The Room - the Citizen Kane of bad movies
From the Times online:
If you’ve never seen — or experienced — The Room, you’d have been as stunned as I was when, about 10 times during the film and for reasons I couldn’t fathom, half the audience stood up and hurled white plastic spoons, yelling, “Spoon! Spoon!” (I later discovered they do it whenever the camera pans over a piece of artwork that looks like a spoon.) But unfettered spoon-throwing is only one of the very strange things that happens during screenings of The Room, the film that has become revered as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”.
Starring, written, directed and produced by the mysterious Tommy Wiseau, The Room has become a most unlikely cult hit. An unintentionally hilarious melodrama with dashes of cringe-making soft-core sex, The Room shows on the last Saturday of every month on four screens in an art-house multiplex on Sunset Boulevard. As many as a thousand people turn up, some of whom have seen the film numerous times. Like fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, people come dressed as their favourite characters, or carrying red roses or American footballs, both of which feature prominently.
The audience starts screaming before the titles roll, warning characters about the consequences of their often ridiculous actions, shouting when the focus or continuity go awry — which is frequently — and applauding when characters appear or disappear for no apparent rhyme or reason. “Who the f*** are you?” everyone shouts at one character. People mimic Wiseau's strange laugh, and groan when he takes his clothes off. At one point, about a quarter of the audience walks out in mock disgust at another ghastly love scene; they return a few minutes later, eager for more. There’s a pungent smell of marijuana in the air.
Most fun is had from yelling favourite bad lines. One line, which can be savoured on YouTube, threatens to make Wiseau as famous in his own way as the actors he says inspired him, James Dean and Marlon Brando. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” he shouts with a terrible, anguished howl. (Bear in mind that Wiseau speaks in a thick but indeterminate east European accent, a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and a drunken Transylvanian innkeeper.) The entire cinema erupts in an ecstatic frenzy.
Wiseau usually attends the screenings. In an expensive black suit, his long, dyed black hair falling about his shoulders, the auteur, who insists he is 40 when he looks to be in his mid-fifties, is treated with the reverence others might accord Martin Scorsese or David Lynch. Acolytes push past each other, desperate to have their photographs taken with the master. Devotees plead for him to sign their ticket stubs.
The film should have disappeared without trace. Originally released in 2003, The Room was described by one reviewer as a “cinematic train wreck”. Variety, the film trade paper, wrote: “Given audience reaction at the screening I attended, this pic may be something of a first: a movie that prompts most of its viewers to ask for their money back — before even 30 minutes have passed.” It’s not entirely clear how The Room was rescued from the oblivion it probably deserves, but Michael Rousselet, a young screenwriter, gets some of the credit.
“I saw The Room almost six years ago in a totally empty theatre and practically forced all my friends and anyone I met to see it before it disappeared,” Rousselet recalls. But The Room’s longevity was also undoubtedly aided by Wiseau’s unfailing belief, which he maintains to this day, that he had created something close to a cinematic masterpiece. For more than four years, until a few months ago, Wiseau paid for a huge billboard advertising the film — on which his heavy-lidded face could be seen glowering at unsuspecting drivers — above one of the busiest streets in Hollywood. Gradually, people, most of them young hipsters working in film or music, started coming to screenings.
How does Wiseau feel now that a film he portrays in all seriousness as having “the passion of Tennessee Williams” is being extolled as perhaps the worst movie ever made? Sitting in a deli in West Hollywood a few days after the screening, he shrugs off the critiques in that familiar accented, idiosyncratic English. “The Room is not regular cookie-cutter from Hollywood,” he says. “My approach was much different. Look, we have drugs issue, relationship issue, money, betrayal, and we have football, for example.”
With his usual approximative take on things, Wiseau admits it was a very hard shoot. “Let’s assume you are director, actor and producer. Is two different things. And writer. The good thing is if you have the skills, you can do it. It’s not a secret, we fire the whole crew three times.”
He refuses to tell me anything about his background or how he found the money to make the film, which is believed to have cost $6m. But how did he feel when people started doing things such as throwing spoons?
“One of the things in America right now, we don’t have a place to express yourself. Now the human behaviour — I don’t care who you are, you have to express yourself, you have to yell, so you have to sing sometimes when you take a shower, why not in (the) theatre? I say, you can laugh, you can cry, you can express yourself, (but) don’t hurt each other.”
As the cult of The Room has grown, so has the respect that people have for it. “I completely support Tommy, I love his film,” says Ross Morin, assistant professor of film studies at St Cloud State University in Minnesota, where The Room is on his curriculum. “Through the complete excess in every area of production, The Room reveals to us just how empty, preposterous and silly the films and television programmes we’ve watched over the past couple of decades have been.
“The real question is: did he know what he was doing?” wonders Morin, and everyone else in LA. “He claims that ‘everything was done on purpose’. But any viewer can see that the film is that of someone who has completely failed to do everything he was attempting. Either way, there is only one conclusion: divine intervention.”
(, Sun 16 Aug 2009, 18:16, Share, Reply)
put <small> </small> tags around that wall of text please
otherwise it discourages us from clicking the link, cos it looks like a rant by The Goat
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weaver., Sun 16 Aug 2009, 18:19,
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cheers, another option is to link to the actual article ;)
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weaver., Sun 16 Aug 2009, 18:21,
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Hahaha!
He never got this did he :)
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Jahled Three shades of black, Sun 16 Aug 2009, 19:26,
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where can i watch/buy this?
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(|D[ekionplexis B3ta.com: fictional child porn is OK, Sun 16 Aug 2009, 18:23,
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wow
that actually looks awesome, made me laugh out loud 6 times in under 2 minutes!
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Shiodome has realised numbers in names aren't cool., Sun 16 Aug 2009, 18:45,
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Our house is worringly obsessed with this film.
Must have watched it about 15 times. It really is that good! About 50% of our conversations contain quotes from the film.
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TheDiscoKing is the train station, Sun 16 Aug 2009, 21:55,
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Hahaha, now I understand that episode of Tim & Eric
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gronkpan https://twitter.com/VomitingLarry, Mon 17 Aug 2009, 0:36,
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Here's what I heard...
I have friends who have researched this bad boy. When someone in this masterpiece shows signs of cowardice, the others gang up on him/her and cry "cheep cheep," a chicken-esque call. And if you watch Arrested Development you will see that all the Bluths have their own rubbish chicken act. They were INSPIRED by this movie. It makes me love everything a little more.
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salamander, Fri 21 Aug 2009, 19:58,
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I've been a lifelong fan, and saw the UK premiere at the Prince Charles Theatre some weeks ago
Any b3tans there?
Also, Wiseau said if enough people ordered tickets he'd come over and do a Q&A session after the showing.
It was the best cinema experience I've ever had; I don't think I've ever lost my voice after going to the flicks before.
(, Sat 22 Aug 2009, 17:01, Share, Reply)
This film....
is a small piece of genius. My flatmate made me watch it about a year ago, after twenty minutes I suddenly got it and laughed my fucking arse off. I reckon it could be up there with Withnail, or possibly even Life of Brian,..maybe.
(, Sat 22 Aug 2009, 23:17, Share, Reply)
brilliant
reminds me of Garth Marengi's Dark place
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monstrinho do biscoito teeeshurts = www.nogunarmy.com, Mon 24 Aug 2009, 15:00,
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