The Communal Joy of the Twentieth Anniversary Screening of The Room
I’m not sure exactly when or how I discovered The Room. As someone who has devoted his life to celebrating the egregiously awful it was firmly in my wheelhouse. Furthermore its writer, director and star, Tommy Wiseau embodies a combination that I never get tired of writing about because I find it endlessly fascinating.
Like many of the eccentrics chronicled in my book The Joy of Trash Wiseau is a crazed narcissist who is wholly devoid of self-consciousness and self-awareness. Even at this late stage he does not seem to understand that the way the world sees him and the way he sees himself are wildly different.
When he was creating the glorious monster that is The Room Wiseau clearly saw himself as a hot young American actor, not unlike Matt Damon, with a muscular body moviegoers would LOVE to see showcased extensively in scene after scene, often while thrusting insistently to the silky sounds of generic Quiet Storm R&B.
The world looked at Wiseau and The Room and saw instead a poorly preserved foreigner anywhere between forty and sixty years old whose staggering lack of talent when it came to acting was only topped by his ineptitude when it came to writing and directing.
The first time I saw The Room I was transfixed. I had never seen anything quite like it. Everything about it was insane. Nothing made sense. And it all felt deeply personal in a way that was riveting but also perhaps a little TOO intimate.
Watching The Room is like rummaging around inside Tommy Wiseau’s haunted imagination, which is a strange and wonderful and eminently curious place to be.
At this point I’ve probably seen The Room between ten and fifteen times, mostly at the Music Box in Chicago or The Plaza in Atlanta.
It’s like Phish shows: if you remember the exact number of shows you’ve been to then you’re clearly doing it wrong and/or haven’t taken nearly enough drugs.
So when Greg Sestero, who I have been friendly with ever since I wrote a piece on The Disaster Artist that he really liked asked if I wanted to attend a sold-out twentieth anniversary screening of The Room I said yes despite my well-known reluctance to leave my home or interact with other human beings.
This wasn’t just part of the twentieth anniversary tour of The Room, although it was that as well; it was two decades to the exact day that the film was released. That made it a historic day in the world of The Room.
It’s a world that I have spent a lot of time in over the years and am always happy to revisit. The last time I watched The Room before last night was roughly two weeks earlier, when I re-watched it at home for an article I wrote for Fatherly calling it the most influential and important bad movie of the past quarter century.
The Room is definitely a movie that you can enjoy at home by yourself. There’s just so much crazy, unforgettable shit happening in literally ever scene. I would go even further and say that glorious insanity pervades every frame.
But you’ll definitely enjoy it much more if you see it in a packed theater of rowdy The Room super-fans eager to relive their favorite moments from a movie I can legitimately say has become the Rocky Horror Picture Show of my generation.
The experience—and seeing The Room live is definitely an experience— is even greater and even more transcendent if Greg Sestro and/or Tommy Wiseau are hosting the screenings.
I’ve seen Sestero at a lot of screenings and am perpetually amazed and impressed by his ability to work a room. He’s an actor and a performer who has perfected his spiel over the course of many, many evenings introducing The Room to its army of crazed cultists.
The comic timing is perfect. The anecdotes have all been refined over the course of years, even decades. Sestero is very good at being Greg Sestero.
Sestero is also the author of The Disaster Artist, a page-turning account of the too-strange-for-fiction making of The Room. The book was adapted into an award-winning and critically acclaimed motion picture that has a legacy all its own.
Because of the book and film versions of The Disaster Artist, it feels like The Room belongs as much to Sestero as it does Wiseau. He might not have written it, or directed it, or played the lead role of Johnny but he’s the man who made sense of it all, to the extent that something like The Room can be said to make sense in any conceivable way.
By writing the book (with Tom Bissell) Sestero was making this story his own. The behind the scenes story is every bit as riveting and funny and human as the cult classic Sestero and Bissell write about with biting wit and no small amount of affection.
The knock on The Room is that its cult is a cult of cruelty devoted to mocking a deluded eccentric who doesn’t realize he’s being mocked. That night, however, I did not see any cruelty. All I saw was a bunch of bad movie-loving nerds having the time of their lives doing something they love to do.
That’s the thing about The Room. It’s never gotten old for me. It still manages to light up all my pleasure centers no matter how often I see it.
The twentieth anniversary screening of The Room was a goddamn blast. I’m already excited about celebrating its twenty-fifth birthday.
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