Tommy Wiseau | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club

Little is known about 40-year-old Tommy Wiseau: He’s an American filmmaker with a vaguely Eastern European accent. He wrote the script for The Room, peddled it to big studios, then decided to scrape together $6 million to do the thing himself in 2003. But unlike his background or personal life, the movie—which Wiseau also produced, directed, and starred in—is known in close detail by its ever-growing cult following. It tells the story of Johnny (played by Wiseau), a regular guy from San Francisco whose girlfriend Lisa is cheating on him with his best friend Mark. Simple? Sort of. There are scenes dealing with drug use, job security, softcore porn, losing underwear, and tuxedo football. (At one point, one of the characters famously says, “I got the results of the test back: I definitely have breast cancer,” and it’s never brought up again; later, a character trips while playing football, then disappears from the film altogether.) The sets are haphazard, the camerawork is blurry, most of the actors’ IMDB pages are surprisingly barren; in short, midnight-movie audiences have been eating up The Room for years in Los Angeles. And other than his appearances at Room screenings, plus a role in an episode of Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Wiseau has remained in the shadows. He put out an independent documentary called Homeless In America in 2004, and began work on a TV pilot called The Neighbors, but that’s it. His film continues to gain exposure, though, and this week, screenings are cropping up in Chicago, New York, Austin, and beyond.