The Disaster Artist Celebrates Accidental Celebrity

For the uninitiated: by any estimation, The Room is genuinely terrible. The 2003 production finds Wiseau playing Johnny, a San Francisco banker whose wife Lisa cheats on him with Johnny’s best friend. The story weaves and bobs along, finding tangents in the strangest of places — a cancer diagnosis here, a dramatic closeup there — until the painfully melodramatic finale. The whole thing unfolds against astonishingly ill-conceived production values, including an inexplicable green screen backdrop on the roof, and Wiseau’s baffling anti-performance as the centerpiece of this epic miscalculation. Diehards know his screeching line reading of his own awful dialogue in their sleep (the oft-cited “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” is the closest the movie has come to obtaining genuine pop culture stature).

"The Disaster Artist is the ultimate feel-good movie about bad art, one that liberates Wiseau's campy accomplishment from the insular world of late-night rituals to celebrate his commitment to realizing his vision against impossible odds."

Wiseau, however, has never seen it that way. While insisting in the wake of the movie’s reception that he intended to make a comedy, he has remained a sullen figure when confronting the crowds that turn out for his every appearance. As The Disaster Artist makes clear, Wiseau appears to be quite rich for unknown reasons, but he’s certainly quite the ambitious entrepreneur: he controls The Room empire, responding to emails about interviews and appearances in addition to selling merchandise from his personal site. Needless to say, nobody takes The Room as seriously as Wiseau, and when The Disaster Artist landed at SXSW, he hadn’t seen it yet. So regardless of the giddiness in the room, in a sense the premiere was designed for an audience of one.

“We were unsure what he was going to think,” Franco told EW later on, but the audience didn’t let him down. “It was like a rock concert,” Franco said.

After Wiseau greeted the crowd, many of them stayed put for a midnight showing of — what else? — The Room, while he joined Franco and the rest of The Disaster Artist team backstage. It was there, Franco and others have recalled in the months since, that the man behind it all revealed his thoughts on Franco’s accomplishment: Wiseau told Franco he approved of 99.9 percent of the movie, but took no issues with the story or Franco’s performance. Instead, he said, “the lighting, in the beginning, was a little off.” It was ultimate non sequitur from an idiosyncratic figure from whom nobody could have expected anything else.

Franco, meanwhile, landed his best reviews as both an actor and director in ages. Later, he would describe the The Disaster Artist premiere as one of the two best screenings in his life, the other being the SXSW screening of Spring Breakers. While that movie presented an eager audience with one of his most outrageous onscreen creations, The Disaster Artist did that in tandem with illustrating Franco’s progress as a filmmaker. The movie is funny, but not pure satire; instead, it celebrates the nature of creative desire through the classic backdrop of Hollywood dreams.

Franco first came across the story of The Disaster Artist while on the set of The Interview, as he was enmeshed in dozens of different projects. By then, he had entered his own whimsical artistic journey, not only acting and writing but also developing an untold volume of art projects, books and other multimedia efforts. He saw something of his own outsized ambition in Wiseau’s determination to make his movie at all costs. “I identified with Tommy,” Franco told the SXSW crowd. “I really respected that he came out to Hollywood like so many thousands of people have done and got this movie made. I had so much respect for him … the more I made this movie, [I realized], I am Tommy Wiseau.”

Watch: The Disaster Artist Q&A with James Franco and Seth Rogen — SXSW 2017