Greg Sestero, Scott Neustadtler, Michael Weber, and James Franco, 2017
#163, 2017 Skandies
Oh hi readers.
The very first thing I ever posted on the Internet, back in 1995, was a MSTing of an infamous swords-and-sorcery story called “The Eye of Argon”. The “MST” in “MSTing” stands for “Mystery Science Theater”, as in Mystery Science Theater 3000, a TV show I had become a big fan of a couple of years earlier. Each episode would showcase a wretched movie—“the worst we can find”, the theme song explained—and the hosts, silhouetted in the corner of the screen, would make jokes while the movie played: not just here and there, but, like, a dozen jokes every minute. With that joke density, even a 25% hit rate meant pretty much nonstop laughter. But I have to confess: even with the jokes, I could rarely sit through an entire episode. The movies were just that dreadful. One of the few I was able to bring myself to see through to the end was called Bride of the Monster. Again, this was only with the jokes—I could never enjoy something like this on its own. “So bad it’s good” doesn’t work for me. But with the jokes, yeah, Bride of the Monster was a good time.
In 1994, I learned that Tim Burton was making a movie called Ed Wood that was largely about the making of Bride of the Monster. I saw it on opening day, expecting that it would be a funny depiction of all the crazy stories behind the movie: that Ed Wood’s gang had stolen the giant octopus that appears at the end of the film but had neglected to steal the motor that went with it, so to make it look like it was attacking him, star Bela Lugosi was forced to flail around while holding its tentacles; that the film was so low-budget that Wood had to print the first take of every scene, even if, say, the burly Tor Johnson smacked into a doorframe while trying to go through it; that when financing dried up, the film was saved by the owner of a meat packing plant who agreed to fund the project on the condition that his son be cast as the hero and that it end with a nuclear explosion. And Ed Wood was this, but it was also more. Despite its title, the movie is just as much about Lugosi, and focuses on how Wood, despite an astounding lack of talent as a filmmaker, gave Lugosi an opportunity to write a final act to his life that, while a little sad and a little goofy, represented a heartwarming recovery from his penultimate act as a washed-up, decrepit morphine addict. The film manages to take a ludicrous speech from Bride of the Monster and give it real dramatic weight: “Now here in this forsaken jungle hell I have proven that I am all right!” has subtext far beyond the creation of a race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 stayed on TV until 1999. In 2006, the hosts of the last few seasons of the show hit upon an idea. MST3K had always been hobbled by the fact that the producers had to secure the broadcast rights to the films they wanted to use. That meant that they were limited to movies in the public domain or those that could be very cheaply licensed—the sort of things that had maybe played at a drive-in in El Paso for a week in the 1960s. But, these guys realized, if they sold audio tracks of just the jokes, and relied on the audience to sync them up with a DVD of the original movie… well, then, they could riff anything! Why do something like Gamera vs. Zigra when you could do Titanic? They called their new outfit “Rifftrax”, and it was successful enough for them to take their show on the road, doing live riffing of movies to sold-out theaters. But this put them right back at square one, needing to secure the rights to show the films. They launched a crowdfunding campaign to try to land Twilight, but even though they reached their monetary goal, they couldn’t work out a deal and had to settle for the likes of Starship Troopers and Anaconda. So rather than continue to shell out serious money for mid-list titles, they went back to traditional MST3K fare: stuff like Mothra and Plan 9 from Outer Space. But a generation had passed since the MST3K days, and monster movies from the Eisenhower administration had gone from common late-night TV fare to museum pieces. Plenty of bad movies had been made during the 21st century, and audiences proved a lot more interested in those. So the live shows started to trot them out. You had the infamous Sharknado, of course. I am personally inordinately fond of Birdemic. But the one that may have garnered the biggest buzz was something called The Room. I knew little about it before watching the Rifftrax crew give it the business, but apparently it has become the consensus “worst movie ever” of the Internet age just as Plan 9 (another Ed Wood extravaganza) was of the pre-Internet era. Like the Ed Wood movies, The Room is not just bad, but baffling. Why is the gangster called “Chris R.” instead of “Chris”? Why does Lisa’s mom reveal that she has breast cancer when there is absolutely no follow-up on this plot point? When one member of the main group of friends disappears and is replaced by someone who looks completely different and who has not appeared in the movie up to this point, why is this not explained or commented upon in any way? And—who is this long-haired goon playing the lead? Why does he slur his lines in some unplaceable accent, with intonations that sound like he’s read about human speech patterns before but hasn’t actually heard any? Why does he swing from furious to cheery in an instant, and burst out laughing (or, rather, in a wooden imitation of laughter) at a somber story of a woman being beaten and hospitalized? Why does he have a tantrum that looks like he’s trying to destroy a room using Charley Barkley’s golf swing? Why did he write this? How did he manage to get it made? In short, wtf?
The Disaster Artist is an account of the making of The Room and the events leading up to it, as originally told by the second lead actor in the film. It very clearly aims to be this generation’s Ed Wood. But it actually doesn’t have many answers to the questions above. Very little is known about Tommy Wiseau, the writer/director/star of The Room. Where’s he from? Throughout the movie he insists that he’s from New Orleans, but apparently the current theory is that the true answer is Poznań, Poland. How old is he? Throughout the movie he insists that he’s Greg’s age, which would make his birth year 1978; apparently the current theory is that the true answer is 1955. Given that making and promoting The Room cost, according to estimates of those in the know, $6 million, where did he get all that money? Apparently the current theory on that one is “?!?”. We do get plenty of crazy material about what Tommy Wiseau got up to behind the scenes: building a set to look like the alleyway across the street instead of just shooting in the alleyway; creating a private bathroom for himself consisting of a toilet on a dais surrounded by a curtain, when there was already a fully functional bathroom a few steps away; delivering one of the worst line readings in cinematic history, yet receiving cheers because it was the first time he got the words right after sixty-seven failed attempts. And of course, just as a stunt, James Franco embodying Tommy Wiseau is very impressive. The problem is, there’s no story here like Bela Lugosi’s final act to serve as the heart of the narrative. The Disaster Artist makes a limp attempt to try to spin a heartwarming ending out of the premiere of The Room: look! The “so bad it’s good” crowd had a great time! Tommy Wiseau brought joy into the world! But c’mon. Really this is little more than “two guys come to L.A. to try to get famous in the movie industry, and do so, in an unexpected way”. Selfish ambition fulfilled! Yay. And Wiseau is no hero: he’s not just a weirdo with a mysterious past, but mistreats everyone around him and seems to be fueled primarily by paranoia and grievance. After all, the plot of his movie—stripping away all the subplots that don’t go anywhere—is “great guy discovers that his girlfriend has been cheating on him with his best friend, so he puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, the end”. Pretty dubious. At least Birdemic had a powerful ecological message!
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