At the turn of this humdrum American century, somewhere underneath the big, hot California Sun, a struggling actor mysteriously acquired several million dollars without killing anyone. With a smile on his face and a song in his heart he began the Great Arduous Process, a mad darting through the weft and warp of improbability to unleash his Dream Tapestry, a glowing cinematic textile of pure love that he intended as his gift to the world.
He walked tall against in the face of failure, an unflinching David before the fat glistening bulk of a Goliath Film Industry.
His name was Tommy Wiseau and his hair was terrifying. The extended weaving metaphor from the introduction is in reference to The Room, his debut feature film from 2003.
Last Friday evening, the Connecticut College Film Society, with the fanatical encouragement of a handful of film majors and some of the people who knew all of the callouts for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, brought the magic of The Room to the Olin City Music Hall 014 for a one-night-only gala exhibition.
As the lights dimmed and the INTERPOL Copyright Infringement Warning glowed blue on the screen, the air was alive with barely contained youthful electricity positively itching for release. This would occur shortly, in the form of laughter, yelling and about a hundred airborne spoons.
The Room is a movie that is so bad it’s good, and good because it’s so much fun to watch. Wiseau’s accent is hilarious, described by one critic as “Borat trying to do an impression of Christopher Walken playing a mental patient.” Lisa’s wine glass jumps from her hand to the table each time the camera angle changes; at the same time, a bulbous twitch keeps jumping from her neck when she speaks, reminding audience members of the alien from John Hurt’s chest cavity in Alien.
Actors quit and were constantly replaced; new characters are hastily introduced at ransom points throughout the movie to replace the old. Interesting subplots including drug use and breast cancer are nonchalantly introduced and then discarded. The green screen used for the outdoor scenes is painfully and laughably obvious. Characters constantly enter the main characters’ apartment without knocking or explanations and only stay for short conversations before having to leave, as if The Room is a movie adaptation of the game The Sims.
The Room, which is still being quoted nonstop audience members who didn’t lose their voices yelling “FOCUS” at the occasionally blurry screen, relays what Wiseau probably thought was a story of a good man’s demise at the hands of a cruel world.
A seasoned Hollywood production team would have limited the impact of his story to a degree comparable with While You Were Sleeping or, at best, Marmaduke.
Luckily, the sum total of Wiseau’s professionalism and filmmaking experience amount to the frenetic skittering of an excitable puppy on a hardwood floor, and his film will accordingly be remembered a tour de force of hilariously bad shooting, unintelligible editing, and pantomime sexing to generic R&B, which is as uncomfortable to watch as it is unfathomably hilarious.
Like so many before him, Tommy Wiseau has stumbled into the Grand Ethereal March of Weirdos. As long as there is a keen artistic tradition, his name will be celebrated alongside Ed Wood, Nicholas Cage and The Shaggs, if not necessarily Tennessee Williams.
Even if they’d never donned tuxedos to play football in a back alley or managed to misplace their boxers in a friends’ apartment without ever taking their pants off (it’s not impossible, I guess), the thirty or so Conn Collegiate who attended The Room got to take part in this rare brand of cultural chaos, and unless uncontrollable laughter implies seething hatred, they thought it a pretty awesome time.
Schedule for Upcoming Film Society Screenings:
April 8: The Headless Woman (Amadori, 1947)
April 9: Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)
April 15: Playtime (Tati, 1967)
April 16: A Colt is My Passport (Nomura, 1967)
April 22: Il Divo (Sorrentino, 2008)
April 23: The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966)
April 29: Survive Style 5+ (Sekiguchi, 2004)
April 30: Stop Making Sense (Demme, 1984)
May 6: Three Times (Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
May 7: Last Life in the Universe (Ratanaruang, 2003)
May 13: Thirst (Chan-wook, 2009)
