What's the worst movie ever and why do people insist on watching it over and over?
Tommy Wiseau's cult hit is a bad movie. It's also an incredible study in mythmaking.
The Room: how the worst movie ever became a Hollywood legend as bizarre as its creator
The Room may not actually be the worst movie ever made, but it almost certainly holds the distinction for weirdest film trajectory: nearly 18 years from premiere to national release. That’s right, The Room is finally about to open, for one day only, in 600 theatres nationwide. The January 10 showing is the latest ironic twist in the journey of a cult film like none other, and the culmination of its creator’s long quest for fame and Hollywood’s respect.
For more than five years during the mid-2000s, an incongruous billboard loomed over Highland Avenue in West Hollywood. It was a mostly black-and-white movie ad, and its only prominent features were the name of its subject, a website, and a phone number to “RSVP” for a showing at one of the film’s only two release locations. Most striking of all was the billboard’s sole photo, a mug-shot-like headshot of a man with a morose scowl and a widow’s peak.
The lack of context surrounding the ominous photo made the ad difficult to parse. Was The Room a noir crime thriller? A gothic horror? A scam ad for a bail bondsman or perhaps a vampire cult LARP?
The Room was, in a way, all of this and much more.
The man in the now-infamous billboard headshot is Tommy Wiseau, The Room’s writer, producer, director, star, and savant. Although The Room played for only two weeks in the summer of 2003, reportedly grossing a mere $1,900 in just two theatres, Wiseau continued to spend a reported $5,000 a week to bankroll the Highland billboard. This odd and exorbitant expense was one of many examples of apparent wastefulness that would come to fascinate fans of The Room, and help earn Wiseau a reputation as “the Orson Welles of crap.”
But amid all the nonsense associated with The Room — its inexplicable $6 million production budget; its awkward, endless sex scenes and vanishing subplots and characters; its incoherent dialogue slurred by Wiseau’s thick, nebulously European accent — the everlasting billboard may have in fact evinced stealth marketing savvy. For by the time the billboard finally came down in 2008, a true Hollywood miracle had occurred: The Room had become a major cult hit.
After failing to secure a wide release after its premiere, The Room became a word-of-mouth fascination around Hollywood, as celebrities like Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, and Kristen Bell came to its lone monthly midnight showing, organized private viewings, and passed around stories of its mythical filming conditions. The secret of The Room spread until it was a cult phenomenon. Today it has spawned seemingly endless viewings at midnight showings around the world, where fans quote the film’s garbled script by heart, hurl spoons at the screen, and treat Wiseau and the film’s other cast members like celebrities.
From its early days, The Room has hypnotized viewers. Now, with the release of The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s new film about the making of The Room, Wiseau’s creation has finally crossed dimensions and garnered legitimate Hollywood success.
Franco’s The Disaster Artist is an adaptation of the 2013 book of the same name, which Wiseau’s best friend and co-star Greg Sestero co-wrote with journalist Tom Bissell about his relationship with Wiseau and the filming of The Room. The book is a hilarious recounting of true cult success, as well as a poignant examination of the myth of Hollywood fame and its impact on the lost souls who seek it. It’s not exactly what you’d expect as the outcome of The Room — a film that never actually explains what “the room” is.
If all this leaves you wondering why? how? and what’s that about spoons? you’re not alone. And that confusion is the very heart of the matter: Had The Room not come packaged with so much internal befuddlement, a legendarily strange production experience, and a mysterious man at its centre, it would have been destined for obscurity. Here’s how it avoided that fate and turned “Oh, hi, Mark” into a catchphrase for the ages.
What is the room movie about?
Johnny is a successful banker who lives happily in a San Francisco townhouse with his fiancée, Lisa. One day, inexplicably, she gets bored of/with him and decides to seduce Johnny's best friend, Mark. From there, nothing will be the same again.
Why do people keep watching it?
The above video from Vox takes the uninitiated into the phenomenon of this piece of “paracinema”--any film that lies outside the mainstream--and tries to explain why The Room is so beloved while so many other bad films disappear into the ether. One reason is its campy nature, though never knowingly so--Wiseau thought he was making something great. And because it’s so hard to find somebody so driven, yet so unaware of the basics of acting, storytelling, and moviemaking, The Room stands out compared to other films that try to be intentionally bad. You just can't fake that kind of thing. The other reason is what critic Pierre Bourdieu would call cultural capital. That’s the shared joy between fans, and the importance placed on dressing up like the characters, going to midnight screenings, and seeing who knows the most lines.
