This article was originally published on Starring NYC (now sadly defunct) and has been dusted off and spruced up for its Movie Maven debut.
Awful. Abysmal. Atrocious. Yes, it’s Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film The Room.
Hailed as one of the worst movies ever made, the film is a bizarre conglomeration of terrible performances, shoddy camerawork and a barely-comprehensible script that stands alongside Manos: The Hands of Fate and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space as one of that rare breed: the bad movie with a cult following.
The plot concerns Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), an affable, caring man blissfully engaged to the beautiful Lisa (Juliette Danielle). For reasons that are never adequately explained, Lisa grows dissatisfied with their relationship and embarks on an affair with Johnny’s best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero). When Johnny discovers Lisa has been unfaithful to him, the plot ripens into full-blown melodrama.
Poking fun at bad movies is one of life’s great guilty pleasures. It’s why Roger Ebert has published two best-selling collections of his most scathing reviews and why people still watch notorious disasters like Battlefield Earth and Batman and Robin—there’s just so much fun to be had. Plan 9 may be the proverbial “worst film ever made,” but the garbled sci-fi thriller still scraped together a 64 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, because it’s apparently too entertaining to dislike. Long-running television series Mystery Science Theater 3000, one of TIME’s all-time 100 television shows, also helped teach audiences the joy of skewering bad movies—many people saw Manos for the first time because it was featured on MST3K. Now, How Did This Get Made? is one of the most fun film podcasts around and the Nostalgia Critic’s rants draw as many as 200,000 viewers a week.
So it isn’t surprising that despite, or indeed because of, its lack of quality, The Room has found a loyal audience. It was broadcast nationwide on [adult swim] on April Fools’ Day in 2009, has been the subject of a parody commentary from RiffTrax, is the subject of The Disaster Artist, a new film starring James Franco, and continues to be screened in cinemas across the country.
It’s shown faithfully every month at the Sunshine Cinema, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. On a recent Saturday, a raucous crowd of twenty- and thirtysomethings packed into a screening room at midnight to watch The Room—an audience participation ritual similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Many settled down with popcorn and bizarrely, a ready supply of plastic spoons. The opening credits rolled, to general applause, and viewers began shouting out commentary or spoke the dialogue along with the actors.
The film is a labor of love. Wiseau not only directed and starred in the movie, but also produced and wrote the script for it, scrounging up $6 million for the project. Perhaps it’s the personal touch that makes the film’s incompetence so compelling.
In spite of its budget, Wiseau’s movie looks and feels remarkably cheap. It boasts only a handful of locations—characters spend an inordinate amount of time either in Johnny and Lisa’s apartment or on the roof of their building—and Wiseau relies on stock footage of San Francisco to pad the running time. None of the acting is even remotely convincing and the script’s vertiginous shifts in tone defy all logic.
A typical evening with Johnny and Lisa.
All of which was gleefully apparent to the audience in the Sunshine Cinema. It was a roomful of aficionados: Almost everyone seemed familiar with the film and the part-improvisational routine that went with it. The space in front of the screen became an ad-hoc stage for skits inspired by the film. When the first of the movie’s many sex scenes began, a young couple dressed as Johnny and Lisa rushed in front of the screen and pretended to thrust at each other. Later, a group of men tossed a football around, mocking Johnny and his friends’ endless rounds of touch football. The audience also hurled plastic spoons at the screen every time a spoon appeared onscreen (a picture of one features prominently in Johnny and Lisa’s apartment).
Popular scenes included Johnny’s visit to the florist’s, in which lines are spoken hurriedly and seemingly in the wrong order and his reaction to accusations that he hit Lisa, marred by Wiseau’s notorious line delivery.
Longtime Room fan Joe Pikowski, 24, brought his friend Jessica Bal, also 24, to the screening. Explaining its appeal, he said, “It’s the fact that the movie is trying to be good and it’s really terrible.” “Every time I watch it I find a new, terrible detail about it,” he said. Pikowski first came across the film at college in Boston and has seen it on DVD or at screenings nearly a dozen times since. “It’s so reassuring to know that people are still coming to this,” he said. He was glad that several of the in-jokes he had read about—such as audience members waving back at Wiseau when he winks onscreen—were part of the fun at the Sunshine screening.
Bal had heard of The Room but had never seen it before. “I’m also a big fan of bad movies,” she said. She believed bad films could often be more enjoyable than good ones, with terrible horror movies transformed into hilarious comedies. “It’s the earnestness when they’re trying to be serious,” Pikowski agreed.
“It’s something you can’t fully understand until you experience it, and then you’re part of the community,” he said. Come and see The Room. “And bring spoons!”
The Room is screened at midnight every first Saturday of the month at the Sunshine Cinema.
Leave a Reply