearsal process. The producers want to see him as the Mark."
Don turned to Brianna - no one was aware then that they'd been secretly dating - and exchanged a pregnant look with her. Then Don's eyes found mine. I shrugged at him.

Tommy dismissed us with the promise that rehearsal would begin in twenty minutes. I tried to go find someplace inside the Birns & Sawyer studio to hide but Don caught up to me. "Hey," he said, his head atilt.
I smiled at him with as much genuine, non-back-stabby warmth as I could muster.
"Weren't you... weren't you going out for a soap or something?" A week or so before I'd had to take off during rehearsal to audition for The Young and the Restless, a part I didn't land. I'd only told Brianna about it, but word had obviously wended its way back to Don.
"Yeah," I said.
Don's eyes filled with jumpy, piqued alertness. "So did you get it?"
"Uh, yeah." I still don't know why I said yes. I think Don's manic newfound interest in my career was freaking me out a little.
"Hey!" Now Don was smiling. "That's great. Congratulations." He looked back at Tommy for a moment, as though having finally made sense of the situation. "So," he said, assertively, "you're auditioning for some other thing for the producers? Or does this have anything to do with the soap?"
"No," I said. "It's something different." This was getting ridiculous. For all Don knew, I was an intern. Yet here I was, appearing to be effortlessly moving ahead in his field while he was stuck trying to get tape in The Room.
"What's your character's name?" Don asked suddenly.
I hesitated. "In the soap?"
"Yeah."
"Tristan."
"Well," Don said, drifting away from me now, "it sounds exciting. Good luck!"

Brianna, too, tracked me down to extend her congratulations, a thin cover for wanting to know what the hell was really going on. Brianna had not had a good experience with Tommy to date. A week before, in what turned out to be a disastrously intemperate cast meeting in the Birns & Sawyer office, Brianna had asked why Tommy was always hours late and why, since it was so hot, did he not have water available for them to drink? Tommy erupted, yelling, "Nobody in Hollywood will give you water!" before chucking a plastic water bottle at Brianna's head. Brianna and the rest of the cast walked out and almost quit the film entirely. I didn't blame them.

Brianna - an actress even if a camera wasn't pointing at her - looked like the sort of pretty blond earth-child who should have small colorful birds floating about her head and chipmunks sitting contentedly on her shoulders. She had asked me, several times, why I wasn't in The Room. Now she was saying, "I told you, Greg! I told you you should have been in front of the camera instead of interning!"
"Thanks," I said. "It's probably going to turn out to be nothing, though."
"Producers," she said, turning the word into an implicit accusation.

The first scene we shot for The Room was on the remarkably fake "alley" set that Tommy had built in the studio space. Tommy's rationale for choosing not to film in the real alley that was literally right outside Birns & Sawyer's door? "Because we do first-class production. No Mickey Mouse stuff!"

The alley scene's major players were Johnny, Chris-R, Mark, and Denny, whom Sandy referred to as "the weirdest character I've ever encountered in twenty-five years of filmmaking." During the making of The Room, Tommy demanded that Philip Haldiman, who was playing Denny, enter some scenes singing his lines, asked him to "cry hysterically" while Juliette yelled, "What kind of drugs?" and made him lingeringly eat an apple early in the film because, Tommy explained, this was "very sexual symbol." Given the nature of the character Philip Haldiman was asked to play - a man-child Peeping Tom neighbor who has no purpose in the story other than to ambiguously propose a threesome and be saved from a drug dealer - he did about as well as any young actor could have.

Philip was twenty-six at the time - older than I, Scott, Brianna, or Juliette - but Tommy still cast him as the youngest character in the film.Tommy wasn't clear in the script about Denny's age (or anything else), but we all assumed Tommy wanted Denny to be between fifteen and eighteen. Philip looked young, but not that young, which makes every scene he's in that much more uncomfortable. In an attempt to make Philip appear more youthful, Safowa had fit him in a tunic-length Charlie Brown-goes-to-prep school rugby shirt. I felt for Philip. Everyone did.

Don, meanwhile, was warming up a few feet away from me. His spiky dirty-blind hair appeared to have been newly highlighted. He was wearing slacks and an off-white Abercrombie & Fitch collared shirt, which had been generously unbuttoned. Tommy was ready to go now, too, having changed into black Nike cross trainers and dress pants. He walked past Don and said, "Don't try to be Brando today because you will hurt yourself."

Dan Janjigian was playing Chris-R, The Room's resident drug dealer. Despite having only ninety seconds of screen time, and having been cast as a complete fluke, he turned in what is commonly regarded as the single best performance in The Room.

Tommy had had a lot of trouble casting the part of Chris-R, probably because he chose to greet most of the guys auditioning for the part by jumping them when they walked through the door. At one point, Tommy wanted to have Scott Holmes (who'd been cast as Mike) also play Chris-R. Scott was supposed to pull this off by wearing what Tommy described as a "disguise" - a black Indiana Jones-style hat and horn-rimmed glasses - on the assumption that the audience wouldn't notice. Scott was no pushover physically, but in terms of attitude and aura he was about as menacing as an Ewok. When Don learned of Tommy's trouble finding a good Chris-R, he suggested that Tommy meet his stacked six-three roommate, Dan, who cut a nicely intimidating figure.

Prior to The Room, Dan was busy doing things like competing in the 2002 Olympics on the Armenian bobsledding team, working as a motivational speaker in Los Angeles's Armenian community, and starting successful Internet companies. Dan's audition for Tommy was his first audition ever. Not one to phone anything in, he read up on Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen beforehand, on the mistaken assumption that Tommy knew something useful about either.

On the first day of filming, Dan arrived on set in character and stayed in character. Trained or not, the guy had become a Hellfire missile of method. In his tight black tank top and even tighter black beanie, he was at times so frighteningly locked into Chris-R that no one dared talk to him. Between rehearsals, Dan would stalk back and forth along the set's edge, muttering and swearing, keeping himself angry.

Dan had some questions about Chris-R. We all did. Why the name "Chris-R," for instance? What's with that hyphen? Tommy's explanation: "He is gangster." What about this drug business, which never comes up either before or after Chris-R's only scene in the film? "We have big problem in society with the drugs. Chris-R is gangster and Denny takes drugs. So he must be rescued."

The original Chris-R scene opens with Denny playing basketball in an alley. Chris-R suddenly joins Denny and demands, "Where's my fucking money?" Apparently, Denny has bought drugs from Chris-R, which makes Chris-R's demand for money a little odd, in that drug dealers pretty much require up-front payment. Eventually, Chris-R pulls a gun on Denny, after which Johnny and Mark rush into the scene to disarm him.

Soon enough Don was being "filmed" running into the scene with Tommy to disarm Dan. They did several takes. "A lot of emotion!" Tommy kept saying. Zsolt, the Hungarian sound guy, was immersed in his sound equipment instruction manual and thus still unable to get the sound to synch. Raphael chimed in to say how strange it was that a guy the size of Chris-R, who's holding a gun to someone's head and is presumably prepared to fire it, could be jumped on and disarmed so easily. Tommy told Raphael not to worry, that when they got "more emotion" into the scene, it would all make sense.
Then it was my turn. "Be aggressive!" Tommy told me. "Really go to edge of your moment. This is drama! Show these people what you can do. Very powerful."

We rehearsed the scene a few times before Tommy announced he was ready to begin filming me. If anyone found it odd that the first thing The Room's mysterious producers wanted to see me do was rush into a scene in which I had no lines, they kept it to themselves.

In between shots, Tommy noticed that Don had walked away to get a drink of water. This was a mistake: Brianna had already established that water was an issue guaranteed to make Tommy go berserk. When Don sidled back up to the edge of the stage, Tommy stopped the scene that was under way and pointed at him. "You stay here while we shoot! Okay? You do not leave set, I tell you right now. Follow instruction! Do you understand?"
At first Don laughed, unable to believe that stepping away from a scene he'd already shot to get a cup of water could possibly be an issue. When Don realized Tommy was serious, his face bunched up. "What's your problem, Tommy? I just stepped out to get water."
"No," Tommy said, "you stay here! You leaving is fucking up our set." Suddenly I realized that Tommy was creating a pretext to fire Don.

The alley scene finally wrapped. Sadly, none of its particular magic ever made it into the film; Tommy had the entire Chris-R scene reshot on another set a week later. The dreadfully unconvincing indoor alley set turns up in the finished film only once, during a scene in which Mike tells Johnny a long story involving wayward underwear.

I'm not sure when word got out on set that film hadn't been rolling on Don, but it did, and now several people were whispering about it. As everyone regrouped to shoot the next scene, I became increasingly worried about what would happen when Don found out. Tommy, sensing my discomfort, took me aside and said, "Don't worry about him. If he attacks you, I will protect you." Very reassuring.

Tommy chose to shoot next on the Rooftop set. Now, the logical thing to do would have been to shoot another of several planned alley scenes because everything was already set up there, and the Rooftop wasn't even completed. But Tommy went with his gut - his weird, inscrutable, unpredictable gut - and so the relevant crew members hurried to put their finishing touches on what has become The Room's most famously incompetent cinematic element, deserving of its capital R.

To begin, the Rooftop wasn't a rooftop but rather three separate Styrofoam walls backed with cheap plywood, all of which had been hastily set up in the Birns & Sawyer parking lot. When shooting Rooftop scenes from alternate angles, the crew moved the three walls to create the illusion of four. (Unfortunately, they often failed to align these pieces, as you can see in the finished film.) Tommy had also determined that a convincing approximation of a fancy San Francisco condominium's rooftop access point would be a sheet metal shed. When this shed was included in Rooftop shots, the two Styrofoam walls were pulled apart and the shed was pushed into the gap: movie magic at its finest.

Behind the Rooftop was Tommy's coup de grâce: a green screen wall. Tommy had decided to add the San Francisco skyline to every Rooftop scene via postproduction digital trickery. As everyone who's seen the film now knows, this compositing process was not successful. Half the time the Mediterranean San Francisco skyline more closely resembles that of Istanbul; at other times, it looks as though the Rooftop is carrying its inhabitants through space and time itself.

The Rooftop scene Tommy now wanted to shoot involved two other characters: Peter, Johnny's psychiatrist friend, and Mark. Mark has headed up to the Rooftop to evade his problems and smoke a joint when Peter arrives to confront him about his affair with Lisa, Johnny's future wife. Mark responds to Peter's accusation with an uncharacteristically abrupt burst of anger and tries to throw Peter off the roof. Then Mark immediately apologizes to Peter for trying to kill him, and Peter lets it slide. It's probably the most swiftly forgiven attempted murder in the history of film.

Safowa scrambled to throw together our costumes, presenting me with an all-denim getup complete with cowboy boots that made me look like a rejected concept drawing of the Marlboro Man. By now I noticed that Don was watching Tommy closely. Tommy still hadn't requested new wardrobe for him for the Rooftop scene, which must have seemed suspicious.

When the cameras started rolling, Tommy kept interrupting the scene. As per the original script, Tommy wanted Mark to knock Peter out and then wake him up by dumping a bucket of water on him. Kyle Vogt, who was playing Peter, sensibly pointed out he had only one suit. "Yeah," Sandy said, unable to believe Tommy was seriously proposing this. "Once Kyle's suit is wet, we can't shoot again until it's dry." Tommy ran his hands through his hair, as though whether or not to dump a pail of water over Peter's head was the most agonizing decision imaginable.

We tried the scene again, but Tommy remained unhappy. "There's no chemistry! Voice need to go up! Okay? Come on, Greg!" I have never been so aware of someone's eyes on me as I was of Don's at that moment. This was obviously way beyond anything some producer wanted to see.

Tommy was also mad because he thought I'd changed a line in the script. In the scene, Mark is supposed to ask Peter, "Why do you want to know my secret?" Tommy thought the line was: "Do you have some secrets?" But it wasn't. That's something Johnny says to Mark earlier in the film. Tommy didn't know his own script. By this point, Tommy was getting looks from just about everyone, especially Don. To deflect his embarrassment, Tommy yelled "More emotion!" and kicked a pail of water that turned over and splashed up near his $250,000 worth of cameras.
Sandy put his arms on Tommy's shoulders and guided him away, saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. We can't have any of that near the cameras."
Tommy was not hearing this. "It's boring!" he said. "No emotion!" Then he called me over to where he and Sandy were standing, put his arm on my shoulder, and said, quietly, "I know what you want to do." I had no idea what he was talking about.
"Just do it," he said. "Don't be scared. Throw this stupid chair like your spy movie."
It occurred to me that Tommy was referring to Spy Game, which I'd watched that morning. In particular, he was referencing the scene in which Brad Pitt, while arguing with Robert Redford, throws a chair off a roof. Tommy, it turned out, had watched a good chunk of Spy Game from the stairs behind me. No wonder he was so late. "If you want to break chair or something," Tommy said, "break chair! I don't care."

In my next take, I kicked over a prop table and threw in an authentically frustrated "fuck," all to appease Tommy and bring this painful, awkward scene to an end - not only for me but also for Don. When Tommy watched the playback he decided that my ad-libbed "fuck" was his favorite take. He couldn't stop talking about how much he liked that take. It was now evident to anyone paying attention that I was being filmed for something more than a screen test. I looked over at Don and saw him talking with Brianna and Juliette. Brianna was animatedly throwing her hands around. Don was shaking his head. Juliette's hands were clasped over her mouth. Tommy's scheme was over. Don knew.

 

[Watcher]

I looked over at Don and saw him talking with Brianna and Juliette. Brianna was animatedly throwing her MANOS around. Don was shaking his head. Juliette's MANOS were clasped over her mouth. Tommy's scheme was over. Don knew.

Might wanna bare in mind that worldfilters are going through

 

[Saney]

Greg's Home Alone 2 actually sounds better than the real Home Alone 2

I don't know aout that, but it's definetly better than Home Alone 3 and 4.

Also, God damn, how in the hell does Tommy Wiseau function?

 

[Jackolantern]

"Promotion! Promotion! That's all I hear about. Here is your coffee and English muffin and burn your mouth."

Quality

 

[Uzumaki]

Thank you so much for posting this, this is great.

Greg's Home Alone 2 actually sounds better than the real Home Alone 2

I don't know aout that, but it's definetly better than Home Alone 3 and 4.

Also, God damn, how in the hell does Tommy Wiseau function?

All of the quality crazy people have an official wrangler, who is in charge of translation and damage control. This book is apparently written from the perspective of one such wrangler.

 

[Jackolantern]

Can't wait for the next update. Can't stop laughing at this thread.

 

[bradsternum]

This book is really great. He sounds like a really fucked up guy.