The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made (A Gift for Film Buffs)

eading this book is like glimpsing the face of God - especially if that face were pockmarked, had black spaghetti noodles for hair, and no understanding whatsoever of the concept of irony. Yeah, that was a potshot at Tommy, but I swear it's the last one in this review.Let me make this crystal clear: "The Disaster Artist" is a hilarious book. Greg Sestero has always been the voice of the audience (and our liaison) when it comes to solving the mystery that is Tommy Wiseau, and there couldn't be a better, wittier, or more delightfully self-deprecating guide to tenderly take your hand and lead you into the beautiful Samuel Beckett nightmare dystopia of "The Room." He did every fan of the Tommy Wiseau universe an incredible service by sharing the story behind some of the biggest enigmas of "The Room": Why does Johnny laugh at the fact that a woman was beaten up so badly she had to go to a hospital on Guerrero Street? What's the reason for there being two Peter the Psychologists? Why didn’t they just film the roof scenes on an actual roof? Where the heck does Tommy Wiseau come from, and how did he manage to raise millions of dollars to make this movie? Although not all mysteries are neatly solved, Sestero's narration does the near-impossible in contextualizing the life of Tommy Wiseau in such a way that all of his baffling directorial and acting choices, not least being the fact that he decided to make a movie in the first place, well, kind of make sense against the backdrop of Tommy’s very strange life.Like I said, this book is incredibly funny - so much so, my level of enjoyment when reading was on par with the joy I experience every time I watch "The Room.” But “The Disaster Artist” is not a book that exploits the oddities of Tommy Wiseau for its own benefit, or to Tommy’s detriment. What makes this book transcend the boundaries of the exposé I initially expected it to be is the fact that Greg and Tommy find genuine friendship in each other, much to my bewilderment. More than that, there’s intense complexity, tension, jealousy, loyalty, and affection within their relationship, and Sestero demonstrates this beautifully. He’s managed both to give the audience all the juicy details we’ve wanted for a number of years, and to do so with immense sensitivity and empathy for his friend. He also reveals what I can only assume is a unifying experience of rejection and false hope for aspiring actors in Hollywood, and very poignantly demonstrates his own struggle to find his place in Tinseltown. I found the interplay between encouragement, competition, and outright jealousy between Tommy and Greg not only fascinating, but also very honest and refreshing. The “Talented Mr. Ripley” section of the book was one of the (many) moments when I found myself forgetting I was reading a book about how a movie was made rather than a prize-winning novel. *Side note: after the intensity of that segment, Tommy’s “Mark Damon” moment had me laughing for days… I’m having a laughing fit just thinking about it. It was such a perfect tonal shift, and one of many examples of Sestero’s abilities as a storyteller.* After reading about Sestero’s own journey, I feel so glad for him that he’s found in “The Room” prosperity and the affection of a very loyal audience of cult film enthusiasts (myself included).When I started this book, Tommy was nothing more to me than a narcissistic oddball, or a specimen in a fish tank, albeit one who I found strangely charming and affectionate for all his idiosyncrasies. After finishing “The Disaster Artist,” though, I can clearly see all the ambiguities to Tommy’s personality that were so fastidiously hidden in “The Room.” He was at times frustrating, charitable, manipulative, courageous, obsessive, and even possibly vampiric in his nocturnal activities, along with a host of many other shades. I found myself utterly heartbroken for him at pivotal moments in the book, and by the time I arrived at the retelling of Tommy’s life story, honestly amazed at this individual’s sheer force of will. It is, quite simply, miraculous that the world has been given the gift of “The Room” given how utterly Sisyphean the journey to its completion really was, and I thank Tommy and everyone else involved for doing it.Don’t get me wrong: Tommy is not Johnny, however much he’d like to be. But you know what? After reading “The Disaster Artist,” I can honestly say that I prefer Tommy. Johnny can leave his stupid comments in his pocket for all I care.

'The Disaster Artist' is an amazing book, and I don't mean that in the same way that people say the film 'The Room' is amazing, i.e., amazingly bad. I mean that it is actually a really amazing character study of one Tommy Wiseau, the wealthy, earnest and completely bizarre auteur behind what has been called "the Citizen Kane of bad movies." As is often the case, truth is stranger than fiction, and the character of Johnny from the film only scratches at the surface of the weirdness of the real-life Tommy.Tommy speaks bizarrely broken English with a heavy Eastern European accent, but insists that he's from New Orleans. Tommy wants to be an actor even though he can't remember simple lines in a script that he wrote himself. Tommy always puts his phone on speaker so that he can record conversations with a cheap tape recorder and play them back later. Tommy is so secretive and paranoid that even after a number of years his close friend Greg is still clueless about whether he has any family or what he does for a living. Tommy occupies his own reality.We meet Tommy through the eyes of his close friend, actor Greg Sestero. An aspiring actor in San Francisco, Greg meets Tommy at an acting class. Charmed by Tommy's fearless obliviousness to his lack of acting ability, Greg strikes up a friendship with Tommy, a friendship that will prove to be crucial for both men. Tommy will help jump-start Greg's acting career by renting him a cheap apartment in Los Angeles. And Greg will be Tommy's close friend, maybe his only friend, and help Tommy make the film which will make him infamous.Intercut with this story is the making of 'The Room itself. If you haven't ever seen 'The Room, I urge you to do so immediately. Whatever strange confluence of events the viewer might imagine lead to this such a weird film, the truth is stranger still. The sublimely ridiculous rooftop scenes were shot in a hastily erected set in a parking lot, despite the fact that Tommy owned an actual rooftop with gorgeous views of downtown San Francisco. Tommy routinely showed up for filming four hours late. He shot on both film and HD cameras simultaneously, even though he had no intention of using the HD footage. Actors were scared away from the casting process due to Tommy's insistence on meeting them at night in a parking lot. And famously, it would take hours and hours to get a passable take of many of Tommy's simplest lines even though he wrote them himself.All of these bizarre stories and many more are faithfully recalled by Tommy's best friend on and off the screen, Greg Sestero, but the heart of the story is Sestero's friendship with Tommy. Sestero comes across as an unbelievably patient and forgiving friend, willing to let Tommy be his own weird self and encouraging him in his starry-eyed ambitions. This despite the fact that at times his friendship with the paranoid and secretive Tommy feels extremely toxic. Tommy is, after all, the guy who hired a documentarian to secretly spy on the cast and crew of the film.Sestero makes it abundantly clear that the secret to `The Room', the thing that makes it such a uniquely strange and riveting film, is that it's filtered through Tommy Wiseau's unique vision. Tommy Wiseau would be one of the great characters in literature, if he weren't completely real.To their credit, Sestero and his co-author Greg Bissell do not approach their subject with a spirit of mockery. They treat Tommy as a genuine person, albeit a very unusual and fascinating one. Tommy has his highs of ebullient fearlessness and lows of manipulation and paranoia. Sestero and Bissell capture both in the style of the best documentarians painting a picture of a very complex and troubled individual.This book is compulsively readable, one of the best character studies I've seen, and made me laugh out loud at several points. Watch 'The Room if you haven't seen it, then pick up 'The Disaster Artist immediately.

Read this book after seeing the film version and I must be honest this book is so much better and really well written. The movie was made to be a comedy but this book was the brutal reality of friendship. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

A guy who had unshakeable courage to pursue his dreams. If Tommy Wiseau can do it in acting, you can do in whatever field you want to succeed in. Tommy did not have in depth knowledge or even mediocre training in the field of film making. He just went ahead to pursue his passion. He saw the sun and took a blind leap of faith towards it. Only if we all had half the courage he had we would also achieve great things. Thank you Greg and Tommy for giving us this novel, the movie room and Disaster Artist movie. Your names are etched in history forever. Be like Tommy and Greg, just take that blind leap of faith to achieve greatness.

Sehr lustig teils.

Buen libro para pasar un agradable rato leyendo sobre cómo fue que se hizo la película The Room, la mejor peor película del mundo, desde la perspectiva de Greg Sestero. Es interesante conocer los pequeños detalles sobre la filmación y la personalidad de Tommy Wiseau. La película no le hace mucha justicia al libro. Sobre la encuadernación no tengo nada qué decir, por el precio no esperaba yo un libro impecable y las hojas están intactas y no se ha desprendido ninguna, así que todo bien.

Um livro que te prende, terminei em poucos dias. É engraçado e trágico acompanhar tudo que aconteceu, e também o que levou a acontecer, o pior filme do mundo. Mostra umado muito humano, dos bastidores, de sonhos. Recomendo.