Returning to theaters with a special “celebration” screening for one night only on June 27th; tickets for the event can be purchased at Fathom Events in participating theater box offices. Some locations are subject to change.
Back in 1999, my uncle was clearing out his old stuff and decided to give me his old camcorder. At that time, I was probably seventeen. I decided I wanted to become a filmmaker. He’d had this old camcorder from the early 1980’s that had no sound, was color (I use the word loosely), and could only really attach to the VCR if you wanted to film with it. In either case, I’d decided to play with it for a while and then staged a short film with my brother and sister. It was the three of us in the middle of the night filming a horror movie in my small bed room. We ended up with about a four minute video. The four minute “short film” had taken us about eight hours to film, overall.
And we cooperated with one another and the filming went smoothly.
Granted, the movie stunk, but we worked well together.
What shocked me at the time is that I couldn’t believe it’d taken so much time to construct only four minutes. What I learned that night is that filmmaking is hard. It’s fucking hard. You could argue with me that I didn’t really make a movie, or wasn’t really filmmaking. Look, I don’t care. The point is that I had a clear vision of what making a movie was, and that I learned that making movies of any kind, be they short form of feature length is really hard and exhausting. I think that’s basically why “The Room” has survived for so long as a cult classic and midnight movie gem. It’s so bad, it’s so utterly bad. But when you get right down to it, you can kind of understand what Tommy Wiseau was going for, here.
I’m not discounting all of the stories about Wiseau or ignoring his inability to be even remotely lifelike on screen, but making movies is tough. And if you’ve seen or read “The Disaster Artist,” you tend to come away with an understanding not just of movie making but of “The Room.” Watching “The Room” today, it exists in a period of time that you can never quite pin down. I think that’s what contributes to its ethereal quality. Although it was made in the early aughts, the movie looks like it’s stuck in a time period that’s not the millennium, but not exactly modern times either. It’s almost dream like in how it unravels its narrative, and how it’s entirely composed. Tommy Wiseau is working on another wave length throughout “The Room,” and you can see it in how the narrative is so absolutely bipolar.
It’s a torrid love triangle, gang, crime, drama, psychological thriller. It also wants to be erotic in many respects. Tommy Wiseau doesn’t write his characters like human beings, but more like how an alien visitor observing us through television soap operas views a human being. No one talks like regular human beings, they don’t react like human beings, and they don’t even commute like human beings. I know very little people that spend all their time solving their problems on the roof of their apartment building overlooking the city. And I’ve never met anyone that passes the time by playing touch football in wedding tuxedos.
Whether it was based around misuse of resources or lack of resources, “The Room” offers so many glimmers of baffling production choices. You almost watch it completely baffled, mouth agape, while simultaneously gazing in absolute horror. I think even if Wiseau hadn’t cast himself as Johnny, “The Room” would still be the otherworldly cult classic it is today. It’s poorly cast but you remember the characters. It’s poor in artistry but I defy you not to pick at least five favorite scene. It also garners absolutely piss poor writing but it’s also infinitely quotable.
It’s almost accidentally a genuine piece of art.
Making movies is really fucking hard, and “The Room” is just god awful. But I’ll bet we’ll still be talking about it in ten years.