Exploiting the Archives: The Room/Disaster Artist Files

As some of you may be aware, bad movies are kind of my “thing.” They’re my “bag.” They’re how I “get down.” What I dig about bad movies is that sometimes they’re so bad that they’re “good.” 

As someone who has devoted his career to bad movies, The Room occupies an important place in my soul as well as my career. So it is not at all surprising that I have written my share of articles about both The Room and The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell’s wonderful book about the making of The Room, which has been adapted into a hit movie and Oscar contender directed by James Franco. 

For The Dissolve I wrote a piece on how reading The Disaster Artist informed re-watching The Room and how Wiseau’s crazed masterpiece of outsider art feels like an elaborate metaphor for Wiseau’s relationship with show-business in general and Sestero in particular. 

Sestero liked it so much we hung out the last time he was in town and had dinner. He gave me a copy of the original screenplay of The Room, which was so fascinating, and so crazy, and fascinating and crazy in a way that deviates from The Room we all know and love that I wrote about it for Splitsider. 

I like to be timely with my columns, so I decided to use the heat around The Room and The Disaster Artist to pay homage to the long-ago episode of How Did This Get Made that presages Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas and June-Diane Raphael’s appearances in the eventual The Disaster Artist adaptation. 

And of course the movie was covered here with a Scalding Hot Take and a segment on Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast. 

I feel like I don’t need to tell you to see The Room or The Disaster Artist. They don’t belong to bad movie obsessives like me any more but to the mainstream, but that’s a story and a possibly Big Whoop post for another day. 

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