How The Worst Movie Of All Time Was Made

INTRODUCTION

When I pick topics to cover for this channel I try to provide examples from critically acclaimed works from some of the best filmmakers of all time. A lot can be learnt from greatness. But, maybe, a lot can also be learnt from a...well, lack of greatness. 

In honour of In Depth Cine getting to 200K subscribers I thought I’d do something different and take a look at the making of a film by an unlikely auteur which many consider to be the worst of all time - The Room. Here we go.

PRE-PRODUCTION

Like any notable tale, the story of The Room came about due to the meeting of two unlikely friends. Greg Sestero developed an early love for film when he was young -  going so far as to write a sequel to Home Alone when he was 12 years old, including an acting role for himself.

He worked as a model, picked up a role in an episode of a TV show and scored a couple of commercials. In an attempt to further his career he attended an acting class in San Francisco. This is where he met Tommy Wiseau. 

Not much is known about Tommy.

Greg partnered up with Tommy in class - despite his tendency to give bizarre, over the top performances. They rehearsed sections from plays together which they would perform for the class and struck up a friendship, bonding over a shared love of James Dean.

Despite his very thick Eastern European accent he claimed to originally be from New Orleans. He drove a $60,000 Mercedes Benz, wouldn’t reveal his age, nor the source of his wealth. Although it does appear that he had a clothing company, Street Fashions USA, and handed out cards from this business. 

During one of his classes Tommy had shot an 8mm short film entitled ‘Robbery Doesn’t Pay’. He had dreams of becoming an actor and a filmmaker. 

Together, the friends decided to move to LA, where Tommy was already renting an apartment. Tommy bounced some of the ideas for films that he had off of Greg, such as the story for a vampire movie with the amazing title ‘The Vampire from Alcatraz: King of Vampires’.

This project never got off the ground.

While Greg’s acting career gradually progressed, Tommy struggled to land any roles, or even to get any call backs. Fed up, he decided to write his own screenplay - a drama about a love triangle (which was reportedly autobiographical) called The Room.

Upon reading the script Greg offered his opinion: 

“I’d told Tommy what I thought about The Room several times, which was that the script didn’t make any sense. Characters’ motivations changed from scene to scene, important plot points were raised and then dropped, and all of the dialogue sounded exactly the same, which is to say, it sounded exactly like Tommy’s unique understanding of the English language. But nothing I said would ever change his view of The Room, so what did it matter?”

Nonetheless The Room began its preproduction journey securing funding from the only source willing to back the project...Tommy himself.

He created a production company, Wiseau-Films where he did everything from acting as the administrative assistant (under the pseudonym of ‘John’) to being the legal department. The credits did include two other executive producers, however one was his much older English teacher who had never had any involvement in film prior or since, and the other EP had been deceased for years already by the time of production. 

Tommy brought on Greg as the film’s line producer, the person who manages the daily operations of a film shoot, despite Greg not knowing what a line producer even did.

When it came to casting, Tommy gave himself the lead and Greg organised auditions for the other roles. He cast an actor called Dan, who Tommy incorrectly always called Don, as Mark, the supporting character. Philip Haldiman was cast as the adolescent Denny, despite the fact that the actor was 26 and actually older than many of the other actors who were playing adult characters.

Initially they found it difficult to cast the oddly named Chris-R - the drug dealer character.

They consider doubling up and having Scott Holmes - who’d also been cast as Mike - play two roles and put on a strange Indiana Jones like disguise for Chris-R to prevent his double appearance getting noticed. They decided against it.

While holding auditions for other characters Tommy had to insist upon some actors that the film they were trying out for wasn’t porn.

With things falling into place, kind of, Greg and Tommy met up the day before the first day of shooting to go over things. At this final pre-production meeting Tommy managed to convince Greg to play the role of Mark - which had already been cast to Dan, or Don - by offering Greg a large acting fee and a new car. 

PRODUCTION

On the first day of shooting Tommy was four hours late. This was a trend which would continue throughout. 

Rather than shooting on location, Tommy made the unusual decision to shoot everything in a studio. Exteriors were shot in the studio parking lot with the help of a green screen. 

They shot at the small Highland Avenue lot of Birns & Sawyer - a Hollywood rental house. This offer was extended by the owners due to the unheard of decision by Tommy to purchase, rather than rent, the film production gear - a financial decision which made no logical sense. It was reportedly a $1 million investment. However he took this illogical decision a step further by deciding to shoot the movie, simultaneously, using both 35mm and digital capture. 

This doubled the cost of shooting as it required two separate crews, one to run the film camera and one to run the HD camera. Despite the crew’s insistence that he would either use the 35mm or the HD digital footage for the final cut, not both - Tommy went ahead with this bizarre decision anyway.

He purchased two Panasonic HDX-900 digital cameras, one Arriflex BL4 35mm camera and a dozen cinema lenses which included Cooke zooms. Most of the movie was shot off a dolly.

Raphael Smadja, an experienced French born DP who mainly worked in reality TV, was hired as cinematographer on the film. 

He mainly lit the sets using strong sources of hard light, apparently undiffused, coming through windows. These lights often cast hard shadows against other actors which made it pretty obvious where the source of light was and wasn’t the most naturalistic way of illuminating a set.   

At times, the DP would retreat from the camera to the director’s monitor - which was away from the set - while Tommy was performing a scene saying that he wanted to view the lighting from a monitor. However really it was because he struggled to stop himself from laughing while Tommy performed his lines.

He would routinely forget the lines that he wrote while acting. It became so painful at times that it took them three hours, many rehearsals and 32 takes to get one 7 second line. Tommy also appeared to lack any awareness of the correct emotional tone when performing. 

The job of making sense of the script and ensuring continuity fell to script supervisor Sandy Schklair - who would change lines from the screenplay to make them more intelligible, block the scenes and generally act as a kind of 1st assistant director.

The rooftop set was created using three separate Styrofoam walls backed with cheap plywood hastily erected in the parking lot. Why the luxury apartment rooftop had a corrugated iron doorway no one quite knew. To get alternate angles the crew would move the three walls around to create the illusion of four. Sometimes their alignment was umm...questionable.

Since Tommy usually showed up late to set most of the rooftop scenes had to be shot in midday or afternoon light where the sun cast unflattering shadows on faces. To combat this the cinematographer used lots of overhead diffusion with textiles on frames to soften the light, which ate up shooting time.

When Don, cast as Mark, who hadn’t been told that Greg had been cast in his place, played out his scenes on the first day of shooting they didn’t roll any film on his takes. He soon found out, lost his temper with Tommy and Tommy fired him, along with another actress cast as Michelle. His reasoning for firing her as well was so that it would prevent any legal issues. Although what he meant by this exactly no one was sure about. 

These weren’t the only people to leave. Fed up after weeks of shooting, Raphael the DP insisted that unless Tommy hired a proper line producer to handle the running of the shoot he would walk. When his demand wasn’t met he quit, followed by his crew who also resigned in protest.

Thus The Room hired its second DP, a guy called Graham, who was recently out of film school. After Graham walked around the set for the first time he immediately concluded that the production must be a money laundering scheme. 

Tommy’s second DP didn’t last long. His reason for quitting was the result of another strange financial decision from Tommy. He refused to rent a generator for $200 a day to power the lights and instead lost hours every day as a result while the crew came up with work around power solutions - which was far more costly.

After days of promising a generator and not delivering Graham walked off the set.

This led one of the few remaining crew members from the camera department who didn’t walk off - Todd Barron - to step up as the third, and credited, cinematographer. He managed to get through the remainder of the shoot.

POST-PRODUCTION

Upon starting the edit the obvious decision was quickly made to dismiss all the HD footage that they had unnecessarily shot and only used the 35mm takes.

A problem soon presented itself - sound. Through a combination of the inexperienced sound recordist, an inability to sync up some of the dialogue sound to the footage and Tommy’s struggle with saying the lines, a lot of the sound was unusable.

They therefore embarked on using ADR, re-recorded dialogue in a controlled environment, to replace much of the location sound. This wasn’t exactly masterfully done.

Rather than carefully controlling the edit through deliberate cutting, the decision on when and what to cut had to be decided by the parts of the footage they had which were actually usable.

The pacing of the edit is another factor that makes the film feel so...odd. Certain scenes without much substance, such as the numerous sex scenes, take up about 10% of the total running time. They really go on forever. Also you can’t not laugh at the beyond cliche music choices. 

With some digital trickery, and some questionable compositing, what is meant to be the San Francisco skyline was added to the rooftop scenes for the last touches.

The final budget, with its strange mix of gratuitous overspending and miserly cheapness, ended up being estimated around a staggering $6 or $7 million dollars. 

Tommy marketed the film by renting a large billboard with his face on it for $5,000 a week. To some crew’s surprise the final film actually opened in a cinema. Its box office take - $1,900.

CONCLUSION

Over the years something interesting started to happen. It was so badly made and strange that it amassed a cult following. Fans from all over the world became enamoured with it and it entered popular culture. 

Over time it actually managed to recoup its budget.

Perhaps his movie didn’t go exactly how he intended it, or maybe the problem was that it did go the way he intended it. 

Either way the best, worst movie of all time gave Tommy Wiseau his dream of fame and celebrity that he’d spent his life seeking.