On Wednesday night, it was nearly impossible to enter Tommy’s Planet, a Chicago pop-up bar launched in celebration of the cult movie The Room. A statue of a stout doggy sat on the counter near the front door, and dozens of people had blocked the point of entry in their attempt to pat it on the head, and photograph themselves doing so. The rite of passage was, for diehard viewers of The Room, completely necessary, and completely alienating to anyone just swinging by to see what the fuss is all about, more or less summing up the movie itself.
Tommy’s Planet is housed inside Emporium Pop, an increasingly popular Logan Square theme bar. In September, Emporium Pop experienced a bolt of publicity when it transformed its interior to honor the Netflix series Stranger Things. Once word spread of its existence, the Stranger Things bar (titled “The Upside Down,” a nod to a setting in the show) had lines over a hundred feet out the door. In response, Netflix sent Emporium Pop a strongly worded letter asking them to stop this unauthorized adaptation, but other parent companies have come around to the upside: Tommy’s Planet is sponsored by A24, the studio releasing The Disaster Artist, a new movie that chronicles the creation of The Room and its mysterious star Tommy Wiseau. The studio endorsed the endeavor in an enthusiastic press release, aware of the perks of encouraging a fanbase to get weird with it.
In The Disaster Artist, the weird-faced Wiseau is portrayed by James Franco, and posters of Franco dressed as Wiseau were pasted all over the walls of the bar. Done in faux-naive Tumblr-art pastel style, and covered in lowercase phrases quoted from the movie — “have no regrets enjoy life,” “be original ok,” “be hero not villain,” “shoot for the stars!” — the posters were designed by A24, and sent over before the opening. Denizens of the bar pointed at these when they talked about Franco. “He really walks to the beat of his own drum,” a bar manager told me. A patron said he’d seen a sneak preview of the film, and that Franco really “channels” Wiseau, the owner of a cinematic vision so endearingly oblivious that making fun of it has become an industry into itself.
The Room was released to almost no fanfare in 2003, but in 2004 it began to pick up steam as a cult film thanks to a series of increasingly popular midnight screenings at the Laemmle Sunset 5 theater in Los Angeles. Cool celebrities like Kristen Bell, who has a role in Franco’s new film, began to attend, funneling more interest to the screenings. In 2006, NPR ran a trend piece about the midnight showings; in 2009, the screenings started popping up around the country, as word of mouth spread. Rituals began forming around the movie’s myriad quirks: Cult devotees would throw plastic kitchenware at the green when they saw glimpses of stock photos of silverware in picture frames, confusingly set up throughout the movie’s main setting. A24’s bar is filled with references to this and scenes from the film. There are glasses full of plastic spoons at the bar, framed pictures of silverware, platters full of tiny footballs (more on that in a second), and cocktails based off of phrases from the movie that people love to shout: “Examine Your Zipper,” “Oh, Hai Mark,” “You’re Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!”
The spread of the Los Angeles screenings included regular sessions at the historical Music Box, about four miles northeast of Emporium Pop near Wrigley Field. At these screenings, the Music Box often hosts Wiseau and co-star Greg Sestero, who is played by Franco’s brother Dave in the new movie, and who is also the co-author of The Disaster Artist, the non-fiction book that was the basis for Franco’s film. A friend tells me he has been to multiple Wiseau-Sestero Q-and-A’s at the Music Box, and deems them uncomfortable. “Tommy might not get it,” he says. “He’s either an amazing, unbelievable actor, or he has just no idea what’s going on.”
In keeping with the film, Wiseau runs around the theater in the lead-up to these screenings, tossing a football around with attendees. In The Room, male characters throw footballs to each other in unusual scenarios that include tight alleyways and post-wedding-photo tuxedo arrangements. It’s difficult to capture a fraction of how bizarre this comes off on screen. Wiseau’s insistence on capturing the verisimilitude of how people act instead feels like an extraterrestrial’s attempt to crash-study American culture. There are somehow four sex scenes, clearly cut from just two filming sessions; there is a pizza ordered that is half artichoke and pesto, half Canadian bacon and pineapple; there is a pathological repetition of the phrase “best friend” and “future wife.” For some reason, Wiseau’s character Johnny pays the college tuition of a young neighbor named Denny, who at one point attempts to get in bed with Johnny and “future wife” Lisa as they’re settling into foreplay. The clumsy come-on is laughed off, and the scene is never brought up again.
After it died as a serious drama and then succeeded as a surreal curiosity, Wiseau came to insist that his work was meant as a dark comedy all along. Of course, no one believed him. The sincerity of this failed desire to fit in is part of his movie’s magic. A woman at Tommy’s Planet tells me that The Room was assigned to her as she studied to obtain a Film Studies degree, with her instructor specifying that it was full of moments that couldn’t be planned or written. Watching it with a large and curious group, as is custom, creates a blend of pathos and schadenfreude that frequently results in absurd wonder. Unintended as it may be — Wiseau favorably compared himself to Tennessee Williams during the movie’s 2003 P.R. circuit — this is the incomparable enchantment that Franco, like so many of the movie’s fans, has glommed onto. It is the reason people come to this promo space to stand in front of a terrifyingly meta green screen, draped behind a recreated rooftop setting from the film, to be photographed for social media.
At its best, Tommy’s Planet, like the unparalleled film that spawned it, finds glory in shit. One of the four specialized cocktails is called the Scotchka, which attempts to make piquant sense from Wiseau’s insane mixture of whiskey and vodka in his film. His protagonist pours himself one of these while opining that “the computer business is too competitive.” When I order this drink — pre-made and poured from a tap, like the other three — I ask the bartender whether they managed to make it taste good. She lies and says yes, when in fact it is atrocious. Still, there is nothing like this mixological catastrophe, and willfully imbibing something so awful feels like an intertextual accomplishment big enough to raise serious questions about what “good” art really is.
Wiseau’s followers, who include Franco and his brother and me, and probably all of the A-list cast of The Disaster Artist — featuring Seth Rogen, Alison Brie, Lizzy Caplan, Zac Efron, Bryan Cranston, Adam Scott, and plenty of other people you’ve seen in sitcoms— come to the Roomverse for a litany of reasons. Some of them are enamored with aesthetic principles of something so bad it’s good; others just like getting stoned and watching dumb shit. What Franco’s version of Wiseau seeks to capture is the filmmaker’s somehow admirable Dipshit John Lennon vibe. Wiseau forges a style of dreaming that, however feverish and outcast and misinformed, is infectiously pure. He forms dumb truisms in the dirt, thinking they are golden; he chases an infinity that no one else can see.
“You can love someone deep inside your heart and there is nothing wrong with it,” Wiseau says in the film, as he leans back in a chair on top of his green-screened room. “If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place.” Who knew that this mawkish Care Bears sentiment would sum up a product that has, in fact, fostered ways for millions of people to more see and enjoy each other? So much so that a Hollywood studio is now looking to sell this fertile niche back to tens of millions more of them, a decade and a half after Wiseau’s movie flopped through its initial two-week release. The Room’s path from dubious, deranged, and unknown to fodder for a mainstream, Oscar-yearning December drama might seem annoying to some cantankerous fans, but the movie itself is far too bizarre to ever become truly mainstream. Wiseau’s movie, once an obscure pleasure for over-invested cinephiles, has become an almost obligatory sensation that people of many stripes use to signal their weirdness, overtly constructed or not.
The Room's alien approximation of humanity has become a language used to signal ourselves. Near the bar’s green screen, three men wearing tuxedo t-shirts (given away freely at the bar) threw around a promotional football, seemingly in the hopes their activity would attract new friends. They had also brought their own football, which was a little larger than those given, and colored bright red. They run a bad movie club, and told me how much they like repeatedly chanting “go” at the Music Box, during one of the film’s many inexplicable transitional pans across the entire Golden Gate Bridge. They imitated this chanting for me, in unison, as people continued to clog the front of the bar.
