Lessons Not Learned - The Room

 So The Room, it's not very good, isn't it?  It's pretty terrible, and not just in a filmmaking manner, it has a lot of really ugly, deeply mysogynistic baggage in it's story which I'm saddened that we don't really discuss more.  However, in a way we should have seen this as a warning for what was to come, how Tommy Wiseau's... bafflepiece was in a way a precursor to what another director called Tom would do, only instead of risking his own money, he did it with a big studio's...

The Room

Now I don't think I really need to get too deeply into The Room itself, it's been a punching bag for so long by this point.   Instead, the points I really want to draw upon are to be found in the book The Disaster Artist by star Greg Sistero and Tom Bissell.  That had its own film version out, but I want to focus on stuff the book makes clearer.  You see, the book and the film can actually be useful together in the art of film studies, as what they give together is a perfect "here's what not to do" guide.  The book mentions mistakes that Wiseau made, and when you watch the film you can see the effect that mistake had.  For example, the book mentions Tommy not filming the scenes in particular sets all in one go, leading them to waste a lot of money putting them up and taking them down again.  It's stuff like that which are what lead to a film that cost $6 Million (which isn't huge as far as budgets go, but is certainly bigger than average for an indie drama like this) looking so damn cheap (fun fact; you can make four episodes of modern Doctor Who for that much, and they all look far more cinematic).

There are two things from this in particular I want to note here.  Firstly, the way everyone on set was treated, including not running air-con and not shelling out for much water (Sistero makes note of how Wiseau would throw out money at needless expenses, but would really rankle at paying relatively small, but essential, costs like catering).  It's no wonder with an atmosphere like that the performances turned out so bad.  The other thing was the cinematography, that Wiseau had the film shot digitally and on celluoid at the same time, because that had never been done before.  As Sistero says, it apparently never occured to Wiseau why precisely that had never been done before. (Answer; because trying to find a way of lighting a set that would look right on both at once is an absolute nightmare).  It's no wonder the whole thing became an extended joke of a film destined for the modern equivalent of the midnight movies circuit.

The Lessons Not Learned

Now, what exactly could this one, a true definition of a cult curio, have to teach modern Hollywood?  After all, it's the studio system, not the indie scene, what mistakes could have been avoided from looking at the tale of Tommy Wiseau.  Well, it could have avoided the almost identical mistakes of another Tom... Tom Hooper.  

Now some of you are probably going "Ed you intellectual colossus with wisdom and humility to match, are you seriously comparing the Oscar winning director of The King's Speech to Tommy Wiseau".  To which I'd say "No, I'm comparing the director of Les Miserables and Cats to Tommy Wiseau", and I think from there you'll understand a bit better.  Now the imperitus for doing this little rant comes from seeing online Sideways' discussions on what had been done to the music in both of those films. I have to seriously praise him for making these, as being not musically trained at all, I couldn't appreciate what was going wrong with the music until he explained it.  Hell, with Cats there's so much going wrong visually that I didn't notice half of what was going wrong with the music on my first attempt.  I'll stick both videos below this paragraph, it's well worth having a watch of both; it will take you less time than it would to watch one of the films, and you'll get a lot more out of the experience...

With those, the parallels Hooper has with Tommy Wiseau are remarkably clear.  He was someone entering a field of filmmaking they were completely unprepared for (in Hooper's case muscial films, as someone who'd only done dramas before), with some bold new ideas of what to do (in Hooper's cases singing live on set), necessitating a lot of needless extra work and expense, when simpler, more cost efficient, and overall more successful methods had been perfected years ago.  Someone so in love with their ideas and over confident in their abilities they couldn't see how badly their methods were warping the finished product.  Someone who borrowed from previous creators without at all understanding why their methods worked (in Wiseau's case it was Tennessee Williams' high drama, with Hooper it's Stanley Kubrick's camerawork and legendary use of multiple takes), leading them to misuse those techniques horribly.  Oh, and like Wiseau, Hooper treated the people who worked under him like shit (whilst I'm here, fuck James Corden and Rebel Wilson for throwing the SFX crews under the bus when it's Hooper who deserved the blame!).  Seriously, the number of parallels start getting comical, like how even both badly dehydrated their casts!

It still baffles me to this day that Les Miserables the film was a success, I remember watching it at the time and being utterly agog that film that ugly to look at, with the music all over the place, won anyone over.  Hooper should really not have been let loose on another musical after that, but Cats... happened, and was a complete wreck. (I will note that no, Les Mis was not as bad as Cats, it's more that a lot of what's wrong with Cats is what's wrong with Les Mis turned up to 11).  It was an avoidable one though, with the lesson we could have learned from Tommy Wiseau, and it's actually a very simple one.  When someone with no experience within a field at all comes in with a big idea, to do something that has never been done before, you should immediately ask the question "why hasn't it been done before, why don't we do it like that?".  It would be a brand new idea to, say, make a fighter jet out of meringue, but that does not mean it's a good one!  Also, if a director really does not understand what they are doing, then they can make a budget vanish before your eyes; a $6 Million film can look worse than direct-to-streaming horror made for loose change, and a musical with a budget that's eight figures big can have the whole cast look and sound worse than a community theatre production.  I hope that Cats as a whole never becomes a lesson for one of these articles, and with the forced hiatus the film industry has been on, the circumstances and consequences of its failure have been well considered.