The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  I couldn’t sleep. I reclined in all my clothes on top of the still-made bed, which smelled like the perspiration of hundreds, wondering what on earth I was going to do in the morning. Someone started knocking through the bars on my street-side window. “Hey, man!” a voice said. “Hey! Do you have some beer? Can you help me out?” His voice was creepy and desperate and so close it was as though he were standing at the foot of my bed. Eventually, I was able to close my eyes.

  • • •

  I have lived in Los Angeles for more than a decade and never seen it smoggier than the first morning I awoke as an official resident of the city. I drove through this wicked blue-gray haze back to Tommy’s apartment building, the manager of which, Stacey, seemed resistant to the idea that I should be living there. Stacey was younger and kind of cute, with glasses that made her look like the secret identity Wonder Woman never had. I finally convinced Stacey to give me the key, though we wound up debating the correct pronunciation of Tommy’s last name. Why-zo? Wee-saw? It was clear that she didn’t believe Tommy and I were cousins. I didn’t blame her. Nor did I want to contemplate what else she thought.

  I unpacked my socks, napped for a while, then went back to my car for my big-ticket move-in item: a colossal fax-machine phone my father had lying around. It was about the size of a European economy car, but I found just the place for it. Beneath Tommy’s crummy television were two small white Doric-style pillars (you can see these pillars, and that television, at several points in The Room), so I decided to swap out Tommy’s television with my fax machine. I stuck the phone cord into the jack and had begun to do something else when, out of nowhere, the phone rang. I hadn’t recorded an outgoing message yet, so I waited for the allotted six rings to pass. Then a voice said: “I’m calling for Greg Sestero. I received your headshot and résumé and would like to set up a meeting for next week.” Given where I’d spent the previous night, this seemed like an unusually auspicious turn of events.

  Five minutes later, another call. Same gist (“This message is for Greg Sestero; we’re interested in meeting you regarding representation”), different agent.

  When, ten minutes later, I got another call from another agent, I started to laugh with awe. Then I learned who exactly was calling: “Hey, Greg. This is Chris from the Iris Burton Agency. I got your package. I want to set up a meeting for next week.” I probably replayed that message twenty times before I convinced myself it wasn’t some sort of joke. Iris Burton’s agency really had called me. This was my Harvard acceptance letter.

  I called everyone back and set up meetings. I scheduled the Iris Burton meeting for later in the week, which I hoped would allow me to gain some educational experience before I had to face her.

  My first meeting was in a bland corporate office on Melrose with a blandly friendly agent. Everything about it felt generic. “I’d love to see some of the stuff you’ve done,” she said. I mentioned I’d studied with Jean Shelton. The woman had no idea who Jean Shelton was. Clearly trying to salvage our sad, forgettable meeting, she abruptly ended with “Can you get your demo reel to me?”

  That was not going to happen. I had never even seen the episode of Nash Bridges that I was on, and I didn’t have my Patch Adams footage, either. Not that it would help; I was only a glorified extra.

  In the next meeting, I might have given the agent the impression that my role in Patch Adams, and my relationship with the film’s director, Tom Shadyac, were slightly more significant than they were. She then started telling me that she’d recently seen Shadyac and teased him about having all of these hit movies—Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, Liar Liar. He was on such a roll, she told him, that he should open his own movie studio! Ha-ha, et cetera. She promised that she’d mention me to Shadyac the next time she saw him.

  “Oh,” I said lightly, “don’t even mention it.” What I meant was: Dammit, please don’t mention it!

  “We’d really like to see some of your work,” she said as we parted. Once again I left completely demoralized. It was becoming clear that I’d need tape before anyone would consider representing me.

  Next I met with a younger male agent who was dressed like a mannequin. He didn’t talk to me so much as lob insults disguised as professional concern: “You’ve got a lot of work to do. A lot of work ahead of you. You need tape, experience, and a new look. Get all those things, and we can talk.”

  “Okay,” I said, standing up.

  Then he said this: “I’ve got some meetings with friends tonight, but after, do you want to play tennis?”

  I knew a euphemism when I heard one. “Actually,” I said, “I can’t.”

  He nodded, frowned, reached into his desk. “Let me give you my card.” He looked at me as he handed it over. “If you ever want to play.”

  Iris Burton was my final meeting. None of the fancy clothes I’d worn to previous meetings seemed to be working, so I put on my normal casual attire: a short-sleeve button-down and cargo shorts. For Iris Burton, I wanted to be as genuine as I knew how to be, and at this point in my life, that meant, God help me, wearing shorts.

  I was a little confused when I first approached Iris’s address. It wasn’t an office building but a house in a Beverly Hills neighborhood, the exterior of which was dominated by rose gardens. In the driveway was a new black Mercedes as well as a motorcycle. I was approaching the place warily when I saw Joaquin Phoenix coming out of the guesthouse. We walked down the long driveway toward each other. I tried to pretend it was no big deal running into him. “Hey,” he said, quick and relaxed. “Hey,” I said back, just as quickly but manifestly less relaxed.

  Inside the guesthouse was Chris, the man who’d left a message on my phone, and who was Iris Burton’s executive assistant. He wore a Caesar cut and expensive clothes and stood a couple of inches taller than me—and I’m not short. I liked Chris instantly. There was no Hollywoodish vibe to him at all. He wasn’t trying to intimidate, impress, belittle, or seduce me. I came in and he smiled, shook my hand, and told me to sit down. He talked, I listened; I talked, he listened.

  “We’re always trying to find people who fit the agency,” he said.

  I told him I’d come from San Francisco and related some of my close calls, or the calls I was discussing as though they’d been close—for instance, that I’d read for The Virgin Suicides.

  “Really?” he said. “What part? Because we have two clients on that—Kirsten and Josh.”

  “I was up for Trip Fontaine.”

  “Josh’s role,” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Yeah.”

  Chris smiled. “Let’s see those headshots of yours,” he said, mercifully. I had brought in all the contact sheets from my most recent headshot session, which we spread out on Chris’s desk. “These are great, actually,” he said, and started telling me about the kinds of calls he’d feel good sending me out on. I could tell this was different. I sensed he was thinking about what he could do for me.

  Then the Dreaded Question came: “Do you have some tape we can see?”

  I just stared. I felt defeated. I wanted to say, “Come on, Chris! After everything we’ve been through!” Tape was like this roadblock that had no room around it. As I sat there attempting to come up with something exculpatory to say, Chris looked back at my contact sheets and said, once again mercifully, “How about we send you out and see what happens.”

  “Okay,” I said. Thank you, I thought. Just hearing that made me want to hug Chris, but I managed to contain myself. Such a simple gesture on his part, but it meant so much.

  Chris got on the phone with someone; he didn’t dial. “Can you come check something out for a second?” Moments later I heard the sound of high heels coming from deeper inside the house and then Iris Burton herself was standing in the doorway. This was a woman who’d played a heathen dancer in The Ten Commandments, who could tell stories about Cecil B. DeMille, and I must say she was a scrotum-tighteningly intimidating figure.

  “How are you, kid?” she said.
Me: deer. Her: headlights. Before I could say anything, she walked toward me. “How did you find me, anyway?”

  An old issue of the Hollywood Reporter, I had no intention of saying. So I told her, “I heard about you when I worked on Patch Adams.”

  She wasn’t even listening. She turned to Chris and said, “He’s beautiful. Miramax would love him.”

  “Miramax?” I said.

  Her eyes were on me again now. “Are you meeting with anybody else?”

  “A couple people.”

  She laughed. “Why? Why would you meet with anybody else? Who are you kidding? Come on, kid. Do you know who I am?” This was all playful, I think, except for the parts that weren’t.

  Chris jumped in with waving, calming hands. “Okay, Iris. That’s enough.” I could tell that Chris was her assistant because he was the only person who could handle her. They had a routine—and moreover, they liked it.

  Iris walked back into the house without saying good-bye. Chris watched her go and turned to me and said, “We’d love to have you.” A few minutes later I signed a contract of representation. What had just happened was impossible. As I walked away from Iris’s house, I kept wondering if I was going to wake up in the Saharan Motel.

  • • •

  Chris and Iris got me my first audition a little over a week later. The part was Max Evans, the lead role in the Warner Bros. show Roswell. Tommy, who was almost as excited as I to hear that I got such a big audition, asked if he could help me with my lines. I said I’d let him know when they came in. Finally, they did, and I left him a message to ring me back. I missed Tommy’s return call. When I played his message, I heard this: “Why do you have so many rings on the phone? It should only ring three times before message. Change this shit, dammit. I hate this stupid beeping. No one likes the Mickey Mouse stuff.”

  When I got Tommy on the line he lectured me some more about my six rings. I tried to explain that three rings, in a lot of cases, didn’t let you get to the phone in time, and then you had to stand and apologize to someone while your stupid message played. Tommy was adamant that three rings were more “professional.”

  “Why the hell do you even care?” I asked him.

  “Let’s run the lines,” Tommy said. “Come on, fax me the script. We do it together.”

  I’d always gotten a kick out of running lines with Tommy. Tommy’s approach to acting helped soothe my nerves and took my mind off the possibility of failure. Above all, he reminded me how important it was to have fun while performing. The only problem was that Tommy wanted to run my lines as his own.

  “Tommy,” I said. “It’s my audition.”

  “I like this Max character,” he said, and started reading Max’s lines in such a horrendously unconvincing way that all I could do was laugh. Max Evans is an alien. In this scene he was talking to a girl he was falling in love with about being an alien. Maybe Tommy should have been auditioning for Roswell. The part had practically been written for him!

  I didn’t get Max Evans but ended up getting a callback for the other lead role, and the casting director said some nice things, including this: “You’re still a baby, remember. We’ll be seeing you again.” Tommy as acting coach was one for one.

  Iris and Chris wanted a few different selections of headshots to send out, so I headed for the nearest Kinko’s. I’d gotten my hands on an Iris Burton Agency logo and made sure that it was featured prominently on all my headshot prints: she was, of course, my big (and only) selling point. The guy behind the desk at Kinko’s—SETH, his nametag read—noticed this and said, “How long have you been with Iris Burton?”

  I told him only a week or two. Seth, an aspiring actor himself, promptly gave me some advice. I’d always heard actors normally maintain a solid distance between one another, but Seth was apparently uninterested in that little dance. He said, “What you should do is send out your headshots to all the casting directors. With that logo, you’re going to get attention.”

  Seth went in back and returned with all the relevant casting directors’ addresses in handy label form. He called these “the casting director label edition thing.” Los Angeles!

  “So,” he said, “send your headshot to everybody. Just send it out. In this town you’ve got to rely on yourself; you’ve got to be your own agent. You’ve got a good agent, yeah, but you want to be doing a lot of the busywork.”

  “Thank you,” I said, a little overwhelmed and taken aback by his kindness.

  Seth shrugged. “That’s what I would do if I had Iris Burton behind me.”

  I bought the Kinko’s Casting Director Label Edition Thing—it came with four hundred labels—and got to work. By the end of the weekend I’d sent out around three hundred envelopes with Iris Burton’s name on them. What I didn’t know was that Chris was out of town for the week, which meant that Iris would be answering her own phone if any of these casting directors reacted to the self-promotional carpet-bombing I’d just given Hollywood. Of course, these casting directors would think that Iris had sent my headshots out, that she had some hot young heartthrob hunk of talent on her hands who was going to be the next River Phoenix. And right away Iris’s phone started ringing. They’d taken the bait. Before too long she called me.

  “Honey, it’s Iris,” she said. “You really need to tell me what’s going on. We’ve been getting calls about you every fucking minute. It’s Greg Sestero, Greg Sestero, Greg Sestero! Did you send your picture out to everyone—including the people that scrub the toilets? You’re getting calls from everyone in town.”

  Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.

  “Listen to me, honey. Don’t. Be. So. Ambitious. It’s unseemly.”

  “I’m sorry, Iris.”

  “Well, the VP of casting at Disney, Warner Bros., and ABC all want a meeting. I’m telling the others, ‘He’s adorable! But you can’t meet him unless you have work for him.’ So go on and meet these ones, honey, but that’s it. You’ve got to stop these mailings. They’re driving me fucking nuts.” In spite of this fiasco, Iris started getting me one audition after another, which is much more to her credit than mine.

  The headshot seen by every casting director in Hollywood.

  For my first few auditions, I superstitiously wore my Iris Burton Meeting Outfit, which is to say shorts and a short-sleeve shirt. This included an audition for a submarine flick with Matthew McConaughey. The casting director took one look at me and said, “Oh, how cute. He wore his shorts.” I took this in stride, having decided to live or die by the shorts.

  One day I picked up a message from Chris: “You need to call me ASAP, buddy. We need to talk. I have an audition for something called Retro Puppet Master, which didn’t come from us. There’s also something else. Call me, Greg. Please. ’Bye.”

  All of it sounded weirdly ominous, especially that “buddy.” Retro Puppet Master, though, sounded exceptionally strange. Actually, it sounded like something I was capable of getting. When I came in to see Chris, the first thing he said was, “So I got an irate phone call from the casting director of Patch Adams.”

  At this I may have gulped. I instantly knew what had happened. I was in Patch Adams, but not in a role the L.A. casting director had filled. My role was that of a “featured extra”—and that didn’t belong on any résumé. That casting director had seen Patch Adams on my résumé and probably thought: I cast all the primary parts in that film. Who the hell is Greg Sestero? I was absolutely in the wrong. “And what,” I asked Chris, “did the casting director of Patch Adams say?”

  “She said she cast the movie and you weren’t in it. So, word to the wise, you might want to leave that one off your résumé from now on.”

  Oh, God, I thought. Iris and Chris are dumping me. This is a dumpable offense.

  Chris must have noticed my disintegrating spirits. “Look, Greg. Forget her. Just don’t—if you ever go in for her—just don’t put that on your résumé.”

  “Okay,” I said, exhaling.

  “Whatever you’re doing, it’s working. We
’re getting calls—and it’s a good thing I’m back this week, believe me. Iris’s hair was about to catch fire. These Puppet Master people are going to be in touch with sides. I’ll let you know.” The way Chris said “Puppet Master people” made it perfectly clear what he thought about their particular production’s value. I didn’t care.

  When I got home there were six messages on my answering machine, all from Tommy. The first: “Hey, yo! How’s audition? Big encounter? Know what I mean? Ha, ha, ha!” The second included Tommy’s lilting rendition of “Hold On to the Nights.” The third was him saying, “Don’t be scared. Enjoy yourself. Life is beautiful, la, la, la. By the way, this girl Jennifer call me. You don’t know her. She wants something.” His messages kept getting weirder and weirder. But I couldn’t really complain. So many actors who’ve just arrived in L.A. wind up doing all sorts of unpleasant jobs to stay afloat: Brad Pitt dressed up as a chicken for El Pollo Loco, Johnny Depp worked as an over-the-phone pen salesman. Surviving Tommy’s message-a-thons was obviously the price I had to pay to live in his apartment.