Some people remember where exactly where they were when the Berlin Wall came down, or when Joe Carter took Mitch Williams deep to left field. I myself will never forget sitting slack-jawed with my girlfriend at a friend’s house in 2007, watching that rarest of things unfold on their little flat screen: a film that actually lived up to the hype.

Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 feature debut The Room has been advertised as a riotous black comedy, but it’s actually a piece of accidental Surrealism — the sort of movie David Lynch might make if only he would ever really let himself go. This tale of lust and betrayal in San Francisco feels unbound by conventional rules of cinematic grammar, or, for that matter, the laws of time and space: characters enter and exit rooms (including the titular chamber) without warning, days and locations melt into one another and the music often seems to think it’s accompanying another movie entirely.

And yet the action is riveting. Who could be unmoved when writer-director-producer-star Wiseau, playing the film’s put-upon Everyman protagonist Johnny, contorts his Die Hard–henchman visage into a kabuki mask of agony before informing his girlfriend Lisa (Juliette Danielle) that her head games are tearing him apart?

With no shortage of comparably classic moments to choose from — the rooftop standoff between Johnny and the badass drug dealer “Chris R”;  the revelation that Lisa’s mother is dying of breast cancer; the interludes where Johnny and the gang toss a football at comically close proximity — I’ll cast my lot for the doggie. Long before learning that Lisa is having an affair with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero), Johnny stops on his way home from work to buy her some flowers; after exchanging oddly rushed pleasantries with the store owner, he turns to bid a rushed but cheerful hello to her bulldog, who is sitting on the counter. I don’t know whether it was the discrepancy between the actor’s trench-coated menace and his sing-song delivery, the turbo-charged pace of the dialogue or the sheer awfulness of the dubbing, but upon Wiseau’s delivery of the line “oh hi, doggie,” I simply lost my shit. The Room had claimed a part of my soul.



A “you-had-to-be-there” moment, perhaps, but this Friday, you can be there — at The Royal, at 11:30pm, for the film’s official Toronto premiere. (Additional screenings are scheduled for Aug. 21 and Sept. 25.) The late-night slots are meant to evoke the midnight screenings in Los Angeles that helped to turn an anonymous, self-financed flop into a bona fide cult phenomenon.

YouTube is littered with clips depicting delirious audiences talking back to the screen — and to Wiseau, whose energetic participation at post-film Q&As is the stuff of legend. At this point, the word is that the director will fly to Toronto for a subsequent showing at The Royal. “I’m satisfied that The Room will be showing in Canada to brand-new audiences,” writes Wiseau in an email exchange before our phone interview. “The Room is for everyone to see and everyone should see The Room at least three or more times to have fun with it. For me it doesn’t matter what people think about it, as long as they enjoy themselves.”

Wiseau apparently types like he talks, and he talks mostly like he does in The Room — with the thick accent, odd cadences and imperfect grammar of a non-native English speaker (although he does claim fluency in three languages). Verbal infelicities be damned, Wiseau has done a lot of interviews about The Room, and it shows — over the course of our chat, he makes a number of assertions already familiar to die-hards. He says that everything we see onscreen is by design, including the establishing shots of locations that don’t figure into the plot; that he hasn’t gotten credit for being the first filmmaker to shoot a feature film simultaneously on 35mm and high-definition video (the making-of featurette on the DVD confirms that this was, in fact, his M.O.) and, most importantly, that he doesn’t mind people thinking that his film is bad. “People should feel free to laugh, cry and express themselves,” he says. “Just as long as they don’t hurt each other.”

Like Scientology or any other cult, Room fandom has different levels. It’s not uncommon for first-timers to try to deflate the giddy tenor of communal screenings by suggesting that the film’s bottomless badness isn’t on the level, that it’s all some kind of post-modern stunt. That’s an understandable suspicion in the age of Sacha Baron Cohen (who would probably do a mean Wiseau), but multiple viewings confirm that for all of its aesthetic, narrative and technical deficiencies, The Room has an abundance of one thing: sincerity. The same can be said of its creator. “Don’t be afraid to ask questions,” says Wiseau sweetly. “I don’t mind when people write negative stuff, as long as the truth comes out.”

Wiseau’s relationship to his celebrity is quite unique. Imagine if Ed Wood had been getting emails and checking out message boards after the premiere of Plan 9 From Outer Space and you get some idea of his unusual position. He says that he’s not tired of talking about The Room — “I could talk about it for 10 years, and I think you could write three books about it.”

He’s aware of his celebrity fan club, which includes noted wisenheimers like Paul Rudd and David Cross, but isn’t necessarily interested in currying their favour: “All fans of The Room are equal.” He will admit to being frustrated when he reads what he calls “factually incorrect things” about the film and about himself. When I ask him if these misconceptions might be related to his secrecy about his past — i.e., where he was born, how he got to the US, and how a first-time filmmaker managed to scrape together $6 million (!) for his debut — he goes uncharacteristically silent.  



He’s much happier to discuss The Room’s allegedly intentional symbolism, like a close-up of a television smashing against the ground during Johnny’s climactic, emotionally charged rampage. “It’s like the smashing of the television is a symbol of the end of civilization,” Wiseau says matter-of-factly, before asking a question of his own. “Did you ever hear about how in New York, the kids used to drop televisions down elevator shafts, just to have fun?”

Well no, I hadn’t, but please, go on. After inventorying the pleasures of hanging out on rooftops (“…people play games on the roof. You can do a lot on the roof if you think about it…”), and the dangers of park closures in the United States (“young people don’t have a place to express themselves”), he mentions that he’s working on a vampire movie that should put his craggy Eastern European countenance to good use. “I will not tell you the title,” he says. “But I can tell you that you will not sleep for weeks.”

It’s doubtful that Wiseau could do any more to keep people up nights than he already has. As the flagship movie of the ironic-viewing epoch inaugurated by Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Room should remain a dorm- room staple for years to come. And maybe a classroom staple, too:  this year, the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies colloquium included a paper entitled “Oh Hi Movie!: The Limits of Authorial Possession and the Aesthetics of So Bad It’s Good in The Room,” which fruitfully analyzed the film through the lens of camp theory.

Wiseau may not be prepared to talk about the politics of spectatorship, but he is willing — if pressed — to consider his place in film history. “I don’t really want to say the titles, but I like a lot of movies,” he says. “I like the work of James Dean, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Those movies really connect people, they can really offer them something. That’s what The Room is. I don’t know if we will still be talking about The Room in 10 years, but it may survive.” How long is he thinking? “Maybe for 20 years, maybe 40. I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

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BEST WORST MOVIES
Tommy Wiseau’s anti-masterpiece may be the “so-bad-it’s-good” marvel du jour, but The Room is far from the first unintentional comedy to score cult fandom and midnight movie adulation. Some of the crapsterpieces that paved the way… WILL SLOAN

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
Poor Edward D. Wood, Jr. may not have been “the worst director of all time” (as he was labelled in the book The Golden Turkey Awards), but he was a hack auteur if there ever was one. Plan 9, his magnum opus, combined tacky glamour (Bela Lugosi! Lyle Talbot! The Amazing Criswell!) with a surreal low-budget ambience, heavy-handed speechifying and cheesy special effects for the ultimate Woodian cocktail.

MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (1966)
Texas fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren shot this satanic thriller for $19,000 with a camera that could shoot only 32 seconds at a time and dubbed many of the voices himself. Poorly made but hauntingly austere, it feels like a demonic second cousin of the Antonioni universe. The movie later became a favourite target of the snarky robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

TROLL 2 (1990)
Little people in burlap sacks and latex stalk the unsuspecting residents of “Nilbog” (spell it backwards) in this notorious in-name-only sequel that doesn’t actually feature any trolls. Child actor Michael Stephenson chronicled Troll 2’s unlikely cult popularity in this year’s Hot Docs favourite Best Worst Movie.


SHOWGIRLS (1995)
Lines like “It must be weird not having anybody cum on you” and “I’m erect — why aren’t you erect?” made director Paul Verhoeven and writer Joe Eszterhas’ over-the-top stripper melodrama a midnight hit. Not to be outdone, MGM packed its “V.I.P. Edition” DVD with sardonic extras like shot glasses, drinking games and a lap-dance tutorial hosted by real strippers.

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