The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Now would be a perfect time for anyone who hasn’t watched The Room (2003) by Tommy Wiseau to watch it. Guys, this movie has been called “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”. There’s a game made based on the story, the following for this cult classic has been going strong for years -it’s still not very famous in Greece but I’m working to change that- and, obviously, a book about it just came out.
A book written by Mark (Greg Sestero) of “Oh, hi Mark!” fame and co-written by Tom Bissell, a person for whom my respect increases by the day. A book I could hardly put down and kept reading it standing up in the metro and in the bus and which I finished in just 3 days. I usually take long with books – sometimes because I force myself to read them rather than enjoying them. This one was different.
The Room is a special case of “WTF, how does this thing exist?!” and a lot of its charm lies on precisely that inexplicability. Who is Tommy Wiseau? Where did he find the film’s $6m budget? Why did he become the unique, strange character he is? Greg Sestero divulges a lot on how he met Tommy Wiseau, what made their relationship special, disastrous and in a way admirable, all the way up to the making of The Room, but those fundamental questions on the very essence The Room are never answered directly. He gave away enough to make me even more interested in Tommy Wiseau as a personality and what he and his ways might have to teach me (I didn’t believe there was anything I could learn from him before I read this book) but not too much, which would ruin everything. At the same time, The Disaster Artist has a certain kind of flow and style that it, as is correctly advertised on the cover, reads more like a novel – and you have to remind yourself that not only is it real life you’re reading about, but also it’s about The Room. The freakin’ ROOM!
Another reason I connected very well with the book was that Greg Sestero’s way of thinking, his reaction to some things, his relationship with Tommy and his whole demeanour reminded me of myself. I could almost imagine myself in a parallel universe in all the situations retold in the book, and that helped a great deal with my immersion in this tragicomic story.
