Mike Scalise – Press Play Video Blog

Gregarious and Kind, Dark and Mysterious: Greg Sestero on THE ROOM

There’s no
way to talk about The Room without talking
about irony. The theater 2003 release of the movie —funded mysteriously by its
writer/director/self-proclaimed vampire Tommy Wiseau—failed to outlast the
Hollywood billboard Wiseau purchased to advertise it. Given that The Room was considered cinematic
anti-matter, a piece of cinema so illogically conceived that Scott Foundas of Variety said it “prompts most of its viewers to ask for their
money back…before even 30 minutes have passed,” that was no surprise. What was a surprise was how The
Room rediscovered life in the late aughts as a new-millennium Rocky Horror. Prime ironists like David
Wain, David Cross and Patton Oswalt saluted the splendor
of its awfulness. Theaters began holding raucous midnight showings
packed with scene-quoting devotees who threw platsic silverware at the screen
and chanted its creators name wildly throughout the credits, proving that the
nation’s complex relationship to irony was—almost a decade after its proclaimed
cutural death—a pretty resilient thing.

Which makes
it all the more remarkable that The
Disaster Artist, cast member Greg Sestero’s memoir about his experience
making The Room and living with its
aftermath, is a work of shocking sincerity. Written with an assist from
journalist/Room enthusiast Tom Bissell,
Sestero’s smart, wicked, yet (somehow) moving book proves sneakily ambitious. Yes,
it chronicles the making of the worst movie ever, and how Sestero was
reluctantly cast as Mark, the traitorous best friend of the film’s hero. But it’s
also a tale of Sestero’s peculiar, enduring friendship with Wiseau, a ruthless
tell-all, a fluid critique on the nature of mass enthusiasm, and a work of
invesitigative journalism, positing what might be the closest anyone’s gotten
to the slippery origins of The Room’s
creator.

I talked
with Sestero about the making of “the making of The Room,” the legacy of irony, what he (and the film) owes to
Anthony Minghella, and how he forced himself to say one
of the worst lines of dialogue in cinema history.

Mike Scalise: You mentioned you’d been working on The Disaster Artist for four years. What
made you stick with it?

Greg Sestero: I really
felt strongly about the material. The stories about my experience were etched
in my memory. I told them to several people over the years, and they thought it
was such a unique and fascinating story. Then, in 2008, I got a call from Clark
Collis at Entertainment Weekly, who
had just experienced the movie and wanted to write an article about it. Once that article
ran in late 2008, The Room completely
took off. Needless to say, I was shocked. So I started to piece together how I wanted
to tell my story. I met Tom Bissell, who
wrote an incredible piece about the movie in Harper’s around that time, and we instantly clicked. We
came up with a narrative to tell about both the making of The Room and my unlikely friendship with Tommy.

MS: Part of your goal seemed to be to
clear the air about the nature of your involvement with The Room, and how important your previous friendship with Tommy
[Wiseau] was to that movie’s existence.

GS: The only
reason I ever ended up in the movie was to help him make it. Obviously when
you’re in your early twenties, you don’t think about your decisions and their
long term effects [laughs]. I decided
to take an acting class in San Francisco and ended up meeting this eccentric person
no one really gave a chance to, mostly because of his vampirish exterior and his
awkward social skills. But maybe because of both of us coming from a European
background, I could see something was interesting there. I’ve always been
fascinated by characters, and part of me wanted to help him at least accomplish
something he’d always wanted to do. But then there were times on set where he
would sabotage everything, yelling at people who were trying to help him
finally realize this goal of being a “movie star” or make this movie he’s
always wanted.

That’s part
of what got me through, I think: helping him complete this passion project. A
lot of the movie is about friendship, which is kind of weird [laughs]. In the
original script, everybody’s best friends. Michelle and Lisa are best friends,
Peter and Johnny are best friends. Its really kind of a fascinating study about
the life Tommy wanted to have.

MS: In the book you don’t shy away from
the many ways in which The Room was a
complete mess, from the script to the casting, filming, and editing. Those are
the funniest parts of the book, but you still remain so generous with regards
to your depiction of Tommy. How difficult was it to maintain that balance when
you wrote it?

GS: I know that
many of the book’s readers will have never seen the movie. So the only way to
do it was to be genuine and say, “this is really how it was” rather than
judging it. And to honor both sides of Tommy. The gregarious and kind coupled
with the dark and mysterious.

MS: Which is an acting credo as
well—don’t judge your character.

GS: I felt like
if I glamorized it, or protected it, or made it something that it wasn’t, that
wouldn’t be the right experience for people dying to find out what really
happened and people who are following the story.

MS: Like in that insane scene in the
book in which Tommy forced the cast to be silent for five straight minutes
(“for America”) while prepping for a day of shooting…

GS: Tommy’s
always got to do everything to the extreme—not ten seconds of silence, but five
minutes. Let’s not shoot with one camera, let’s shoot with two.

MS: Did you earn any sympathy for Tommy
when you tried with the book to add order to all the chaos?

GS: Absolutely.
I realized how hard it is to get something off the ground, and to get someone
to believe in what you’re trying to do, and for you, yourself, to take that
vision of what you want and make something that resembles it.

MS: I get two kinds of responses when I
bring up The Room: one is from the
type who I imagine shows up to the screenings, who see something valuable in
it, ironic or not. But there’s also the kind of person that responds to the
idea of The Room as a vanity
project—that Tommy’s an unchecked narcissist, out just to self-promote. But the
book makes the case that The Room
came from a far more complicated place.

GS: It
definitely does. Tommy had several motivations. One, I think, was to feel
understood. To feel accepted. No one was wiling to hire Tommy as an actor, so
he figured, “I will do it myself.” It
was therapeutic for him to explore the ways in which he didn’t fit in, or to
explore aspects of human nature that he had a vendetta towards. We’ve all had
someone break our hearts, or have been fired from a job, or have been cheated.
For him, I think it was a way to show everyone he was mainstream.

One review called
it a vanity project gone horribly wrong, and there definitely is some truth in
that. But I think he made it with sincerity, and that’s what people respond to.
Watching someone really put himself out
there, even if it’s an inept attempt.

MS: And as you detail in the book, Tommy
went to a really dark place during
the months he was writing it.

GS: I think in
some ways, he was trying to survive himself, tearing apart his psyche in a way
that he couldn’t even see. I don’t think it was to get fame, or girls, he was
just coming out of this dark place, and needed to feel accepted.

MS: You start each chapter with an
epilogue from either Billy Wilder’s Sunset
Boulevard, or Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. What do you think those films to say to
the experience of filming The Room,
watching The Room, watching people
watch The Room…

GS: Both films
deal with not only delusion, but—like I said—wanting to be accepted. Norma
Desmond sees herself as someone meant to be a star, and Joe Gillis’ tries to
guide her, and protect that delusion. Poor guy. So much of that movie paired up
with The Room in strange ways, all
the way down to where The Room premiered, which was at Schwab’s Pharmacy, where
Joe Gillis goes to get work.

With Tom Ripley,
again, it’s a character who wants to feel like he’s respected and important.
And he sees in Dickie Greenleaf a guy who he thinks has all that and pursues a
friendship. Tommy, I think, saw me as this all-American kid who made him feel
like he belonged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrVWz-u66mw

MS: You talked a bit about how you
wanted to bring The Room to a new
audience, but you also debunk many of the myths that persist among the film’s
rabid, midnight-screening-attending, spoon-carrying fanbase.

GS: One of the
things I did was consult with some of the biggest Room fans out there to make sure they were getting what they
wanted. My goal was to give them correct information and make the movie a
deeper, richer experience. Those people are the original fans, and have seen
the movie so many times, so I took their feedback.

MS: I think they’ll be happy with the
long, anguished passages that depict the inner struggle you endured in order to
say the line “leave your stupid comments in your pocket.”

GS: That was a
definite challenge to say that line with a serious face. When people watch this
movie, they probably see a bunch of young actors who thought this movie would
be their big break. That’s obviously not the case, but I I’ve done the same
thing with certain movies. You wonder what actors were thinking when they had
to say certain lines in a movie. They
almost become a figment of your imagination. If you remember this movie called Private Resort, which came out in 1985. .
.

MS: Oh, I remember Private Resort.

GS: I’d watch
it as a kid and make fun of the characters, and they weren’t real to me: just
these people on screen. Obviously with The
Room, I wasn’t on set thinking “I’m going to be Daniel Day Lewis” playing
Mark, but explaining how I even got involved in the movie shows how we all get
stuck in situations as actors—and this one ended up being one of the craziest.
Working on this movie, saying that dialogue, you’re almost surviving rather than acting. Saying that line—you just had to “get
it out” rather than “say it right.”

MS: Despite the quality of the end
product, through your involvement with The
Room you’ve actually gotten many opportunities to try your had at a ton of
different roles. You were a model before you were an actor. You acted in The
Room, but you were also a crew member. Now you’re an author. What do you want
to focus on next?

GS: In the end,
I’m grateful for the experience. I’m looking forward to going in a different
direction and do creative projects I believe in and am passionate about.

Mike Scalise’s essays and
articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, The Paris Review, PopMatters, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter here.

Some Like It Dead: What WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S Owes to Billy Wilder

Procrastination
can bring you to surprising places. Recently, I made the decision to leave
a stack of papers ungraded and watch Weekend
at Bernie’s, because . . . why not. I’d already gone through a string of Iron Chef repeats, some Ninja Warrior, and the back half of the
astounding, horrendous We Bought a Zoo.
Bernie’s, I thought, was the natural
next step—a movie notorious for its badness, something that would remind me I had
far more important things to do. But what I saw as I watched Bernie’s blindsided me—the kindred soul of a much older, much
more respected film.

What I
saw in Bernie’s was Some Like It Hot.

I hadn’t seen Weekend at Bernie’s since its release in 1989. I was eleven then,
and in the decades since, I’d managed to retain nothing about the movie beyond
its crass, high concept: Richard and Larry, two broke, young accountants for a
Manhattan insurance firm (played by Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy),
find evidence of millions of dollars in corporate theft. But their high-rolling
boss, Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser), is the actual thief; in the guise of a
congratulatory gesture, he invites Richard and Larry for a weekend at his
Hamptons home, then arranges for a mafia hit man to meet them there first. But
But the mafia don pulls a switcheroo, Lomax gets whacked instead, and when Richard and Larry arrive to find his
body slumped in a chair, they do what any movie worth its weight in farce
would: they use Lomax’s corpse as an all-access pass to infiltrate a world far
beyond their means. Perhaps because in 1989, we weren’t ready for a buddy
comedy built entirely around necro-play, Bernie’s
opened poorly at the box office. It was panned by critics.

Yet, somewhat like the body at the core
of the film, Bernie’s has somehow
stayed alive in our cultural memory. As with the Police Academy films, Summer
School, or Just One of the Guys, Bernie’s has become a kind of
apologetic, cultural shorthand for a time when our tastes veered toward the
horribly inexplicable. But people seem drawn back to Bernie’s more than any
other schlocky comedy of that era, especially in recent years. In 2011 a
Colorado news team cited Bernie’s to
describe a real
crime in which two Denver guys found their buddy dead, then “took his body — and his credit card — out for a night
of diners, bar hopping, burritos and a strip club.” There are two
Facebook campaigns and an online petition to jumpstart another sequel (Bernie’s 2 hit theaters in 1992), and at
least one t-shirt dedicated to the same cause (as of this writing, a
total of 948 people have “liked” this idea). Just weeks ago Bill Maher lit
into the ancient members of Congress by calling it a “Weekend at Bernie’s government.”

Something about Bernie’s sticks with us. But what?

Weekend at Bernie’s 3: Dead Wrong – watch more funny videos

For twenty-four years, I thought
it was its ironic value, and when it came on that night I expected to be
transported to a time when I was far too young to understand what “good” comedy
was. But it was too late. Perhaps I’d taken too many “film as literature”
classes in undergrad, or streamed my way through too much of the Criterion
collection, but now all I saw when I looked at Bernie’s were the sensibilities, timing, and even shot makeup of
Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic.

For one, Bernie’s pickpockets the Some
Like It Hot’s plot, wholesale: unlucky,
prohibition-era musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon), witness
a New York mob hit, then hide out by posing as women in an all-girl
band—fronted by Marilyn Monroe—at a Florida resort stuffed with millionaires,
and when one falls for Jerry’s lady version, “Daphne,” things get interesting. Down-and-out
buddy trope? Check. Mafia-related danger? Check. Taboo as a dramatic hook?
Absolutely. But reputation-wise, Some
Like It Hot bests Bernie’s on all
fronts. Currently atop AFI’s list of greatest American comedies, any mention of
the film conjures Wilder’s golden catalogue (Sunset Boulevard, Double
Indemnity, The Apartment, etc.)
and talk of its revolutionary
take on gender roles. It’s been called the “Great American Comedy,” while the most Bernie’s
could muster was a “heavy-handed spoof of social life in the Hamptons” that’s
“as sophisticated as a ‘National Lampoon’ romp.” But reviewers of Bernie’s seemed too hung up on the dead
guy, writing it off as a retread of Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry or Blake Edwards’ S.O.B. What critics missed was how well Bernie’s harmonizes with Some
Like It Hot in tone, sensibility, and in the interesting (and maybe even
sophisticated) things it has to say about privilege, wealth, and what it means
to move within those worlds without possessing either.

From the
early club scenes to Joe and Jerry’s arrival at the resort, Wilder layers the
world of Some Like It Hot with dark excess:
rum-running in hearses, police raids, Vassar girls on the hunt for sugar
daddies (Monroe’s character is actually
named Sugar Kane), and Wilder puts his heroes on the outside looking in, where
they become their most dangerous. Bernie’s
director Ted Kotcheff (of Fun With Dick
& Jane and, oddly enough, First
Blood fame) updates that world to the boom-time eighties with just as much
ingenuity. Bernie’s opens with a
montage of sweltering Manhattan—soundtracked with an eighties-tastic Jermaine
Stewart cut, the chorus of which repeats “some like it
hot”— as stodgy Richard and proto-slacker Larry schlep to the office
on a Saturday to number-crunch for Lomax, a stand-in for the sharks and
soulless moneymakers of the Reagan/Bush I era. While both films traffic in
deception, in Bernie’s it begins way
before Lomax is killed, and the deception here is less for the sake of survival
than for that of social preservation. In an early scene, Richard’s first date
with the new company intern, Gwen, goes south once she realizes Richard’s been
lying all night about being the heir to a fortune. When the two meet again that
weekend, in the Hamptons, Richard launches a quest to convince Gwen he’s
trustworthy enough to sleep with—all while passing off a dead guy as alive.

And it’s once both
films reach their moneyed destinations that Kotcheff works his hardest to keep
up with Wilder’s tone and aesthetic, from the pacing to the look. From getaways
to seduction scenes, boats and waterways play huge roles in each film, and
Kotcheff, along with his cinematographer, François Protat, frame Larry’s and
Richard’s Hampton arrival shots to match the way we see Joe and Jerry arrive as
“Josephine” and “Daphne” in Florida: docks, expansive skies, sand leading to
mansions. And both films waste zero time establishing the natives of these
lands as, at best, absolute idiots. Within seconds of Joe and Jerry’s arrival
in Florida, Some Like It Hot gives us a meet-cute between Lemmon’s
Daphne and rich bachelor Osgood Fielding III that results in an improbable
(and, it must be said, date-rape-ish) bout of elevator grab-ass. In Bernie’s
we get it moments after Richard and Larry grasp their predicament, when the
house is invaded by the now-dead Lomax’s hangers-on, all zombified versions of
rich archetypes and clichés far too self-involved to realize they’re
humble-bragging to a corpse. “He’s dead,” Richard says to a half-in-the-bag
partygoer. “That’s the idea, isn’t it?” he replies.

Wilder seems more
interested, as his film goes on, in making Monroe the butt of his film’s jokes,
particularly the plotline in which Joe/Josephine tricks Monroe’s Sugar into
sleeping with him by disguising himself, yet again, this time as the heir to
the Shell oil fortune. But in Bernie’s, the wealthy remain Kotcheff’s
mark, even as the joke goes increasingly stale. Every scene with Lomax in
public is an indictment of him and his kind, as when his body is met on the
beach with big hellos from oblivious Hamptonites, or when, in the film’s most
bizarrely sterile scene, Lomax actually gets laid. Even Gwen, ever burned by
Richard’s cover-ups and lies, refuses to acknowledge Lomax is dead until an
exasperated Larry drags his corpse to her feet.

Both films make a
case that to move in wealthy circles is to engage in a certain kind of
self-deception, but each film is only as rich as its choice of taboo, and it’s
here that Kotcheff’s effort gets a bit exposed. Wilder’s
taboo—homosexuality—allowed him to crack open what could have been a
boilerplate crime caper, then push it into thrilling territory that muddles the
way we think about love, money, redemption, and self, leading to one of the
most memorable endings in American film history. And Bernie’s? Bernie’s
has a dead guy at its heart, which presents about as much opportunity for
narrative growth as you’d imagine. The hardest part of re-watching the movie
after so long, after noticing its potential, was how it devolved in its final
act into easy dead-guy jokes. Dead guy falls off a boat. Dead guy as a life
raft. Dead guy as deus ex machina. I could almost feel Kotcheff realizing
the limits of his ambition for Bernie’s, then, like his protagonists,
deciding to get the most he can out of the conceit and exit the movie as cleanly as
possible.

But maybe the most
important quality of Bernie’s—and why it’s stuck with us so long—is its
inhabiting of the spirit of Some Like It Hot, which presented a
controversial but universal concept to an audience in a digestible,
non-threatening way. Some Like It Hot was revolutionary because it
was a movie about coming out that skirted all the murky—and in that era,
legal–complications. Bernie’s performs a similar trick, only with
something as bleak as death, which might be the key to why we still carry
affection for it. Weekend at Bernie’s was
released three years after children my age had huddled excitedly around a TV,
only to see the Space Shuttle Challenger explode, violently, in midair. It came
out two years after news channels broadcast footage of a press conference in
which Pennsylvania State Senator Budd Dwyer removed a revolver from a manila
envelope and shot himself through the mouth. It’s not hard to see how that
generation might harbor a soft spot for a movie that starred a corpse, yet
wasn’t about death at all. Instead, Weekend at Bernie’s becomes about
two young people who confront death and, for at least a weekend, find new,
crude ways in which to defy it—which, when you think about it, isn’t the
worst possibility to find yourself revisiting now and then.

Mike Scalise’s essays and
articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, The Paris Review, PopMatters, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter here.