Book Review: "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside 'The Room,' The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made," Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell (Simon & Schuster, 2003)

Mystery Science Theater 3000 once had a recurring gag where TV's Frank would announce that some terrible movie, say, Gamera vs. Gaos, was "a triumph of the human spirit" in the tones of an overblown film reviewer who'd spent the last week on a steady diet of amphetamines and Chariots of Fire.  It takes a lot to make The Room into an unironic triumph of the human spirit, but that's what Sestero manages.

Sestero takes two narrative threads - his relationship with The Room and his relationship with the movie's creator, Thomas P. Wiseau, better known as Tommy Wiseau - and runs them in parallel until the concluding chapter.  Given that separating Wiseau from The Room is impossible, the separation is more a matter of the focus of the moment, and on the timeline of storytelling, rather than a true separation.  Because Sestero is at the same time describing his mostly unsuccessful efforts to become a working actor during the same period, the parallel stories of his struggle, and the struggle to get the movie made, balance each other out quite well.

Horror stories about the production dominate the Room chapters, like Wiseau's decision to build a private bathroom on set separated from the rest of the world solely by a shower curtain, or the difficulties of keeping cast and crew on a project where the driving force behind the project was a man who viewed paychecks as a carrot to lure the donkey onward, not a carrot to keep the donkey fed.  Like Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau believed, whole-heartedly, that he was making a truly great movie; unlike Ed Wood, who felt he had a good instinct for shots and would call objectively bad shots after a single take, Wiseau struggled for his entire life and was, within the very narrow scope of his abilities and interests, a horrendous perfectionist.  Combining the artistic eye of Ed Wood, and the cantankerous perfectionism of Stanley Kubrick, into a single character makes sense of much of the final product.  The Room emerges from this as a labor of love by a man whose idea of relationships is deeply flawed.

The Sestero chapters, meanwhile, tell the story of a man struggling to Make It in Hollywood, a very classic American story, with the "one weird twist" of classic science-fiction that his best friend, sometimes his only friend, is a bizarre, secretly fabulously wealthy East European man who occasionally thinks he is a vampire, drives like an old lady, and thinks that he's the next Marlon Brando or James Dean.  The end result is sort of like Mork and Mindy - if Mork were a jealous, controlling man with absolutely no sense of boundaries or appropriateness, who behaves much more like a creature completely unused to Earthling norms than actual Mork.

For the first half of the book, it is difficult to see Wiseau in anything resembling a sympathetic light.  He is controlling, selfish, jealous, difficult, and full of obnoxious mannerisms.  So far, what I am describing is an emotional horror story - Mary Shelley's Streetcar Named Desire.  Of course, like Shelley, Sestero engages in a bit of emotional bait-and-switch on us.  There are plenty of moments where we see Tommy being something akin to a human being - he has no idea what football is, despite claiming to be from New Orleans and living in the Bay Area surrounded by football teams, and despite the fact that he claims to be from France occasionally he clearly hates the French in a deep, personal fashion.  Tommy allows Greg to live basically rent-free in his LA apartment while he tries to get his acting legs under him, a gesture that Greg comes to regret, but also shows very clearly that the man can be exceptionally kind.

It is not until the second half of the book, until we've established that Tommy can be a hard, cruel, controlling, emotionally manipulative and abusive man, who is clearly worth millions but balks at common-sense measures on set, that Sestero pulls out the stops and tells us about what he's managed to reconstruct of Tommy Wiseau's backstory - again, like Shelley, revealing to us that the monster isn't Adam, but rather Victor.  Tommy's hard work and struggle to escape his East European upbringing, his determination to come to the United States, his hard work to succeed in the US - all of them shine through, and give some context to why this man is so clearly damaged goods, and why he is so tightly protective of his own emotions at the expense of others.

The final chapter of The Disaster Artist brings the two threads together - Greg screens the movie for his family, who finally understand the madness he has been working under for months, and become, in his words, Patient Zero for the future phenomenon; Tommy, meanwhile, arranges for its premier in an LA theater, thereby making it eligible for Academy Award consideration.  Greg's family has the more honest reaction, but Sestero's portrayal of Tommy, finally at the culmination of his dream, suddenly paralyzed by the attention of the small crowd in the theater, is deeply touching, and speaks to the contradiction at the heart of The Room.

The contradiction is this: Never was there someone so temperamentally unsuited to the making of a feature film under the circumstances where he chose to labor as Tommy Wiseau; however, no one other than Tommy Wiseau could have done it, anyone else would have quit along the way.  The Room is a terrible film, but it is also, despite what Wiseau might later claim, a terribly sincere film.  It is a masterpiece by a man who had not even mastered himself - but, in completing it, just as TV's Frank had declared about all those other, equally terrible but lesser movies, he created a triumph of the human spirit.

It deserved an "inside story" book that managed not to reduce him fully to caricature; Sestero delivered what it deserved.