| Tommy Wiseau’s The Room: The Citizen Kane of bad movies |
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Page 1 of 3 Every now and again a film comes along that is so badly made, so terribly put together that it actually becomes impressive. Instead of attempting to follow the plot or performances you just sit back and watch as it continually trips over itself. Now to fall into this category it can’t just be any Uwe Boll drivel or Jean Claude Van Damme tomfoolery. To qualify it must hold that magical combination of accident, ignorance and often arrogance that means its appeal transcends anything the filmmakers envisioned. The result is a chimera; a crudely fashioned mutant of half-ideas, ridiculous plots and acting that makes Segal look like the next Olivier. Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space is such a film, as is Guy Ritchie’s Revolver and Demian Lichtenstein’s 3000 Miles to Graceland. But in 2003 a film was made that surpassed all its predecessors. Here was a film that revolutionized the thinking on just how terrible a movie can be and set the benchmark for every motion picture to come. So the next time your watching a shallow Hollywood explosion fest, just remember that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as Tommy Wiseau’s The Room.At this point you may be wondering why you haven’t heard of The Room. Well its lack of fame can mostly be explained by its genesis. This was not a studio picture with an extravagant budget and starry cast. Instead its director, the enigmatic Tommy Wiseau, scraped the seven million dollar budget together by, in his own words, “importing leather jackets from Korea and selling them”. Wiseau had written The Room as a play before adapting it into a novel and then screenplay to shop around to major Hollywood studios. While some might feel disheartened when no studio showed any interest in their screenplay, Wiseau was of a steelier mettle and decided to make the film entirely himself. Not only would he write, direct and star but would also serve as executive producer, director of photography, principle-casting director and would be responsible for the “making of”. Orson Welles, eat you heart out.
After five long years of fundraising, which Wiseau has been highly secretive about, the film began principal photography in Los Angeles. In a typically mysterious move, Wiseau decided that to truly capture his vision he needed not one, but two cameras. But as Wiseau had absolutely no experience making films, he wasn’t aware of the existence of two different methods of filming: digital and 35mm. According to Greg Ellery, an actor in The Room, Wiseau was suddenly faced with an decision that would effect the whole look of his film and confused about the differences between the two formats decided to best way forward was to buy a new 35mm film camera and a $30,000 digital camera. Now this decision could be explained by presuming Wiseau was going to shoot the film in one format and the promised “making of” with another. But such conformity doesn’t apply to Tommy Wiseau. He instead decided to shoot the entire film concurrently in both formats by rigging up a special double camera mount. To those who don’t really know much about the technical side of making films, what Wiseau had affectively done was buy a new Mercedes and an old Cadillac, bond them together with duct tape, sit atop and attempt to commandeer them through a crowded intersection. This two-camera gamble was probably the reason why principal photography on a film set mostly indoors and only 99 minutes long lasted eight months. That’s roughly the same as a year of college. Additionally Wiseau’s audacious camera system almost certainly led him to firing and replacing his whole camera(s) crew not once, but twice during filming. |