Magic Hours (27 page)

“I speak French,” he said. “I speak, you know, another language, and English, and I understand some other languages.” This “another language” was, no doubt, that of his native country, which I pressed him to reveal. When he refused I began throwing out former Communist bloc states. Romania? Hungary? “Wrong, actually,” he said, laughing once again. He did admit, or seem to admit, that his homeland was “a few countries,” which led me to guess he was from the former Yugoslavia. “I'm an American,” he said, “and I want to be treated as an American. Bottom line.You may say whatever you want. I think we are entitled to our privacy in America.”

America is among Wiseau's major talking points: “We are Americans,” he toldme, “andwe cherish our freedom.” Americanness is also the central, and centrally unexamined, theme of
The Room.
Wiseau cast himself within the film as a hunk of Johnny Americana, with no corresponding recognition of how absurdly ill fitting this role actually is. Whenever the film's Johnny throws a football, you do not see Johnny What you see is the ungainly shot put of an eastern European who did not grow up throwing footballs. This is the most longingly human aspect of
The Room
and, not at all coincidentally, the hardest thing to laugh at.
⁹

The two most-asked questions about Wiseau concern his age and the origin of the personal fortune he used to fund The Room. As to the first, his Wikipedia page lists his age as forty-one, though he looks as though he is in his early fifties. “I am
thirty-something,” Wiseau told me. As to the source of his money, one uncorroborated story has to do with Wiseau's vaguely sinister-sounding involvement in some sort of Asian-market clothing-import concern—Chinese jeans, possibly? According to Wiseau, his involvement in imported garments was straightforward and artisanal: ”I used to design jackets, leather jackets, a long time ago. I've been designing, selling, whatever.”

Whereas the precise truth about Wiseau's past is never going to be as interesting as the rumors (my second favorite: Wiseau is an erstwhile Serbian warlord; my favorite: Wiseau is a cyborg from the future), his evasiveness bizarrely extends into the most mundane matters, as when I asked him about whether he had made contact with any of his celebrity fans, which include Paul Rudd, David Wain, Jonah Hill, David Cross, and other members of the Hollywood humorati. Wiseau's answer: “If I say I met a big director, I'm not dropping any names—I've met everybody, for your information—so if I met, let's say, one of the big directors, who's from New York, just to give you a clue. He has a business in Santa Barbara. You see, you can assume who is the person, because there's only one.”

I had no idea who or what he was talking about. But surely, I said, there were actors, directors, or writers he drew particular inspiration from?

“Again,” he said, “I don't want to drop the names. Because you'll be blogging about it.” All I eventually wrung from Wiseau was that he admired the work of Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean, and that he had recently seen
Twilight
and was seeking investors in a vampire film he wanted to shoot in Austin, Texas. At this news, I confess, I restrained myself from writing a check payable to Wiseau-Films then and there.

The critic Robert Hughes once said, “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” I thought about this maxim more when once during my lunch with Wiseau. When he talks about his work, the explanations range from more or less normal (“
The Room
was done to provoke the audience. That's the bottom line”) to puzzling (“And you see, in entertainment, we have such a limited presentation. You have comedy, you have drama, you have melodrama, and that's about it, basically”), to incomprehensible (“You see, black comedy is related to melodrama, leans toward melodrama, but it's not melodrama. That's the difference. So it's realism, if you really think about it. Melodrama is not real”), but they are always Jesuitically certain. I tried, several times, to formulate a humane way of asking Wiseau how he felt to be locked out of all artistic time and space, but he could not answer because he, of course, fails to see it that way. The things I wanted to know about
The Room
could never be addressed by Wiseau, the Intentional Fallacy made flesh.
The Room
, as a work of art, must remain a mystery—at least to its creator, who not only views
The Room
as mainstream entertainment but himself as a potential diamond mine for future mainstream entertainment, constantly letting it be known that he is “open for any projects.”
¹⁰

Wiseau, who by his own admission is as demanding and finicky as Samuel Beckett, told me in one breath that he is prone to firing anyone who deviates from his vision (“I deal with it in a very simple way. I say, ‘You see the door there? Go through the door and don't come back”'), and in the next said, “If the studio decided to hire me, for example, I will say, ‘Sure, tell me what to do. I'm ready.'” When I said I imagined he would have a hard
time working within traditional studio confinements, Wiseau disagreed. “I can make millions,” he said. This hard-nosed and eccentric control freak is also a craven sellout. The contradictory tension between these selves would surely drive mad anyone who was aware of them. I believe that Wiseau could make a studio film. Or at least I believe that he believes he could, and I am probably not alone among Wiseau's fans when I say would happily watch anything he commits to film—other than that.

When I asked Wiseau about his fan base, he said, “Talking to the fans is fun. I'm thrilled by it. I really enjoy it.” Hundreds if not thousands of people around the country have worked to get
The Room
into theaters and promote it on their own time. Did Wiseau have intense feelings of gratitude and connection to those people? “Oh, yeah,” he said, leaning back. “Absolutely” He mulled over this for a moment. “That's a pretty interesting statement, what you're saying right now. That's correct. People want to be involved with promoting
The Room,
for some reason. For nothing, basically.”

“And that's weird,” I said. “Isn't it?”

“It is, but I'm very happy with that.”

As to the discordant matter of negative reviews, Wiseau attributed all such reactions to
The Room
to “tripping” critics and reporters, none of whom “understand that, by design, any movie has to entertain people.... They think they hurt me because they say something negative. No, they hurt themselves because they're not true to the audience.” For the first time during our talk, Wiseau became agitated. “This is what I'm furious about,” he said. “The people writing, they don't know anything about acting. They don't understand the concept that entertainment is something that you take from yourself and give to people, and let people decide what they want to do. And there's nothing wrong when people say, ‘Oh, yeah, I don't like your movie, but I like this little shot.' Or, ‘Oh, you
have a heavy accent.' But you have people who actually go the extra mile and say, ‘I hate it.”' He shook his head. “Why do you write about it if you hate something? Why spend so much time? Because you're not honest with yourself. Because, no, you're not hating. It's because I, as a director, opened certain doors for you, and you don't want to be there.
That's
why.”

Wiseau's contention that his critics do not want to be in the room to which
The Room
leads is correct, but, in a perfectly Wiseauian move, correct for reasons he does not and probably cannot recognize. We are all of us deeply alarmed by the Wiseauian parts of ourselves, the parts of us that are selfish and controlling, that crave attention at any cost, that imagine ourselves as superlatively gifted, that arrange all sources of light—whether literal or metaphysical—to be flattering. To watch
The Room
is to see that part of ourselves turned mesmerizingly loose. During lunch, he was heroically without shame as he described his plans to turn
The Room
into a Broadway show (“It will be musical. People say it's comedy, but I don't care what they want to say”), a cartoon (“based on the same characters—however, they will be approached for kids”), and a video game (“You can be Johnny, you can be Lisa, you can do whatever you want to do... like play football, for example”). He then startled me by saying, “My idea has always been that I want ninety percent of Americans to see
The Room.
That's the idea I have.”

I looked at him. “Ninety percent?” I asked, if only to make sure he did not say “nine percent.”

“Ninety percent. Absolutely.”

At this I all but laughed in his face. “Good luck.”

“Because ten percent, you see, it's the kids, and it's R-rated, and they're not supposed to see it.”

“You want every adult to see it?”

“I think so, yes. That's the goal.”

“I don't think everyone has even seen
Snow White
.”

“I'm not concerned with other movies. I'm concerned only about
The Room
at this time. If that's your analogy, that's fine with me. But yes, absolutely, we will eventually beat
Snow White.”

“Bigger than
Snow White
!”

He grew preposterously thoughtful. “It's not a question of bigger. Every American should see
The Room
.”

“You realize,” I said, “how ridiculous that sounds.”

“No,” he said, “it's not at all.”

 

 

A month after our meeting, I attended a midnight Halloween screening of
The Room
in Los Angeles, to which Wiseau showed up in a state of inebriation somewhere between Richard Yates Drunk and Keith Richards Stoned. He delivered an impenetrable speech to the several hundred people waiting in line, attempted to return to the safe confines of the Laemmle's Sunset 5, found that he had been locked out, made the best of it, threw off his jacket, and proceeded to play football with a few audience members. At one point he launched an impressively long bomb that hit a young woman in the face. (Several of her friends assured her that this was, in its way, an honor.) During the pre-screening Q&A, he seemed particularly angry and defensive about a recent
Los Angeles Times
profile of him, and lashed out at one audience member who asked him to recite one of Shakespeare's sonnets, which Wiseau has previously been happy to do. He abruptly ended the Q&A when he was asked for his views on health care reform. The whole ordeal was so crushingly sad that during the screening I barely laughed. At one point in the film, Johnny is sitting on the edge of his bed after Lisa has announced her intention to leave him. When Johnny says, in a childlike falsetto, “I haven't got a friend in the world,” I confess to having felt a pre-lachrymal tickle in the back of my throat.

Whether Tommy Wiseau is evolved or stupid, brave or blind, his work makes me and thousands of others feel catastrophically alive. Whatever he tried to do, he clearly failed, and whatever he succeeded in doing has no obvious name. (Sincere surrealism? Sincerealism?) But
The Room
's last remaining ritual of audience participation might be for everyone to imagine seeing one's most deeply personal attempt at self-expression razed by a hurricane of laughter. Most of us, I think, would fare more poorly than Wiseau. That night in Los Angeles, he was as famous and well loved as he has ever been and nevertheless seemed like an unfortunate cultic animal we had all come together to stab at the stroke of midnight. We were laughing because we were not him, and because we were.

 

—2010

Chuck Lorre and the American Sitcom

 

S
oundstage 24 on the Warner Bros. lot, in Burbank, California, is a sand-colored, pyramid-like hangar identical to the many stages that surround it, as though the pharaohs had developed an air force. Some time ago, Stage 24 was designated the “
Friends
Stage” in honor of the decade-long residency by Rachel, Phoebe, Joey Chandler, Monica, and Ross, and their improbable Manhattan apartments. According to an engraved plaque near one of the entrances,
Blade Runner
was filmed there too, in 1981. So was the ABC sitcom
Full House,
which ran from 1987 to 1995. The ghosts of actors, directors, and audiences past linger in these curious structures, and, when a new show is assigned its stage, cast, crew, and visitors alike can sense them.

One afternoon in mid-August, the latest production to occupy the
Friends
Stage—
Mike and Molly,
a new CBS sitcom created by Mark Roberts and executive produced by Chuck Lorre—was having a network run-through. This is a weekly rehearsal
attended by various studio and network executives and representatives from CBS's Standards and Practices department, and it takes place relatively early in the production process. The show's cast members were still carrying their scripts, which they had first seen three days earlier. The actors would finish a scene, hustle to the next set, finish a scene, hustle to the next set, all while being trailed by various supporting camera haulers and cable draggers. It looked a bit like speed-dating, but with a pit crew.