Books: The Disaster Artist

For years, John and Sue have been after me to read The Disaster Artist, the behind-the-scenes account of the making of the cult movie The Room, written by co-star Greg Sestero (with Tom Bissell), and I kept saying yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it. I wasn’t in much of a hurry to read it because I wasn’t as huge a fan of the movie as they were.

When James Franco’s film adaptation came out in 2017, I felt I had understood everything there was to understand about the notoriously awful film that had won over audiences worldwide despite its mediocrity. As interesting and funny as this story was, Disaster the movie didn’t change my assessment of The Room much.

Then, when I visited John and Sue last month (they had moved upstate a few years ago), they lent me their copy of the book—and even though I was reading two other books at the same time, I started this one too. This time I couldn’t wait.

First of all, it’s an excellent account of what it’s like to pursue an acting career in Hollywood. Sestero describes the grind of going on auditions, living in both hope and fear that this next one will be the one, making compromises in his life, in pursuit of his dream. He had taken baby steps towards progress prior to The Room, but despite his youth, his good looks and his representation, he had made precious little headway overall. The Room had initially seemed like a stride forward.

Greg Sestero

It’s also a good example of all the little things that go into the production of a movie and what can go wrong when a director and his cast and crew aren’t on the same page creatively. I’ve always felt the “auteur theory” was overrated, but The Room is a legitimate example of how a film can be one creator’s vision—but at the expense of everyone else involved.

Mostly, though Disaster the book is Sestero doing his best to explain his complicated relationship with The Room’s auteur filmmaker, the enigmatic, possibly deranged, but ultimately heroic writer-producer-director-star, Tommy Wiseau. Yes, I say heroic, because in spite of everything, he winds up looking better in this book than he deserves to—and that’s saying something.

Sestero paints Tommy as a ruthless, dictatorial martinet on the Room set who insisted on doing everything his way, even when it flew in the face of reason. He alienated the cast and crew, antagonized everyone who dared question his vision, and tested the limits of Sestero’s patience—yet from the moment Sestero met him, he saw something in Tommy no one else did: someone supportive,  dedicated to his craft, and optimistic to a fault. To a young and inexperienced kid out of San Francisco doing his best to break into the industry, doubting his ability and desperate for a break, Tommy was, in his own weird way, inspiring—and Sestero captures that in the book.

Sestero, right, with Tommy in The Room

The book even provides a possible secret origin for Tommy, though Sestero makes plain it’s only one of a number of stories Tommy has told about himself, kinda like the Joker in The Dark Knight. Is the story real? It sounds plausible, but who knows? I remain unconvinced this isn’t all a put-on the two of them have staged. Tommy seems too improbable to be for real: that accent, his total ineptitude in learning a role, his eagerness to throw money away while making The Room—he sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch character!

Then again, maybe he is real. Could Sestero be that good a writer, not to mention an actor, to collaborate with Tommy in perpetrating such a hoax? He’d have to be the greatest one alive if so. Sometimes, as the cliche goes, truth is stranger than fiction, and this might be one of those times. The Disaster Artist is funny, sad, banal, frustrating and in the end, inspiring. Tommy got his movie made and Sestero helped. That’s the bottom line—and good or bad, that puts them ahead of a lot of other folks.