Slowly Going Bald

First of all, Seth Rogen and Ed Helms were there, as was Jonah Hill. And I'm pretty sure I got a laugh out of Seth Rogen.

I'd seen ads for The Room around town: a billboard on Highland a while ago, and always the posters outside the Laemmle on Sunset (my default and favorite art-house theater in town). I even, I swear, saw a brief commercial for it one night on TV, but I really knew nothing about it. The friends I accompanied to the movie said that's the best way to approach the film: knowing as little as possible. And they were right.

The Room, briefly, is a film so genuinely awful that it's hilarious, and the unintentional humor is blown out exponentially when watching it in a theater full of people who've seen it before and are all shouting at the screen. The plot concerns a love triangle of sorts, and the whole thing (or most of it) unfolds in a tiny apartment dressed for Glamour Shots or straight-up porn. In fact, the first 15 minutes feel distinctly like a skin flick: The first few lines of dialogue between the male and female lead are along the lines of hi, how was your day, we need some alone time, etc., then the action fades to the bedroom. The sex scenes are laughably bizarre, with lots of long-stemmed red roses and strenous pelvic thrusting between the lead, writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau as Johnny, and Johnny's fiancee Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who was surely cast out of her willingness to do topless scenes. The sex is horribly blocked: Johnny appears to alternately be humping the mattress, Lisa's hip, and her upper chest. And this happens several times.

But the joy of seeing The Room in a theater full of fans is getting caught up in the constant yelling at the screen. The audience chatter is ceaseless and falls into one of two categories: traditional jokes they people yell at certain scenes in every viewing, and the kind of spontaneous free-form riffing that's born on the spot. (It's like watching Rocky Horror, if Rocky Horror weren't like 19 hours long and kinda boring and worshipped by some fairly unstable people.) One of the traditional jokes involves shouting "Because you're a woman!" at the screen when Lisa's mom tells Lisa that she's incapable of supporting herself; another involves throwing spoons at the screen whenever a framed picture of a spoon appears on the table near the couch. Observe both:

Here's another clip featuring Wiseau. You may think the audio is out of sync because it's a YouTube clip, but you'd be mistaken. The ADR really is that bad on almost all of Wiseau's dialogue, which just makes is indeterminately European accent that much more entertaining:

The film's dramatic thrust, such as it is, comes from the triangle formed between Johnny, Lisa, and the bearded man in the previous clip. But that probably makes it sound like the film has an actual cohesive narrative flow, which is definitely not the case. For instance:

• Characters appear out of nowhere, never to be named, only to disappear later;

• The basic rules of lighting, camera work, focus, etc., are willfully ignored;

• Cutaway footage of the city at night is interspersed with a party scene, unintentionally conveying the passage of time and making the party appear to take place over something like six nights;

• Again, much humping of chests and hips.

And through it all, the constant yelling and laughing, even though the theater I saw it in was, sadly, only about three-fourths full. There was some brief speculation among people near me as to whether the experience would be different because Rogen and Helms were in the audience, since what would have just been a collection of bored semi-hipsters was now like some weird performance in front of some legitimately funny writer-performers, the men whose lines we quote. (Lord, beer me strength, indeed.) But they were quiet the whole time, content to laugh along with the crowd, which of course meant you were always aware when Rogen was laughing, because it sounds just like it does in the movies. I was happy to mostly ride along on the crowd jokes and screw around with my friends, though I did say some things that went over fairly well, my nerves aside (I explained away a character's apparent suicide by saying, "It's okay, he just has breast cancer," which believe it or not was a pretty contextually appropriate callback). But like I said, the fun of the thing is being there to hear the dozens and dozens of jokes that are passed down from screening to screening, and to hear people stand up and unleash something less well-known or even new (I have no idea if it was new or not, but a guy in front of me howled at the screen during a coffeeshop scene, "You turn around, extra, you f**king day player!" Brilliant.).

The movie was terrible, just absolutely abysmal, but I've spent all day wanting to see it again. It still plays the last Saturday of the month at midnight, though the crowds are thinning and Wiseau hasn't shown up for a pre-show Q&A in a few months. But the film's site is still up and running, so feel free to explore it. The film is too bizarre, too terrible, to be a hoax; if it were fake, it would be so genius as to make Andy Kaufman look like Carlos Mencia. No, the great thing about The Room is that it's real. And, oddly enough, the unsourced review blurbs pasted on some of the ads are truer than I ever would have believed: I've entered The Room, and my life is forever changed. Hi, doggy: