Trivia / The Room (2003)

aka: The Room

• Accidentally-Correct Writing:
  • As mentioned in "Throw It In!", "hospital on Guerrero Street" was a Sestero ad-lib, but there actually used to be a hospital on Guerrero Street, though it moved out of San Francisco to nearby Daly City in 1965.
  • As mentioned in Tuckerization, the character Mark is named after actor "Mark Damon" but there is indeed an American actor/producer named Mark Damon.
• Acting for Two: Originally, Chris-R was going to be played by Scott Holmes, who already plays Mike, wearing a hat and glasses, which would have made the film even harder to follow. Fortunately (or not?), Holmes convinced Wiseau to give the role to his roommate, Dan Janjigian, whose performance so impressed Wiseau that he thought about writing more scenes for Chris-R, but never did.
• Acting in the Dark:
  • According to Wiseau, Denny has some sort of mental disorder, which explains his behavior in the film. Philip Haldiman was not told about this, and the entire explanation was likely a post-release retcon anyway.
  • Robyn Paris (Michelle) says she only got the script pages for her scenes, and Wiseau refused to let her see the whole script. When she arrived at the studio on her first day, she was immediately whisked away to film the chocolate scene, still wearing her street clothes.
• Amateur Cast: The cast of the film had very little acting experience beforehand. Among other examples, director and lead actor Tommy Wiseau had only appeared in a self-made commercial for his own clothing store before making the movie, co-star Greg Sestero was a bit actor who took on the project because he was a personal friend of Wiseau's, Juliette Danielle had only previously appeared as an extra in a short film, and Dan Janjigian was an Olympic athlete who had never appeared in a film before.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!
  • The "oh hai, [X]" construct is used more than enough times in the film, but in the flower shop scene, Johnny just says, "Hai doggie" without the "oh".
  • "What a story, Mark" and "Anyway, how is your sex life?" are often paired together, but they are from different scenes.
• Blooper: In the final scene, Denny can be seen crying before he realizes that Johnny's dead.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Juliette Danielle was originally cast as Michelle, but was given the role of Lisa when the original actress was dismissed because her "personality...didn't seem to fit" the character.
• Colbert Bump: Part of the film's rise from cult classic to one of the most infamous movies of all time is due to [adult swim] airing it on April Fools Day for three years straight and it getting covered by popular internet reviewers like The Nostalgia Critic and RiffTrax.
• Copiously Credited Creator: Wiseau ignored the normal convention of placing his name at the end with the caption "Written, Produced, and Directed by Tommy Wiseau", possibly to have his name in the credits as much as possible.
• Corpsing: Greg Sestero and script supervisor Sandy Schklair couldn't stop Wiseau from laughing during the takes where Mark tells Johnny about his friend being beaten by her boyfriend.
• Creator Backlash: Many of the actors are reluctant to - or adamantly refuse to - watch this movie. Greg Sestero will often host live screenings but spend the actual screening out of the theatre.
• Creator Breakdown: Tommy Wiseau was inspired by a real breakup from a cheating girlfriend.
• Creator's Apathy: As production dragged on, professionalism just fell apart. Most of the crew were convinced nobody would ever see the film. Sestero admitted to phoning in his performance. Entire scenes were out of focus because no one bothered to check the lens.
• Dawson Casting: Philip Haldiman is one of the oldest members of the cast (being 26) and played the youngest character, Denny. One side effect is that it makes Denny's Precocious Crush on Lisa unconvincing since Haldiman was actually several years older than Juliette Danielle.
• Deleted Scene: The film has only two scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor, and those were because Wiseau decided to reshoot them on different sets: Chris-R's scene originally took place in the alleyway, and Johnny's suicide scene in the living room. Wiseau insisted on keeping everything in the film, so aside from these two scenes (well, and the version of the entire film that was shot with an HD camera), every single scrap of footage ended up in the film.
• Deliberate Flaw Retcon: In addition to using the Parody Retcon excuse liberally in defending the film, Wiseau also claimed that Denny's strange, abnormal behavior was deliberately written to indicate that Denny was mentally disabled (even though none of the other characters seem to find his behavior particularly out of the ordinary).
• Diagnosis of God: Tommy Wiseau has helpfully clarified that, yes, Denny does have some sort of mental disorder, a detail that makes many of his scenes make more sense. According to Wiseau, Denny is "retarded, a little bit".
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • That Chris-R's actor puts on a better show than the rest of the cast during the "Where's my fucking money" scene with Denny is apparently largely down to the fact that Wiseau genuinely pissed the actor off between takes.
  • Sestero's venomous delivery of "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!" is due to him channeling all the frustrations of the shoot and imagining he was actually saying to Wiseau, "Why are you doing this to me?"
  • Sestero managed to pull this on Wiseau himself by speaking French to him during the recording of the park football scene. Wiseau has a strangely intense hatred for everything French, so when he tackles Sestero in that scene there is genuine anger behind it.
  • Mark casually mentioning the "hospital on Guerrero Street", as mentioned below, was an ad-lib on Sestero's part because he saw Tommy's enthusiasm starting to flag near the end of the day's shoot, so he mentioned the actual street in San Francisco where Tommy kept an apartment to get his attention immediately. It worked, mostly because Tommy is, according to Greg, extremely paranoid and hostile about discussing his personal information.
• Fake Nationality: Wiseau claims to have been born in the United States, but given how little he has revealed about himself combined with his speech mannerisms and accent, it's pretty safe to say that this isn't the case, which would make this trope apply to Johnny. Wiseau being from Eastern Europe is the most common guess, and in 2020 it was finally confirmed by Tommy himself (albeit after losing a lawsuit) that he was born and raised in Poland.
• Fan Community Nickname: Roomies, as coined by Robyn Paris (Michelle).
• He Also Did: Dan Janjigian, who gave that famously hammy performance as Chris-R, is also an Olympic bobsledder,^note He competed for Armenia, with which he has dual citizenship due to his heritage, at the 2002 Winter Games. businessman, and as of 2019, U.S. congressional candidate.^note He didn't win his contest in the Democratic Party's primary election in Texas' 31st district and endorsed the eventual winner, who lost the general election.
• Hostility on the Set: While the film became a Cult Classic that spawned a book about the experience and an award-winning film based on the book about the film, its production remains among one of the most infamous. Wiseau made life on the set a nightmare. While he was generally a Prima Donna Director who refused to compromise, and was often stingy and showed his lack of professionalism on the first day by arriving late and yelling at the crew for being lazy, there were specific incidents that peppered the already uneasy atmosphere:
  • Arguments with his first two directors of photography ultimately led to them quitting. The first director, Raphael Smadja, left after Wiseau refused to hire a proper Line Producer and instead forced his costar and best friend, Sestero, to do all of the work. The second director, Graham Futerfas, quit in anger over escalating frustrations with Wiseau's attitude, the final straw being him lying about calling for a much-needed generator.
  • Wiseau also ostracized costar Kyle Vogt after he needed to leave production for a prior commitment (which Wiseau knew about and was reminded of several times), refused to allow him to seek medical attention after he hit his head on set, and also didn't invite him to the premiere due to his "betrayal". Even the costars who spoke in defense of the man in later interviews, such as the aforementioned Sestero and Juliette Danielle, who played his onscreen love interest, were treated poorly.
  • Sestero was harassed and goaded into participating in some of the more ridiculous parts of the script, including shaving his beard (with Wiseau watching and dictating how to do it), along with Wiseau lunging at Sestero for using French, which — along with any language but English — was apparently forbidden on the set.
  • Danielle, meanwhile, was condescended to on a regular basis, and even humiliated when Wiseau pointed out some acne she had and said it loud enough for all to hear, which reduced her to tears.
  • After his scene had been reshot, Dan Janjigian's boots got scuffed and he had to replace them. Wiseau initially refused to replace his $80 boots, even though the scene they just filmed cost a thousand times as much. Wiseau caved because he was scared of Janjigian's intensity.
• Looping Lines: Happens all the time with Wiseau's lines for no adequately explained reason. Even in the interviews on the DVD, looped sentences and fragments appear seemingly at random. It's incredibly obvious whenever it happens, because the words don't match up to the lip movements at all.
• Method Acting: Dan Janjigian stayed in character as Chris-R during his entire time on set, resulting in the other actors being genuinely scared of him.
• Money, Dear Boy: Sestero considered leaving the set due to how difficult it was ... but didn't for this reason.
• No Export for You: The film has only showed in very few countries outside America and Direct to Video in all. According to a Spanish distributor, Wiseau has very tight control over distribution, making any international distribution really hard. As a side effect, the film has never been dubbed, even in countries where dubbing is mandatory by law.
• On-Set Injury: Kyle Vogt hit his head on Johnny and Lisa's spiral staircase, which gave him a concussion. Wiseau forced him to shoot a scene before seeking treatment, which explains his woozy blinking in said scene.
• The Other Marty: Several roles reportedly ended up getting recast as the Troubled Production went on. An actress who has never been identified (other than allegedly being from South America) was cast as Lisa, but was let go by Wiseau, and Juliette Danielle, who was playing Michelle, got shifted over into the role. Robyn Paris, who took over as Michelle, says that there were two other actresses who had the role of Lisa early on, and Michelle also had multiple recastings. Peter famously turned into Steven after Kyle Vogt was no longer available and Greg Ellery was hired.
• Parody Retcon: Wiseau claimed his film was actually a "black comedy" after it became the So Bad, It's Good hit of 2003. Trailers were even hastily edited to reflect this. Nobody, except maybe Wiseau, was fooled. The rest of the cast and the script supervisor knew exactly what they were making.
• Produced by Cast Member: Taken to extremes. Tommy Wiseau was the star and producer, along with also being the director and the writer. As he clearly doesn't know how to do any of these things, it goes about as well as you would expect.
• Referenced by...:
  • The Nostalgia Critic not only reviewed the film, but he has a character based on Wiseau.
  • When The Spoony Experiment and Atop the Fourth Wall reviewed Warrior #2 and #3, there was a shot of an alternate dimension where everyone acted like Wiseau, and quotes from this film abounded.
  • In Knights of Buena Vista, Adriana asks if it's safe for her Player Character "to walk out of the room", and Mary immediately quotes this film (just changing "Lisa" to "Elsa").
  • A 2017 issue of Deadpool featured a cameo by Captain Marvel at a video store, where she's been given a copy of this film instead of Room. (The joke, of course, being that Room was the Star-Making Role for Brie Larson, who had recently been announced to play Captain Marvel in her 2019 film debut.) Captain Marvel mentions that Tommy Wiseau is actually an intergalactic criminal that the Guardians of the Galaxy have been trying to catch for years.
• Rereleased for Free: The film was officially uploaded to YouTube for free viewing by Wiseau himself on September 21, 2018. Said upload was taken down the following day.
• Role Reprise:
  • Wiseau and Sestero reprised their roles for the AFI stage adaptation mentioned below.
  • Wiseau wants to star in a musical version but will only appear on the opening night.
• Shrug of God: What was up with that flower shop lady? Who knows. Not even Wiseau knows. Maybe she was busy, maybe she was on drugs.
• Throw It In!
  • According to a crew member, the infamous "Hai doggie" scene was one of these. The owner of the flower shop they were filming the scene in just happened to have the dog there and it hadn't moved at all during the filming, so Wiseau improvised a brief moment where he rubs the dog simply because the thing was creeping him out.
  • Despite knowing there was no hospital on Guerrero Street in San Francisco, Sestero ad-libbed the part about the hospital with the beaten-up woman being there because it's where Wiseau had an apartment. Even though no one who saw the film would ever connect them, Wiseau was furious at Sestero for this ... but used the take anyway because it was the best one they had.
  • Wiseau insisted on the entire cast being present during the filming of every scene, in case he suddenly felt like throwing them into the background.
• Troubled Production: To say The Room had a troubled production is like calling the Pacific Ocean big and wet. The experience is described in detail in The Disaster Artist, a dual "making of The Room" and "My bizarre friendship with Tommy Wiseau" book by Greg Sestero, who played Mark. Some of the more notable things out of Sestero's book:
  • Wiseau made the film because he was tired of waiting to be cast as an actor, and decided to make his own film, despite having never made a film before and having little discernible talent for acting or writing. As his heavy accent makes clear, English is not Wiseau's first language, hence the script's many bizarre turns of phrase (such as Mark's "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!"). Wiseau refused to take any advice from the cast or crew, dismissing concerns about characters' motivations changing within scenes or subplots abruptly coming and going and insisting that they deliver their lines exactly as written, which were apparently even more nonsensical than they were in the finished film.
  • On a technical level, the original script's formatting left much to be desired. It rarely specified where or when scenes were taking place: indoors or outdoors, which location, day or night, etc. Functionally, the script was a stage play with the odd camera instruction included. What made it on film was more or less the result of guesswork.
  • Wiseau was verbally abusive towards the cast. Juliette Danielle, who played Lisa, got the worst of it; in one scene, she had been put in a backless blouse, and Wiseau shouted loudly enough for the whole cast and crew to hear that she needed makeup on her back acne. Carolyn Minnott, who played Lisa's mother Claudette, had to be rushed to hospital after passing out from heat exhaustion when Wiseau refused to rent an air conditioner for the studio. The original Michelle walked off the film, taking several cast and crew members with her, after Wiseau threw a water bottle at her during rehearsals. Kyle Vogt, who played Peter, told Wiseau that he had a limited time to shoot due to another commitment, but Wiseau made no attempt to schedule Peter's scenes before Vogt was due to leave, requiring the casting of Greg Ellery as Steven, who got Peter's lines during the party sequence. When Vogt hit his head on Johnny and Lisa's spiral staircase, ending up with a concussion, Wiseau made him film his scene anyway, resulting in Vogt having to hold onto props and blinking woozily throughout the take that went into the finished film.^note After all that, Wiseau didn't even invite him to the premiere because he viewed Vogt leaving for his other commitment a 'betrayal'. Sestero and his girlfriend broke up during filming, and Wiseau decided to use this as inspiration for a scene in which Mark grumbles about women to Johnny over coffee.
  • The crew were even more poorly treated. Wiseau would shout at them for minor or imagined infractions (including one crew member who farted during filming) and lack of professionalism even though he routinely arrived on set three or four hours late. Though most of the crew had the training and/or experience to back up their technical advice, Wiseau ignored every suggestion, resulting in multiple resignations. Sestero was given double duty as line producer as well as playing Mark, requiring him to handle everything from casting to catering between (or even during) takes. The first director of photography, Raphael Smadja, stormed off the film, taking his entire crew, when Wiseau refused to hire a dedicated line producer. His replacement, Graham Futerfas, only lasted a few weeks before quitting (along with his entire crew) after catching Wiseau in a lie about having been unable to rent a generator that would save time lost re-charging equipment. His replacement, Todd Barron, was a cameraman who had been the only member of Futerfas' crew not to quit, asking for the promotion to DP which was granted because he was deemed the Closest Thing We Got.^note  Neither Smadja nor Futerfas nor any of their crew members were credited in the finished film. Script supervisor Sandy Schklair also quit after getting an offer to work with Steven Spielberg's double Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and losing patience with Wiseau viewing him as his personal assistant.^note Like Kyle Vogt, Schklair was pointedly not invited to the film's premiere for this 'betrayal', and his name was left out of the film's credits.
  • Numerous illogical decisions were made that inflated the film's budget unnecessarily, including purchasing (rather than renting) half a million dollars' worth of equipment, filming on 35mm film and digital high-definition simultaneously (even though they require entirely different lighting,^note On Graham Futerfas' first day as director of photography, he asked how they lit the set; Sandy Schklair simply replied, "Poorly." and no HD footage ended up in the finished film), and filming scenes that could have been done on location on sets — this despite Wiseau being The Scrooge when it came to any cast or crew requests for minor but necessary expenses. The haphazard allocation of the production budget left almost nothing for costumes, forcing the wardrobe director to buy them from thrift stores (hence the film's Rummage Sale Reject look), while the condominium set was a window display from a furniture store bought in its entirety, and the crew had to buy such items as the infamous framed spoon photographs to make it look like someone actually lived there. Rather than filming all of the scenes on a particular set and dismantling it, Wiseau chose to film scenes almost at random, requiring sets to be struck and then rebuilt days later. When the studio shoot wrapped and production moved to San Francisco for location shooting, Wiseau didn't bother to obtain filming permits, attracting unwelcome police attention.
  • Due to Wiseau's inability to remember his lines (even though he wrote them himself) or move to the appropriate place, minutes-long dialogue sequences often took days to shoot, while he is visibly reading off-screen cue cards or looking at his feet for his mark in takes that went into the finished film. For example, Johnny's infamous "I did not hit her! ... Oh hai Mark!" line, which lasts seven seconds, took three hours and thirty-two takes to film.^note Partly because Wiseau gave himself a concussion by hitting his head on the "outhouse" doorway; in contrast to Kyle Vogt's concussion, Wiseau's concussion did halt filming. The equally infamous "You're tearing me apart, Lisa!" scene, conceived as a tribute to Rebel Without a Cause, also took hours to film when Wiseau couldn't remember the line "I cannot go on without you!"^note The climactic line was originally written as "You're taking me apart, Lisa!"; when the crew could not stop laughing at the mistake, Sestero was persuaded to tell Wiseau that the correct word was "tearing". Despite being brutally critical of the other actors' performances, Wiseau would accept no criticism of his own performance, so the crew set up a "giggle tent" where they could laugh at blown or unusable takes in privacy. Not that this escaped Wiseau's notice, as he hired a Czech man named Markus to film the cast and crew, ostensibly for a "making of" documentary but really to see what they were saying about him behind his back.
  • By the end of the shoot, nobody was even trying to be professional about it, and most of the actors admitted to phoning in their performances, while the crew were no longer paying attention to continuity or even whether or not scenes were in focus. Post-production was just as bad, as Wiseau refused to listen to editor Eric Chase, who told him that the film's pacing was a complete mess and there was simply no way to join the scenes together into anything like a coherent whole without cuts; the only scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor were alternate versions of Chris-R confronting Denny and the final sequence, plus three minutes of Johnny and Lisa's sex scene. Convinced he had made a masterpiece, Wiseau sent the finished film to various major studios seeking distribution; Sestero notes that while studios usually take two weeks to make a decision on distributing films, Paramount rejected The Room in just twenty-four hours. Wiseau ended up paying to distribute the film himself.
• Underage Casting: Johnny's fiancée (uhm, future wife) Lisa is implied to be at least in her late twenties, since they've been together for seven years, but Juliette Danielle was twenty-two at the time of filming.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to The Disaster Artist, Wiseau was considering a subplot about Johnny being a vampire with a flying car. It never comes through in the film, but Wiseau is utterly fascinated with vampires.
  • There's an early version of the film's main theme, which Wiseau rejected for being too depressing, according to Milicevic. The former interpreted the film as a tragedy.
  • According to Sestero, the film began life as a play. It would've been a Bottle Film, with the whole story being set in a single room, but consisting of several unrelated plots in referring to how many different events, happy or sad, can happen in the same room (kind of like a time-lapse). That's what the film's title is supposed to refer to; Wiseau was just too lazy to change the title when he decided to make it a film.
    • The play was also adapted into an unpublished 540-page book.
  • Wiseau was so impressed by Dan Janjigian's performance that he considered writing more scenes for him, but ultimately never did.
• Word of God: According to Wiseau, Claudette recovers from her breast cancer fully.
• Word of Saint Paul: Greg Sestero had come up with a brief backstory for Mark to fill in gaps; mainly that he was an undercover vice detective constantly plagued by the stresses of his job. This was mostly to explain away his apparent marijuana habits as well as his unexplained knowledge in how to deal with Chris R.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: According to the book The Disaster Artist, everything that fans love about The Room was ad-libbed. Wiseau was writing, directing, casting, rewriting, and acting by the seat of his pants, practically making up the film as he went.
• Write What You Know: Some small details on Johnny's backstory are very similar to those of Tommy which makes sense since Johnny is Tommy's Author Avatar. An example is Johnny saying he moved to San Francisco with only a suitcase and a $2,000 check that he couldn't cash because it was from an out of state bank. According to The Disaster Artist, Tommy had the same issue when he moved to San Francisco from New Orleans. There's also Johnny and his friends talking about the Bay to Breakers race and the eccentric participants including a woman wearing a wedding dress with a sign reading "Please marry me." Greg and Tommy ran the Bay to Breakers one year and according to Greg, the wedding dress woman was real.
• Write Who You Know: It's suggested in The Disaster Artist that Wiseau wrote Johnny as essentially a romanticized, tragic reflection of himself — a well-meaning, magnanimous, kind and sympathetic Nice Guy who's heartlessly taken advantage of and betrayed by the ungrateful people in his life. But it's observed that while Wiseau was something of a troubled, brooding loner with few, if any real friends beyond Sestero himself, the Johnny character is constantly surrounded by close friends and loved ones, who frequently extol his virtues. The book also implies that Johnny's abusive relationship with the sociopathic Lisa was torn straight from a chapter of Wiseau's own love life.

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