From Horror to Simply Horrible

I’ve always wondered how “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” became a cult hit. Did one guy just show up in latex one night, pelting people with rice to the delight of the couples in the audience? “Honey, I believe that gentleman has a splendid idea. What say next week we return in gender-bending S&M; gear of our own?”

Now I know. “The Room,” an indie drama advertised for the last three years on a creepy-looking billboard on Highland Avenue, plays now and then at midnight at West Hollywood’s Laemmle Sunset 5 theaters. People dress as the characters, shout out the lines, throw roses and plastic spoons, clap along to the music, count the number of times dialogue is repeated and constantly yell back at the screen.

The cultization of the film started two years ago when some undergrad USC film majors went to a free screening, which star/writer/director Tommy Wiseau had promoted with a personal fortune-worth of billboards, local TV commercials, free T-shirts, postcards and a genius L.A. Weekly full-page ad that claimed you could not call yourself a real actor if you didn’t come see the movie. This, I believe, is basically the same ploy Robert Evans used to meet women.

Before last weekend’s showing, I went to a pre-”Room” party hosted by Richard Lukas, who wore a long black wig, sunglasses and an askew tie like the film’s Wiseau. Reuben Sears, who was seeing the film for a fifth time, made me a drink named after his favorite character, Silk Shirt Guy. “I keep a postcard of ‘The Room’ in my car,” said Sears, an actor. “Every time I feel bad about my career, I flip down my visor and say, ‘If these people are in a movie, maybe I can have a career too.’ It’s a good motivator for me.”

More than 140 people showed up, some of them instructed to see it by their New York Film Academy teachers -- as an example of how not to make a film. The guys in back of me had endless packages of plastic spoons, along with bubble soap they never used. The embarrassing bubble-blowing scene, they later realized, was in “Fever Pitch.”

“The Room” is a lot like what a movie would look like if it were made by a North Korean dictator. The actors weren’t the age they claimed to be, their wigs didn’t fit, a woman suddenly said she had breast cancer and never mentioned it again, the San Francisco skyline is shown on a blue screen on an L.A. rooftop, and a soft-core sex scene had Wiseau positioned in a way that looked like he was enjoying his girlfriend’s stomach -- which, having looked at her, would have been impossible.

By the time I left, the thing I was most shocked by -- other than the fact that the characters mixed a drink that was one part whiskey with one part vodka -- was that Wiseau, who spent six years on the film and submitted it for an Academy Award, was handing out a documentary he made about the audience reaction. He had become a willing party to his mockery. It was like he stole George W. Bush’s playbook.

I met Wiseau at Jerry’s Deli, where he wore his Oakley sunglasses the entire time and spoke in a thick pan-European accent he refuses to identify. He said he always intended to provoke the audience with his extreme choices. “In America, we don’t play football in tuxedos. Or from 3 feet away,” he said. “It says you can break the rules. Freedom of expression is the idea.”

When I pressed him on what it feels like to have to reedit your website so “a film with the passion of Tennessee Williams” is immediately followed by “experience this quirky new black comedy!” he said he always meant for it to be a comedy. Then he paused and added, “I wanted people to see my movie. That’s the irony of the story.”

When I got home, I was still thinking about how pathetic it is to need attention so badly that it feels good to be abused. Later that night, a friend e-mailed to tell me she saw Lewis Black’s stand-up routine and he mentioned me in a punch line. And, for a good while, I was excited about it.