The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  • • •

  The afternoon after we shot the “Leave your stupid comments in your pocket” scene, Tommy and I arrived on set to find Sandy sitting on an apple crate in the Birns & Sawyer parking lot. He looked relieved; I knew immediately what he was going to say.

  “Tommy,” he said, standing up. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to leave your project. I got another offer, and it’s too good to pass up.”

  Tommy said nothing. He didn’t ask Sandy what this other offer was.

  “It’s with Janusz Kaminski,” Sandy said, and waited. Kaminski had been Steven Spielberg’s DP for his last seven films and was commonly regarded as one of the greatest living cinematographers. Tommy, I could all but guarantee, had never heard of Kaminski. I doubt he knows who he is even now.

  If we lost Sandy, I felt, The Room might not be completed. He’d been extremely helpful, and we still had a lot of complicated, important scenes to film. Well, complicated by Room standards. Byron had been useful, but Sandy actually got into the trenches with Tommy. The only reason we’d gotten anything even remotely watchable on film was due to his ability to turn Tommy’s vision into something slightly less extraterrestrial.

  I knew Sandy was relieved to be leaving now, because looming next in line to film were Tommy’s love scenes. That, really, was Sandy’s choice: Tommy’s naked ass or Steven Spielberg’s director of photography.

  Tommy kept staring at Sandy.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Sandy said, his hands out. “It’s Kaminski. The guy’s got two Oscars.”

  Tommy said nothing.

  “I’ve got to take it,” Sandy said, clearly boggled by Tommy’s silence. “It’s Spielberg. Kaminski shot Schindler’s List!”

  Sandy was right, of course. He had to take it. It would be insane for anyone to tell him not to take it. I’m sure half of the crew wanted to jump in the back of Sandy’s pickup and ride off the Birns & Sawyer lot with him.

  Tommy, finally, spoke: “So what? I don’t want to hear this stuff. Oscar nothing. If you leave, don’t come back.” Tommy then did to Sandy what he had done to so many people, in so many circumstances: He turned away, made Sandy the enemy, and instantly sought to replace him.

  fourteen

  Highway of Hell

  If I could just go back . . . if I could rub everything out . . . starting with myself.

  —Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley

  Tommy had begun to write. Sometimes he spent the whole day on his computer, behind his black velvet curtains, using two fingers to peck out his . . . play? Script? Whatever he was writing, his description of it changed day to day. Occasionally he’d call out things like “Prepare yourself physically and mentally!” or “How many pages does normal movie script have?” or “Tell me not to eat any more of these chocolate muffins!” or “This place is too small! I can’t think in this house!” At the end of the day I’d find him sitting at the small kitchen table, looking happy and tired as he quietly devoured a chocolate muffin. “Aren’t all these human need strange?” he asked one night. “Human behavior is funny stuff.” But he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to his script.

  As the weeks went on, the stress of writing wore Tommy down. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, screaming about leg cramps. Other times, when he noticed my irritation with him, he’d say, “Don’t try to poison my oatmeal, okay?” I was still looking for somewhere else to live, but not very diligently, largely because my nonsleeping hours were rarely spent in the apartment anyway. I’d booked a gig on Days of Our Lives thanks to my ability to do a French accent. The role was a guy named Jules, who claimed to be from France (this was his way of picking up gullible American women) but was actually from Indianapolis. I appeared a couple of times over several months, until Jules was forced to admit he wasn’t French at all, after which he was shot to death at a party. C’est la vie, as Jules would say.

  I was still taking Jeff Corey’s acting class. Aside from my being berated by Bob Dylan for blocking his driveway, it remained an enjoyable experience. Sometimes my scene partners would call me at home to discuss rehearsals. Tommy hated it when the phone rang before noon, but if they called after that Tommy could be surprisingly chatty. “Your cousin is so sweet,” Rena, one of my scene partners, said to me. It turned out that she’d called one afternoon when I wasn’t there and wound up talking to Tommy for twenty minutes. “He’s a bit out there, though, isn’t he? He asked me a lot of really intense questions about acting.” (Tommy’s version of this: “I talk to your friend the Rena! We have great conversation. Don’t be jealous!”) For the most part, though, Tommy was so focused on his script that he hardly seemed to notice anything. As he withdrew deeper behind his velvet curtains, my need to move out seemed less pressing. As long as Tommy stayed focused on his writing project, I figured we could manage being roommates for a little longer.

  Then Tommy raised the rent—again. He claimed that it was being raised on him, which was what he’d said when he raised rent on me four months earlier. When I questioned him, he got angry and switched tactics, now claiming that he didn’t have enough space. This was a very interesting thing for him to say, given that Tommy’s “corner” had steadily expanded to include every square inch of the apartment, save for my bedroom. The kitchen sink was perpetually filled with dirty plates, and the ratio of spoiled to unspoiled food items in the fridge was usually five to one. I made the mistake of complaining about this stuff, and all at once Tommy was fuming.

  “I stop you right now,” he said. “This mess? You create it all by yourself. You need to get a job, young man. You’re not fifteen years old, you know. So if you don’t like it, you get your own place. You are a guest in this house!”

  And so my search for a steady job and a new apartment began in earnest once again. I attended a job fair sponsored by Santa Monica College and got called in for a salesclerk gig at Armani Exchange in Beverly Hills but didn’t land it. I also interviewed for a bellman job at a fancy hotel called Shutters in Santa Monica. At the end of the interview I was asked, “When can you start?” A few days later I learned that a nephew of one of the managers had been judged the more promising bellman.

  The day I learned I lost out on the Shutters gig, I came home discouraged—only to be greeted by Tommy, who was once more pestering me about getting a job. I told him what had happened, hoping he’d extend some consolation.

  He didn’t. “I don’t care about your excuses,” Tommy said, turning his back to me as he headed off into his curtained lair. “I don’t want all your stress in my head.”

  Infuriated, I had the most unpleasantly pleasurable fantasy of wrapping my hands around Tommy’s neck and squeezing. To drive that thought away, I called to him through his layers of black velvet: “What do you do for money, anyway? I’ve known you for two years and I’ve never seen you do anything but sit around.”

  For a moment, silence. Then: “I drive Mercedes, smart guy, so I must do something right!”

  Having cooled myself down, I tried to speak plainly and honestly. “I’m working my ass off here. I go to school, I’m going on auditions, I’m trying to find a job. So I am working.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said warily. “I got the picture.”

  “You’ve still never said what it is you do.”

  “I told you,” he said. “I do the marketing stuff.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Your thinking is not my problem.”

  “Marketing for who, Tommy?”

  “That,” he said, “is none of your business at this time.” From behind the curtains I soon heard the familiar Tommy-puttering sounds that I’d grown to loathe.

  I headed for my corner of the apartment. “That’s fine, Tommy,” I said. “I’ll pay the extra rent. You just keep lying to yourself.” With that, I slammed the bedroom door.

  Tommy was shouting at me five seconds later. “Don’t you slam your door, young man! Remember, you are guest in this house.”

&n
bsp; I didn’t say anything. Ten minutes later, though, he opened my door and began doing his nightly pull-ups. As soon as I get a place, I thought, watching his grave, spectral face go from white to an engorged red, I’m not even giving you a warning. I’m just going to disappear.

  • • •

  A few days later, the Armani Exchange on Sunset Boulevard, where I’d fruitlessly dropped off an application months before, called me in for an interview, which ended with them hiring me on the spot. It only paid eight dollars an hour, but it was something.

  I returned home to tell Tommy the good news. Unusually, he wasn’t there. When he finally returned around six thirty, I casually asked him where he’d been. Tommy played coy for a little while but finally admitted he was taking a cold-reading acting class run by Brian Reise, a fairly well-known acting teacher, whose studio was right down the street. Reise’s cold-reading classes—wherein students gather outside, on the corner of Hayworth and Fountain, and have a couple of minutes to do unprepared readings of material they’re not familiar with—were popular. I’d drive down Fountain sometimes and see actors of all ages out there, cold-reading for one another.

  I was happy to hear that Tommy was taking a class. As far as I knew, he’d had almost no human contact with anyone but me since he’d arrived in Los Angeles eight months ago. I also figured a cold-reading venue was more suited to Tommy’s talents. In San Francisco, acting classes could be staid and self-important, at least in my experience. I imagined that Los Angeles’s aspiring actors would be more receptive to Tommy’s brand of thespian bonkers.

  Tommy assured me he was having a great time in the cold-reading class. “I make some friends,” he said. “I can make friends, too, you know. You think because you have blond hair, you own the world?” He went on to tell me how his classmates would sometimes start chanting “Tommy! Tommy!” as he got up onstage. L.A. was embracing Tommy Wiseau, then. This was good for all sorts of reasons.

  Then, another positive development: A guy in my Santa Monica College film class mentioned that his friend was moving to Barcelona for work and needed a long-term subletter. As it happened, the apartment in question was across the street from Tommy’s place. Better yet, all the subletter had to do was pay utilities and forward the guy’s mail to him in Spain. And the place itself was gorgeous: a two-bedroom in a colonial-style building with an amazing view of Sunset and lovely gardens in its shared courtyard area.

  Now all I had to do was break it to Tommy. He wasn’t around when I got home; he was still at his cold-reading class. While I was eating dinner, I noticed that Tommy had, for some reason, left his ID out on the kitchen table, along with a bunch of papers. It was a California State driver’s license. Name: Thomas P. Wiseau. Date of birth: October 3, 1968.

  That would have made him thirty-two years old. I put the license down. Maybe, all this time, Tommy hadn’t been lying to me about his age? Was it possible he really was in his thirties? If Tommy wasn’t lying about this, maybe he wasn’t lying about everything else—his meetings, his origins, his work—either. Maybe I’d been in the wrong this whole time.

  A little while later, I went for a drive on Fountain and noticed a large group of gesticulating Brian Reise actors standing on the corner, talking and laughing and hanging out. Then I saw Tommy. He was standing fifteen feet away from everyone, arms crossed, head down, leaning against a brick wall. He looked about as glum and lonely as a human being could look. I slowed and pulled my Lumina over to the curb. When Tommy glanced up and saw me, he smiled like a kid waiting to be picked up after his first day of school. A heartbreakingly genuine smile. I told him I had a few things to talk to him about later that night.

  Tommy didn’t seem himself when he came back from class. Or, rather, he didn’t seem any of his many selves—not his manic self, not his petulant self, and not his zany self. He appeared, instead, profoundly defeated. This was surprisingly hard to see. I’d never known anyone as invincibly optimistic as Tommy, and I didn’t realize how central that optimism was to my understanding of him until it was gone. As hard as our rooming together had been, I didn’t feel very good about telling him I was moving out when he was in such a state.

  Tommy sat down at his glass-topped desk, leaving the curtains open behind him—always a sign he wanted to talk. “Maybe,” he said after a while, “acting is not my destiny.”

  “Did something happen in class?” I asked.

  “Forget class for now. Hollywood won’t do shit for me. All these months and no call, no audition. They don’t want me. They don’t want me to be the next Johnny Dapp.”

  “Tommy,” I said. “I know you don’t believe that. Come on. You have your script now; you’re writing. You’re writing a lot. Just keep doing that, keep pushing, and something will eventually happen.” It was hard to give that advice, because I didn’t believe it myself. But then again, I realized, how was my disbelief in Tommy any different from my mother’s disbelief in me? Who was I to know what was best for Tommy?

  “Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “Talk is talk. Where is result? I don’t need the talk. I need something different.”

  “Okay. So what do you need?”

  He was silent for a moment, thinking about it. He turned to me, still slumped over in his chair. “To be star,” he said, “I need to reshape myself. Everything. My acting. I need to fix entire thing.”

  This sounded ominous. “What does that mean?”

  He knew he’d said too much. “Look at you,” he said, waving his hand at me. “You go on all these auditions. You do a good job and you get nothing. What does that mean for me? They will not give me chance.”

  I didn’t know what it meant for him. I also didn’t know what it meant for me. Tommy’s loss of faith was so difficult to watch that it took a little of my faith right down the drain with it. “It’s not supposed to be easy, Tommy. You’ve said so yourself.”

  “Easy nothing,” he said. “No one want me. Bottom line.”

  No, the I’m-moving-out conversation would definitely not be happening tonight. I knew all the years of acting classes and relocating back and forth from San Francisco to L.A. had taken its toll on Tommy. I knew this was at least the third serious effort he’d made to be an actor. I knew that he had hoped it was going to be different this time. Of course he’d lost his stomach for acting. By this point, who wouldn’t? Most of the people who start down this path wind up at a dead end. The odds of success are so dauntingly low that you have to be a special kind of crazy even to want to court such a fate. Optimism can sustain a young actor, but only for so long.

  “So look,” Tommy said. “I have certain issue. I have to leave for couple weeks.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Are you going back to San Francisco?”

  He shook his head. “No. I have work in the London. Marketing stuff. People need me there. So I go for a while.”

  London? Tommy claimed to despise Europe. He’d often told me that he’d never go back, not under any circumstances.

  Tommy saw the concern in my eyes. “Don’t worry about me, okay? And you still have apartment. I keep renting it for now.”

  I looked at Tommy carefully, trying to suss out the truth behind his statement. But there was so much anguish in his face—he had the eyes of a trapped, dying animal—that I had to look away.

  “So take care yourself,” Tommy said. “Be good.”

  “How long are you going to be gone?”

  “Several weeks or so.” He stood and reached out to close his curtain. “Okay. So I’m tired now. I go to bed. We talk tomorrow maybe.”

  It wasn’t even midnight. This was normally when Tommy started to wake up. “Yeah,” I said agreeably. “Of course.” Tommy’s hand was still on the curtain. It looked like he wanted to say something more, but he didn’t. When I turned away, he pulled the curtain shut. I had a strong sense that Tommy wouldn’t be there when I woke up. He wasn’t—and he hadn’t left a note. He was simply gone.

  I was packing up my things to move into my new
place across the street when I noticed Tommy had left something out on his desk, I think, for me to find. It was a bulletin board. On it, Tommy had pinned a bunch of his headshots. In the middle of this Tommy collage was a picture of me. Knowing him, this didn’t strike me as upsetting or creepy. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. I knew he was trying to figure out what it was that separated me from him. Why had I, in his mind, been accepted by Hollywood and he had not? As though a picture could tell you that. All at once I felt both immensely sad and immensely relieved he was gone. Somehow I knew I wouldn’t see him again for a very long time.

  • • •

  To my surprise, I liked working at Armani Exchange; it offered me a sense of normalcy and routine. Before I knew it, I was seeing a completely different side of being young in Los Angeles. One day I was being set up with a rich Lebanese customer’s daughter; the next, having a friendly dinner with Joni Mitchell, to whom I had sold a sweater, and her pal. (Joni Mitchell was greatly amused to learn, halfway through our dinner, that I had no idea who Joni Mitchell was. She just seemed like a cool, artsy woman to me.) It was as though not having Tommy around freed up all this trapped mental and emotional energy. I was friendlier, happier, and far more open than I’d ever been. You might say that, for the first time in my life, I was acting my age. And I was so thankful to finally have a job, which in turn made me pretty good at selling clothes. Within a couple of months, in fact, I was personally outselling the entire store’s staff. A general manager from Armani in New York came to visit and took me out to lunch. “What are your career plans?” he asked me. At that point in my life, career plans wasn’t a phrase that often passed through my mind.

  While I wasn’t expecting to see Tommy again for a while, I was certainly expecting to hear from him. But I didn’t. No messages or calls. Weeks passed. It got to the point where I almost forgot Tommy existed—like the last two years had been a strange, sometimes upsetting dream. From time to time I’d go back to the old apartment to do laundry or check phone messages, and in the apartment’s silence Tommy would weigh heavily on my mind. Eventually I decided to call him. Tommy always used to tell me, “We’re on different highways. You are young, so we see things different. You go your way. I go my way.” I never really understood what he meant by that, but I found myself thinking of those words while his phone was ringing. He didn’t answer, so I left a message: “Hey, Tommy. Just wondering how you’re doing and how London is. I hope you’re on a good highway.”