by Greg Sestero
Between rehearsals, Dan again began stalking around the Rooftop’s pavement edge, swearing to stay angry and in character. Philip watched him, looking more and more worried, having already been mauled once by Dan. “I think you’re in for a good time,” I said to him.
“Yeah,” Philip said. “A blast.”
Sandy and Tommy stood by one of the monitors. Tommy was wearing big gray headphones with pastry-size ear cushions, his long black hair spilling over his shoulders. After the eighth or ninth time through the scene, Dan turned to Tommy and said, “Why do I keep saying the same line over and over again? ‘Where’s my fucking money?’ Can’t I mix it up or something? Vary it a little?”
“We will not change lines,” Tommy said, his eyes not leaving his monitor. “You want to be actor, act like one.” Tommy’s response only made Dan angrier, and for the next couple of run-throughs it looked as though Philip were about to melt in terror as Dan pressed him for his fucking money. Although the effect Tommy’s response had on Dan was unintended, the moment nonetheless stands as one of the only successful things I ever saw Tommy do as a director.
Philip Haldiman and Dan Janjigian. Where’s his fucking money?
So yes: As unlikely as it may sound, the scene between Chris-R and Denny actually did get better on the Rooftop, no thanks to Tommy’s wizardly direction. (He kept telling Dan to “imitate” Denny during the confrontation scene. It took everyone a while to realize that Tommy wanted Dan to intimidate Denny.) Tommy hit his first real snag when it came to the moment he cherished most: Chris-R firing a warning shot in the air to frighten Denny. Tommy seemed to believe that if he wanted the gun to fire, it should. But prop guns need blanks. Tommy began to talk about sending the art department out for blanks immediately, but Sandy wasn’t comfortable with this.
“Tommy,” he said. “The last thing we need right now is—”
“I stop you right there,” Tommy said, stopping him right there. “This is Hollywood. Everything is possible. If Hitchcock hear you talk like this, he would fire you on the spot.”
“You,” Sandy said, laughing, “are not Hitchcock, my friend.”
“That is your business,” Tommy said. “I am not Hitchcock. I’m myself.”
“What?” Sandy said, confounded.
The debate ended when Bill Meurer got word of what Tommy wanted to do. Through Peter Anway we learned that Mr. Meurer would “not tolerate” a gun going off on the premises of his retail business. Tommy was disappointed but said nothing. Hearing from Meurer was, in Tommy’s mind, like hearing from God. Besides, his other beloved idea for the scene—the gun somehow flying off the roof when Mark and Johnny disarm Chris-R—was still in play.
Until it wasn’t. Sandy pointed out that there was no good way to dramatize the gun flying off the roof without a lot of extra camera-and-blocking work. Raphael’s resistance was more boldly stated: “If you knocked the gun out of that guy’s hand,” he said, pointing at Dan, “he would tear both of you to pieces.”
“That’s true,” Dan said. “I would. And if you don’t believe it, let’s try rehearsing it your way, Tommy.”
We came to the moment in which Johnny and Mark launch themselves out of the tin-roofed outhouse to disarm Chris-R and rescue Denny. Due to the outhouse’s solitary-confinement dimensions, Tommy and I had to run out of it separately. Tommy was adamant that we both have “intense” expressions on our faces when we emerged. This was, for Tommy, a pure action-hero moment. As soon as we finished shooting our first run-through of the scene, Tommy wanted to watch the results on playback. He was terribly impressed with his intensity and deeply disappointed in mine. Tommy emerged from the outhouse looking like he’d just discovered Chris-R eating Denny’s intestines; I looked like I’d discovered two strangers playing jacks. I couldn’t take it seriously. I finally did my best approximation of Tommy’s wide-eyed, O-mouthed expression and burst into laughter the second Sandy called “Cut!” It was good enough for Tommy. We moved on.
Now all we had to do was film our attempt to disarm Chris-R, which had turned out so badly the first time through, on the alley set. Our runs on the Rooftop, sadly, were just as pathetic. Dan actually stopped in the middle of one take and wheeled around on Tommy and said, “If you’re going to grab my arm, really fucking grab it! You’re jumping on me like a pussy!” With that, he headed off to shout some more expletives.
“My God,” Tommy said, watching Dan go. “He’s like monster.”
The lost take of the Chris-R scene on the indoor alley set—our first day of shooting.
As hard as it may be to believe, it took us two weeks to film this whole sequence, including the part of the scene that involved Carolyn and Juliette. This is about the same amount of time it took Steven Spielberg to shoot the D-day landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan. But even though Dan’s scenes were finished in a few days, Tommy forbade him to ever leave the set. “Tommy,” Dan said, “if I’m not doing any more filming, there’s no reason for me to be here.”
“But we may need you,” Tommy said. “There’s still more scenes in the script for your character. Maybe we use them, maybe not.”
“Really?” Dan said, warily.
“Chris-R is big character,” Tommy said.
“Can I see the script, then? That would be helpful for me.”
“I’m sorry but you cannot. It’s confidential at this time.”
When Dan asked me if it was true that Chris-R had more scenes in the film, I was straight with him: There weren’t any in the script I’d seen, but then again, Tommy had recently been planning for a subplot involving Johnny’s flying vampire car. If Dan stuck around, it was entirely possible that the film could turn into The Room: The Story of Chris-R’s Gun.
When Dan realized that Tommy had no plans to use him again, and that his time was being wasted, he presented Tommy with an eighty-dollar receipt for a new pair of Skechers boots he’d purchased. “What is this?” Tommy asked.
“You stepped on my boots so many times during our scene, they got all scuffed. I had to replace them. I’d like to be reimbursed.”
“I am not the Santa Claus,” Tommy said, turning away.
Dan grabbed Tommy by the arm and kept him there. He reminded Tommy that he’d been promised a full wardrobe during filming, but no one had given him boots. He’d thus worn his own, which were damaged. Replacing them was Tommy’s responsibility. Dan explained all this to Tommy calmly, but there was an unbreakable steel rod in his voice.
Tommy, I think, gulped before saying that he’d have to ask his producers for permission.
“Tommy,” Dan said, not letting go of his arm, “I do speeches for five thousand dollars a day. I run a business—a professional one. If you’re really an honest businessman, as you claim to be, and you’re really true to your word, as you claim to be, you wouldn’t be fighting me on this. Right now, you’re being unprofessional.”
“We are very professional,” Tommy said quietly.
Dan let Tommy go. “Good. Then be a man and pay for my boots.”
Tommy ran his hand through his hair and looked around. “I need check!”
Tommy balked at replacing Dan’s eighty-dollar Skechers. I later learned that Tommy’s decision to reshoot the Chris-R scene—a scene, I should note, that had no impact on the film’s plot—cost the production over $80,000.
That is how it went, every day: Tommy behaving like a gregarious spender one moment and a brutal miser the next. It wasn’t new behavior; he’d been like this since I’d known him. Once, back in San Francisco, I was in a Big Five store with Tommy; he was shopping for workout gloves. A pair of Rollerblades caught his eye, though, and after trying them on, he spent an hour Rollerblading around the store, saying, “So beautiful. I love it!” He ended up grabbing four pairs of Rollerblades to take home with him. When he went to pay, Tommy asked the cashier what kind of discount he could get. The cashier said it was a set-price store. “Oh, come on, be good sport!” Tommy said. “Give me discount. How about five-dollar
discount? Student ID or something?” The cashier laughed. “My God!” Tommy said. “She is so difficult! Somebody doesn’t understand American way!” He pulled this stuff constantly, even in restaurants: “How about we pay for one drink, and you give us two. Come on, be good salesman!” Tommy, I guess, utterly rejected the idea that the entire point of Western civilization is not having to haggle like a peasant every time money changes hands.
Strangely, though, Tommy never haggled at Birns & Sawyer, maybe because he desperately wanted to be accepted as their golden boy. Whenever Peter Anway suggested that Tommy needed to buy something, Tommy usually did. “We are first-class production,” he’d say, right before slapping a WISEAU-FILMS sticker on his new purchase. For the record, I don’t fault Bill Meurer and Peter Anway for taking Tommy’s money. They were running a business, and when someone turns up on your showroom floor determined to spend, the businessman’s duty is to accommodate him. Still, I imagine it came as something of a shock to Anway when he found himself listed in The Room’s credits as one of Tommy’s five assistants.
Three executive producers were listed in The Room’s credits. One (Chloe Lietzke, whose nighttime conversation with Tommy I’d overheard during our James Dean road trip) was a much older woman who lived in Oakland, was confined to a wheelchair, and had never been involved in film production before, during, or after The Room. Another (Drew Caffrey, with whom Tommy became close soon after moving to San Francisco) had been deceased for years at the time of the film’s production. Along with being the executive producer, Caffrey was credited as another one of Tommy’s assistants and the San Francisco casting director, making him the busiest dead person since Tupac Shakur.
The only real executive producer was, of course, Tommy Wiseau himself. In other words, The Room had no producers, which Tommy knew that I knew. That didn’t stop him from lying about it to me. Whenever any issue came up that Tommy wanted to deflect, he attributed his needs to what “the producers” wanted. This was also a way of creating the illusion that Tommy had confidently navigated Hollywood’s upper echelons. And it worked. Initially, at least, no one involved in the production doubted the existence of these producers. Considering how much money Tommy was throwing around, how could they have?
But eventually, members of the cast and crew began asking, “What the hell is this really all about? Where is Tommy from? Where is he getting all this money?” I told them I didn’t know. After knowing Tommy for fifteen years, I still don’t know how he originally acquired his money. What I do know is this: Whenever Raphael or Sandy discussed with Tommy ways to be more cost-efficient, Tommy responded, “We don’t worry about money. We worry about movie.” Anyone with that attitude is not operating out of a normal economic framework.
The question then becomes: What types of businesses are capable of generating a cash flow that allows one to spend $500,000 on a never-screened HD film? Tommy poured money into promoting the ultimate flop, despite making no profit, for years. He spent tens of thousands of dollars on merchandise. He spent $5,000 per month, for five years, keeping up a Highland Avenue billboard advertising the film. He spent thousands of dollars a month paying one theater in Los Angeles to screen The Room, earning a return on his investment somewhere between $100 and $200 per month—if that. If you want to make large amounts of money disappear, this is certainly one way to do it; but at a certain point, don’t even money-laundering schemes diversify?
So it didn’t surprise me when I heard whispers on the set about the source of Tommy’s money. But here’s the thing. The last person I would ever entrust to oversee any part of any criminal enterprise would be Tommy Wiseau. In fact, were I involved in illegal activity, I would think twice before launching a criminal enterprise in a country where Tommy Wiseau was even resident. And after all, if you were the legal face of a presumably international money-laundering scheme, what on earth would impel you to try to get the world’s attention by becoming a movie star—and why would your less public colleagues allow you to do so?
When I told friends about Tommy early on—his secrecy, his wealth, his cheapness, and his frivolousness—they always warned me to be careful. I recall one friend saying, “Just wait. One of these days there’ll be a knock on your door and it’ll be an FBI agent.” But after knowing Tommy for a decade and a half, I’ve never gotten a call or a knock. There were never any suspicious (or, really, any) people around him.
Money is what allowed Tommy to not only produce and release The Room, but also to extensively advertise it and keep it alive in the dark time between its disastrous initial release and eventual cult success. The origins of all of this money are still unknown. Money, you could say, is the elephant in The Room.
eight
May All Your Dreams Come True
The funny thing is, I’m not pretending to be someone else, and you are.
—Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley
I was driving through central California with the windows of my Lumina open to the rural, manure-laden air. It had been eighteen days since I’d first seen Tommy’s apartment. Earlier that Thursday afternoon, on a whim, I decided to move to L.A. What was I waiting for? I’d dreamed of this moment since I was twelve. Now I was actually doing it.
Before leaving Tommy’s apartment a little over two weeks before, I’d grabbed a stack of his ancient Hollywood Reporters and brought them with me to San Francisco. Back home in my bedroom, I paged through them, one by one, figuring out which agencies I wanted to approach. In one of the more recent issues I read an interview with a famous young actor represented by the Iris Burton Agency. I did a little research and learned Iris had started out with a small boutique agency that had since become the stuff of legend in the business. (According to that legend, Iris became the first—and, I’m guessing, remains the only—agent able to secure a contract for a fetus.) Iris had a particular gift for representing young actors who succeeded in bucking the typical young-actor trend of being washed up at twenty. River Phoenix, Drew Barrymore, Jerry O’Connell, the Olsen twins, Hilary Duff, Joaquin Phoenix, Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett—these were just some of Iris’s clients. A casting director in San Francisco told me that Iris was someone who could “get Steven Spielberg on the phone.” I sent Iris, along with a bunch of other agents, my headshot and résumé. For my contact info I used my new apartment’s phone number, which didn’t yet have a phone hooked up, though I planned to rectify that immediately. That phone number is still working, incidentally. It now serves as the Room hotline. Feel free to call it if you’d like to hear Tommy personally invite you to a screening: (323) 654-6192.
After seven hours, I made it to Sunset Boulevard, feeling a bit automotively emasculated among a sudden blitz of Porsches and Ferraris. I didn’t care. I was damned proud of my Lumina, which hadn’t broken down once on this drive. I came to Los Angeles to do a big movie. Something with a huge impact, like Interview with a Terminator. I was here now, and I could make it happen. And it was all thanks to Tommy, wasn’t it? I wondered what he was doing up in San Francisco. Probably vamping out in his lair, getting ready to sell some pirated Levi’s. And good for him! I had nothing but appreciation for the man at this moment.
Around 2:00 a.m. I parked at Tommy’s complex and hauled my luggage (a duffel bag filled mostly with socks) up to the third floor. There was the door. My home. I was at the end of my first night in Los Angeles and about to crash in my new apartment. I got to the door, pulled out the key, stuck it in. It wouldn’t open. I tried again. I tried for ten minutes. Nothing budged. This was, quite obviously, the wrong key. Tommy gave me the wrong fucking key.
The apartment manager’s office was, of course, closed. I didn’t have a cell, so my first order of business was to get to a pay phone. I found a Chevron gas station on Sunset and called Tommy collect. He didn’t answer, so I waited in the gas station for a few minutes and fulminated. In the short time I had known Tommy, I had learned this much: He had established an entirely new category of personal disorganization. You know bett
er, I thought. You should have gotten the key from him when you first saw the apartment. You idiot!
I called Tommy again, very much hoping that my first night in Los Angeles would not be spent in my Lumina. This time, he answered. After accepting the charges, he said, “I’m listening!”
“Tommy?”
“Oh, hey! How is Babyface?”
“The keys don’t work. The manager’s office is closed. Do you have a spare somewhere?”
“What?”
“The keys don’t work. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Oh, come on! Try again. It works!” He sounded jovial. Playful, even.
Why did I bother calling him? Even if Tommy’s organizational skills weren’t so hopeless, what could he do from San Francisco at this hour? Teleport? I didn’t want to get mad at Tommy, because he’d been so cool and supportive, but the only way to keep from getting mad at him was to end our conversation immediately. “It’s late,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll figure something out. Maybe a hotel.”
“No, no,” he said. “Don’t stay in hotel. You have your own place now!”
“Thanks, Tommy. I still can’t get the door open.”
“I’m here if you need anything.”
What I needed was for the key to work. My next move was to drive east down Sunset Boulevard, looking for a side street to pull over and go to sleep. Sunset Boulevard at 3:00 a.m. is not the most welcoming place, and I soon realized I was liable to be robbed or worse if I slept in my car. And the farther east down Sunset I went, the rougher, darker, and stabbier it got.
Out of this unpleasant darkness the blinky lights of the Saharan Motel emerged. The place had an Egyptian theme. More interesting yet was the part of its sign that read: $59.99 OR HOURLY RATES. I was a sheltered twenty-year-old from Northern California, but even I knew from which segment of society the Saharan likely lured most of its customers. I pulled in, only to be greeted by a gentleman of Middle Eastern descent who ran out of his check-in hut screaming at the top of his lungs, “Turn your car! Move your fucking car!” The man yelled at me some more when I got out and walked over to him. “I need a room,” I said. Happily, there was one vacancy left. After procuring my key from the still-screaming man, I walked to my room past several dead palm trees and an empty swimming pool. I could smell rotting Indian food and, yep, people were actually getting it on in the rooms. Not in a nice, loving way, either. As I was opening my door, a trashed middle-aged man with two wobbly-legged prostitutes young enough to be his daughters emerged from the room next to mine. “Hello,” I said. They laughed the cruel laughter of the damned. My first night in Los Angeles and I’m in a hooker motel. Thank you, Tommy.
