BEFORE: I've heard quite a bit of buzz about this film in the last year or so, so it's finally time to watch it. It's got a huge cast, so it seems like a bit of a shame to just use it as a link here, with Zoey Deutch carrying over again from "Rebel in the Rye". She's in tonight's film somewhere, apparently as something of an extra in the background, in an acting class, with no spoken lines, but it still counts for my purposes. This will allow me to link to tomorrow's film, however, which has been on the list as an unlinkable for some time. At least the tenuous link today leads to a more solid link tomorrow that helps clear another film from the list.
THE PLOT: When Greg Sestero, an aspiring film actor, meets the weird and mysterious Tommy Wiseau in an acting class, they form a unique friendship and travel to Hollywood to make their dreams come true.
AFTER: This makes some kind of sense to me, going from a film about the writing of a book to a film about the filming of a movie. And just like I've never read "Catcher in the Rye", I've also never seen "The Room", but it turned out that I didn't have to, in either case. Instead I can just revel in the meta-ness of watching stories about the other stories being made, reducing "The Room" to the film-within-the-film. But during the end credits, "The Disaster Artist" ran a number of clips from "The Room", side-by-side with the ones filmed with more famous actors, to demonstrate how close they came to re-creating the look and feel of the original.
I've also read in interviews about how close James Franco came to capturing the spirit of Tommy Wiseau, his strange manner of speech and his unpredictable nature, and the stories were that Franco recorded some messages for the fans of "The Room" - if they should call a certain phone number, perhaps the one depicted in the film, they'd hear a message from Franco speaking AS Wiseau, with most people then being unable to distinguish between them. And supposedly even the people who end up befriending Wiseau still have questions about where he originally came from, how old he is and where he got the money to make "The Room". Perhaps some questions are better left unanswered, because for all you know, that's an Eastern European accent and he's connected to the Ukrainian mob or something.
It's estimated that Wiseau spent $6 million of his own money to make the film, which could have been made for less if he had made different decisions along the way, like maybe shooting live on location instead of paying to re-create those same locations on a soundstage. Or making sure that an actor's shooting schedule was completed before randomly firing him or her, which then necessitated that all of their previous scenes would be re-shot with their replacement. Hiring better actors who had the ability to remember lines also could have cut down on the number of takes - though Wiseau himself, as director/producer/star of the film probably was the worst offender when it came to being unable to memorize dialogue.
I can confirm first-hand that the process of filmmaking comes down to a huge number of small decisions, which when taken together as a compilation can result in a finished work, which ends up as a sum of its parts, so any small bad decisions along the way can affect the outcome. I've often told the story about my first day on a professional music video shoot, during which I spent about 10 hours just to purchase a stool for Apollonia (yes, the one from "Purple Rain") to sit on. This was back in 1988, in the days before cell phones with cameras, so I was sent down to the Bowery district in Manhattan, where many restaurant supplies, including stools, were sold. The parameters were very vague, I was just given money and a rough sketch of how the stool should look, and each time I found one I had to call the director from a payphone and verbally describe the stool to her, whether it had a flat seat or a padded one, whether the legs were straight or diagonal, etc. Nothing seemed right, so after a few hours she told me over the phone to come back, as she had found the perfect stool in a store catalog. I was sent out again, to purchase the right stool from a place called The Door Store, bought the stool, travelled back in a cab to the production office, then had to spend an hour or so assembling the stool. When it was done, the director determined the stool was too shiny, so I had to go out again to an art store, to get either dulling spray or matte black spray paint. By the time I got the stool painted everyone else had gone home, it was probably 7 or 8 pm and this stool had cost the production roughly $175, when you added up the cost of the stool, the spray paint, and the cab fares, and my daily rate. Wait, I was an intern so I might have been working that day for free, I can't remember. But the punchline is that the stool was in the video for under 5 seconds, and you couldn't even see it, because Apollonia was sitting on it - so it didn't even matter if it was shiny or not. Those are the kind of days, however, that end up determining if you're cut out for a life in the crazy business of filmmaking - a lesser man would have given up on the process of buying a stool after just a few hours, but I spent ALL DAY on it.
Even on professional shoots, it's possible to spend an entire shooting day on one scene, or even getting one take just right. It comes down to how badly somebody wants things to be perfect, plus how much money they're willing to spend to get close to that. Post-production and special effects have become a great help, but there still has to be real humans in front of the camera, and they still need to say their lines in a believable way, you still can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as they say. "The Room" was never going to be a great film, because it didn't have any of the necessary basic elements to produce one - not a great story, nor any intelligent dialogue spoken by believable actors, so the result was an unconventional story with threads that went nowhere, many technical flaws, and performances that seemed to come out of left field, to say the least.
But then something happened - people went to see "The Room", and some of them enjoyed it. (First Wiseau had to buy all the tickets at an L.A. theater for 2 weeks, a procedure called "four-walling", in order to make his film Oscar-eligible. Been there, done that...). But word spread, and people started telling their friends (or perhaps their enemies...) to go and see the film. Then it caught on with the late-night crowd, and given the timetable, I suspect that the success of this so-bad-it's-good film may have coincided with California's legalization of marijuana. Maybe if you're stoned, "The Room" is very funny - and the fact that Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen were early champions of the film probably proves my point, as do on-screen testimonials from people like Kevin Smith. I rest my case.
I don't think I could stand to watch "The Room" myself, but I'd consider watching "The Disaster Artist" again. It's weird, but that one degree of separation helps quite a bit. It's easier to watch a film about a bad movie than to watch the bad movie itself.
Also starring James Franco (last seen in "Lovelace"), Dave Franco (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Seth Rogen (last heard in "The Spiderwick Chronicles"), Ari Graynor (last seen in "The Guilt Trip"), Alison Brie (last seen in "The Post"), Bob Odenkirk (ditto), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Magic in the Moonlight"), Paul Scheer (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Zac Efron (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Josh Hutcherson (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), June Diane Raphael (last seen in "Bride Wars"), Megan Mullally (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Jason Mantzoukas (last seen in "The House"), Andrew Santino, Nathan Fielder (last seen in "The Night Before"), Sharon Stone (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Melanie Griffith (last seen in "Cecil B. DeMented"), Hannibal Buress (last seen in "The Comedian"), John Early (also last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Jerrod Carmichael (ditto), Megan Ferguson (last seen in "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Charlyne Yi (last heard in "Nerdland"), Joe Mande (last seen in "The Interview"), Kelly Oxford (last seen in "Aloha"), Tom Franco, Lauren Ash, Sugar Lyn Beard, Dylan Minnette (last seen in "Labor Day"), with cameos from J.J. Abrams (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Judd Apatow (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Ike Barinholtz (last seen in "Bright"), Kristen Bell (last heard in "Zootopia"), Zach Braff (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Lizzy Caplan (last seen in "Allied"), Bryan Cranston (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Brian Huskey (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), Randall Park (ditto), Keegan-Michael Key (last seen in "Get Out"), Danny McBride (last seen in "Rock the Kasbah"), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (also last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Adam Scott (last seen in "The Overnight"), Kevin Smith (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Kate Upton (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Casey Wilson (also last seen in "Bride Wars"), Tommy Wiseau, Greg Sestero, Angelyne and archive footage of James Dean, Ann Doran, Edward Platt.
RATING: 6 out of 10 promotional postcards
No comments:
Post a Comment