The Room (2003): The Best Entertainment Six Million Dollars Ever Bought By Accident

In 2003 a man named Tommy Wiseau spent six million dollars of his own mysteriously sourced money on a serious drama about a banker betrayed by everyone he loves. Its opening theatrical run took in around $1,800. Then the strangest second act in movie history began. People kept watching. Twenty-two years later The Room still sells out midnight screenings on several continents, audiences arrive carrying plastic spoons, and the film has earned a nickname it will never shake: the Citizen Kane of bad movies.

We reviewed it with a straight face, because someone had to.

What You Get for Your Money

Johnny is a banker. His fiancée Lisa is tearing him apart, in the sense that she has started an affair with his best friend Mark, a fact Johnny greets with the now-immortal line “Oh hi Mark” delivered on a rooftop that is very obviously a green screen. Around this love triangle orbit subplots that arrive, wave and leave forever. A character announces she definitely has breast cancer. It never comes up again. A young neighbour named Denny has a gun-related drug problem for one scene. Also never mentioned again. Grown men in tuxedos toss a football back and forth from a distance of roughly four feet, for reasons the film declines to explain and we have stopped asking about.

The Production Details That Explain Nothing

Wiseau wrote it, directed it, produced it, starred in it and financed it. He shot the whole thing on 35mm film and HD video simultaneously, using two cameras bolted to the same rig, because nobody could talk him out of it. He built sets replicating locations he already had permission to film in. He kept a billboard of his own face up on Highland Avenue in Los Angeles for five years at a reported $5,000 a month, which is how a film that made $1,800 stayed famous long enough to become beloved. The apartment set dresses its shelves with framed photographs of spoons. Stock photos, still in their frames, nobody swapped them out. This is why audiences throw cutlery.

Why It Works

Plenty of films are cheap and dull. The Room is expensive and hypnotic. Every single decision, from the dialogue to the blocking to the four separate scenes of people buying flowers, is confidently wrong in a way no committee could produce. Sincerity is the engine. Wiseau meant every frame, and two decades of viewers have responded to that sincerity the way you respond to a friend’s honestly terrible open-mic night. You cheer. Greg Sestero, who played Mark, wrote a genuinely great book about the shoot called The Disaster Artist, and in 2017 James Franco turned it into an Oscar-nominated film, which means the making of The Room has now won more awards than The Room.

The Practical Bit

Our colleagues over at Worst Movies Ever Made have been championing this film since 2012, and their full review is the correct next stop for anyone who wants the deep cut. Seeing it properly means a midnight screening, which most large cities now host monthly. Bring spoons. Plastic ones. First-timers should watch it at home once beforehand, because the crowd shouts over half the dialogue and the dialogue is the point. Discs circulate through Wiseau’s own site and the usual marketplaces for around $20, and the man himself still tours screenings for Q&A sessions in which no question has ever received a direct answer. We checked. Anyway, how is your sex life?