Directed by: James Franco
Starring: James Franco, Dave Franco, Alison Brie, Seth Rogen, Jacki Weaver, Ari Graynor
Tommy Wiseau and Ed Wood would have been a match made in heaven. Or maybe not. Both likely would have battled for artistic control of a Plan Nine from Outer Space as if it were a masterpiece waiting to be filmed and there was only room enough for one of them to make it. Wiseau thought he was making another Rebel Without a Cause when he wrote, produced, and directed The Room (2003), but in reality he may have made something worse than Plan Nine.
I admit I never heard of The Room before The Disaster Artist, but now I think I would like to see it. There are scenes shown in the epilogue with a side by side comparison of James Franco's version of those very scenes, and it is hard to tell the difference. The Room was Wiseau's massive ego run amok. He threw his weight around as if he had weight to actually throw around. He was a complete no-talent, but he had drive, ambition, and vision. Thus, he actually made a Hollywood movie and has to be given credit for seeing his dream fulfilled, even if people laugh at it. This is the type of film Bob Bowfinger would've been proud of.
We meet Wiseau (Franco) in a San Francisco acting class in 1998. He screams "Stella" in some strange Eastern European accent while hurling himself to the floor in convulsions after trying to climb the walls. He thinks he is channeling Brando, but he is more like channeling the worst Brando impersonator ever. Wiseau's classmate Greg Cestero (Dave Franco), another no-talent, albeit younger and better looking than Wiseau, thinks Tommy is simply awesome and the two strike up a friendship. The one thing they seem to have in common is not only are they devoid of any acting ability, they can't recognize when someone else doesn't either. Tommy is completely delusional, egotistical, and unafraid. He and Greg go to Hollywood and are in for a rude awakening. They get auditions, but naturally no one casts them, so undaunted Tommy decides to write his own script and produce his own masterpiece. Greg goes along; wide-eyed and totally confident in Tommy's genius.
Tommy and Greg know next to nothing about filmmaking. They buy their equipment instead of renting it, shoot the movie in two separate formats, and continually ignore the advice of the more seasoned pros who work on the project, including script supervisor Sandy (Rogen), who is astonished when his paycheck actually clears. The Disaster Artist's opening scenes are not as strong as when The Room starts shooting. The other actors have no clue what the movie is about. They try to decipher how old Tommy is and where he came from, even though he claims New Orleans, and Tommy's first scenes take 75 tries before getting it right. (Right?) And somehow, in a mystery which still exists to this day, Tommy was able to come up with the money for the budget which wound up topping out at $6 million.
James Franco throws himself headlong into the nutty world of Tommy Wiseau. He thinks he is the next James Dean, but we all know better. Like Ed Wood, he is devoid of introspection and unflinchingly believes in his own genius. He promises "real human emotion" in The Room, but when we see him laugh inappropriately at a monologue in his script about a woman who was beaten and hospitalized, we wonder if he isn't actually an alien or a vampire. Nothing would surprise us.
The first thirty minutes establish what pinheads Tommy and Greg are and soon we realize a little less of them goes a longer way. The juiciest scenes involve the production itself, which was supposed to last forty days and instead goes closer to sixty. Tommy and Greg fight and reconcile before the premiere, in which the response to Tommy's movie does not elicit the response he expects. The epilogue says Tommy and Greg still act, produce, and direct today. I'm not sure I even want to know what those projects were, but I will bet Tommy and Greg believe they will succeed, just like The Room did...in their minds and its own way.
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