Blueprints: "The Disaster Artist"
Thursday, February 15, 2018 at 5:15PM Jorge Molina continues with the 2017 Oscar nominated screenplays...
One of the most overused film tropes out there is the big pep talk that a leader gives his or her team before they get into some sort of defining battle. It’s meant to inspire, motivate, eliminate any form of self-doubt, and give them the necessary strength to embark on their journey.
But what if the task at hand is the production of what would become one of the canonically worst films of all time? And what if its leader is a proto-European actor with a lot of heart and devotion, but almost no social skills? Let’s take a look at how the writers for The Disaster Artist managed to inject these doomed elements with sincerity...
The Disaster Artist
Written by: Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber
Based on: The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tm Bissell
[You can read the full script here. I will be talking about these pages and this scene.]
The people behind The Room did not know that they were gonna be making one of the most infamous flops of all time. They thought they were making a legitimate movie, if a bit strange and not well thought-out. But no one more so than its director, writer, and star Tommy Wiseau, who was convinced that this movie would make his career. For him, this battle was as big as William Wallace leading the rebellion.
On the first day of filming, Tommy gathers the cast and crew for what he thinks will be an empowering speech to motivate them. He also knows that he will be recorded for a behind-the-scenes doc, and wants to propagate his image as a nurturing leader.
This short scene encompasses very nicely the themes of the film and the characters as a whole. Tommy is the fearless leader (sometimes to a fault), whose devotion and passion for this film takes him to being misunderstood by those around him. And his cast and crew want to desperately believe that somehow this will work out okay.
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The script does not seem to take an explicit side on whether this production is a worthy attempt for glory, or a doomed wild dream from the beginning. It instead walks a line where it acknowledged the silliness of the film execution (“Which has been constructed to look exactly like the real alley outside.”), but also sees the sincere devotion that the crew, and Wiseau in particular, put behind it (“A CREW of Gaffers, Electricians, Prop people and the like mill about. It’s a real movie set).
His speech crams about four or five different clichés in first three lines, and everyone seems to be aware of that, but they’re buying into the corniness and over-the-top nature of this situation (and this man). It’s the first day. “They’re making a movie!”
But Tommy Wiseau is not a man to mince on words or contain himself, so he keeps going. He’s rambling. He talks about betrayal and chemistry and love. The crew is confused and doesn’t know where this is going. “What is happening right now? Tommy isn’t done?”. Once again, the script nicely balances Tommy’s love for the craft with the sheer confusion of everyone around him.
The scene ends with another sharp left, where Tommy informs them that he has his own completely unnecessary private bathroom. Because why wouldn’t he. And after that eerily predictive kick-off, they’re off to battle.
The Disaster Artist is, at its heart, a movie about an underdog rising and battling against a world that constantly goes against him. The difference here is that the world was mostly right. Still, that doesn’t take anything away from the resilience and earnestness of those fighting the battle.
The script doesn’t make any judgments. It knows that this is Tommy’s lifelong dream, and treats it as such. But it also knows that it is a misguided dream, and that its attempts to make it come true are catastrophic. If only the audiences first seeing The Room were are judgment-free as the script was about its making.
Reader Comments (3)
Franco can be so good is these weird-type roles. He’s like an actual good version of whatever it is that Johnny Depp has become.
"The Disaster Artist is, at its heart, a movie about an underdog rising and battling against a world that constantly goes against him."
Which is one of the things that kind of bothers me about this movie, since Tommy Wiseau was not some scrappy underdog with nothing but his dreams and bootstraps. A man independently wealthy enough to self-finance his own movie, to the tune of millions of dollars, will never truly experience the world going against them.
This movie bothered me more than anything I saw last year. It kept indicating that a deep despair--or at least a deeply distorted self-image--motivated Wiseau's folly, and vaguely encouraging the audience to feel something about that, and then laughing it all off. I thought the script *was* making judgments, only to repeatedly retract or revise them and then judge again. Tonally, it felt all over the place to me.