Tommy Wiseau: Hipster Irony Created a Monster

We’ve created a monster. Or, more precisely, a large group of hate-watching hipsters out there have created a monster. And the monster's name is Tommy Wiseau.

The director-writer-star of The Room, dubbed the “Citizen Kane of Bad Movies”, has threatened the festival with legal action if they screen Room Full of Spoons, a documentary by Rick Harper that supposedly uncovers details of Wiseau’s early life.

Wiseau seems to be very sensitive about keeping his formative years under wraps. He’s claimed in interviews to have been born in the late 60s, but he appears much older, and his birthplace remains a mystery; his bizarre accent (think a punch-drunk Arnold Schwarzenegger) doesn’t give anything away.

Harper’s film also reportedly explains how Wiseau raised the $6 million it took to make The Room. An equally interesting question would be why the budget looks to have been closer to $60?

If the festival gives in to Wiseau’s cease and desist letters, it’ll be the first cancellation of a film screening in its ten-year history. "If we did pull the documentary,” says the festival director, Stefan Popescu, “there would be a kind of irony to it as over the last ten years we have taken pride in screening content that was seditious, political, profane, defamatory and at times illegal and still manage to cleverly manipulate the system to our audience's advantage. Yet it will be the man with the reputation as the world's worst filmmaker that manages to censor our festival for the first time."

The Story of The Room

The story of The Room started 13 years ago, when Tommy Wiseau wrote, directed and starred in a bizarre melodrama about a banker and his cheating fiancée. It’s spectacularly terrible. The love triangle plot plays like a series of dada non-sequiturs, with characters prone to wild mood swings from scene to scene. Actually, sometimes their characters would change within a single scene – within a single spoken line. Here’s our cuckold hero, Johnny (ineptly played by Wiseau), on the roof of his apartment shortly after his fiancée, Lisa, falsely accuses him of domestic abuse: “I did not hit her, it's not true! It's bullshit! I did not hit her! Oh hi, Mark.”

The cast reek of soap opera cheesiness. The protracted sex scenes will make you sterile. The sets look as if they were designed by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen’s less talented, more flamboyant brother. Worst of all, however, is the dialogue, which runs the gamut of bad (“As far as I'm concerned, you can drop off the earth. That's a promise”) to the surreal (“You betrayed me! You're not good. You, you're just a chicken. Chip-chip-chip-chip-cheep-cheep”) to hilariously melodramatic (“YOU'RE TEARING ME APART, LISA!”).

The Room’s opening night, was, unsurprisingly, a disaster. “Most of its viewers ask for their money back – before even 30 minutes have passed,” reports Scott Foundas in the film’s first review. But something unthinkable happened after this ignoble debut: people kept coming back for more. “It was like our own private Mystery Science Theater,” Michael Roussele, an LA screenwriter who became a Room superfan on its initial run, told Entertainment Weekly. “I was calling friends during the end and saying, ‘You have to come to this movie.’ We saw it four times in three days.”

The Room's journey from disaster, to cult masterpiece

It was as if people had to go back to try and make sense of what they just saw, and audiences began to hoot along with the film in appalled delight. A cult grew, which included celebrities like David Cross, Paul Rudd and Kristen Bell. Thousands of these super-fans were soon canvassing Wiseau to get the film back in cinemas. "We got several phone calls from the theater that people were campaigning because they wanted to see The Room,” Wiseau told IndieWire. “I said to myself, What the heck?"

Over a decade later, The Room is a regular on the midnight movie circuit. The Prince Charles in London screens it once a month to sellout crowds. Rather than shrink from the ignominy of creating “the worst movie ever made,” Wiseau has embraced it. He turns up at screenings and laps up the ironic applause. He poses for photographs and signs autographs after screenings like he’s a rock star. Online he flogs his own brand of Tommy Wiseau pants called Twunderwear.

Wiseau’s ownership of the warped passion fans have for his vanity project’s ineptitude hints at what makes The Room so awful. It takes more than a spectacular lack of talent to create “The Citizen Kane of Bad Movies”, you also need a heavy dollop of egomania to convince people you have the talent to make the film in the first place. Wiseau clearly has this in spades. As Foundas said in that Variety review, “[Wiseau is] not just one of the most unusual looking and sounding leading men ever to grace the screen, but a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny seem the apotheosis of cinematic self-restraint.”

This egomania is there for all to see in Wiseau’s bullying attitude to the Sydney Underground Film Festival. Pleasingly, Popescu and his team don't seem to be submitting to his demands, at least not yet. "I am not completely sure if Tommy Wiseau is bluffing or not," he says. "So my strategy at this point is to engage his lawyer in writing me as many letters as possible, as I know each letter would cost him at least $500 a pop."

If Wiseau does succeed in censoring the festival, however, we’ve only ourselves to blame. By paying multiple times to see his terrible film, purchasing his pants online and cheering him like a rock star at screenings, we’ve given him the means and the ego with which to throw his litigious weight around. Even worse, our cult for Wiseau has given his fellow writer-director-actor James Franco the idea to immortalise him with The Masterpiece, the story about the making of The Room. Franco, of course, will play Wiseau. Like Cereal cafes, top-knots and Rick Astley's comeback, making a comedy about an unintentionally hilarious vanity project is a step of hipster irony too far.