A Good Night for a Bad Film

Lots of new films turn up at the multiplex every week, so much so that, every once in a while, a really good one gets overlooked. Think about it – “Night of the Living Dead” was considered just another creature feature in 1968 before the Museum of Modern Art gave it some serious attention a couple of years later. The same can be said of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which seemed doomed to obscurity after it came out in 1958, but got a second chance when the next generation of movie buffs discovered it. Even Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” whose public-domain status made it easy to play on TV every Christmas, got about as much love in 1946 as a holiday fruitcake.

As improbable a phenomenon as this is, what’s even more unlikely is when the same thing happens to a bad movie. Sure, there are lots of films out there that are pretty bad, but some are so unique that they might actually be worth the price of admission. Without all of the dumb dialogue and underwhelming special effects in “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” Ed Wood wouldn’t have earned his reputation as the worst director of all time. The absent-minded dubbing and clunky editing in “Manos: The Hands of Fate” were so careless that it wound up on “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” a TV show that was a kind of B-movie graveyard. Depending on how much time you spend on the Internet, there’s a chance you’ve seen clips of the notoriously bad acting from “Troll 2,” which is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what makes it such a disaster. Even the people in it said later that movies don’t get much worse than that.

Or so it was. Back in 2003, an independent filmmaker named Tommy Wiseau finished work on his directorial debut, a melodrama involving a doomed love triangle called “The Room,” which he raised $6 million to complete. He felt he had good reason to put so much heart into it – after all, it was a faithful production (which he helped produce) of a solid script (which he wrote) with a breakthrough performance (which he delivered).

You can get an idea of how it did commercially and critically by reading Scott Foundas’ review in Variety, the only major media outlet that bothered to send someone to give it a look. “Pic may be something of a first,” he wrote. “A movie that prompts most of its viewers to ask for their money back – before even 30 minutes have passed.” (At least the “something of a first” part would’ve made a great quote for the poster.)

After a premiere as pathetic as that, you’d think no self-respecting theater owner would’ve gotten anywhere near it. A great deal has changed during the past couple of years, though. Oh, there are still plenty of people who think “The Room” is a gigantic mess, but these same people have transformed it into a hit, one that’s a crowd pleaser in spite of itself. In fact, midnight screenings of it have been so successful that they sell out as quickly as they turn up. Anyone who wants to see it tomorrow night at Village East Cinema in New York should reserve a ticket before it’s too late.

Although it doesn’t come to New York often, hundreds of people line up to see it every month at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, the theater that’s become the epicenter of the whole thing. Isaac Wade, the general manager at Sunset 5, stated that it’s done good business there these past seven years.

“In the beginning, it was only around a hundred people or so that would come to the midnight screenings,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Attendance grew steadily over the years, requiring us to show the film on more than one screen.”

For as loyal a following as it had, Wade said it really took off in December 2008, when Kristen Bell brought it up on national television. “Bell was interviewed on ‘Jimmy Kimmel’ and talked about ‘The Room,’ which she had seen the weekend before with some friends of hers,” he wrote. “The next month, we experienced a spike in sales, requiring us to use all five screens.”

To see a film this bad get this big is strange enough, but what’s even more bizarre is what its director has to say about all this. Whenever someone questions Wiseau about “The Room,” not only does he seem satisfied with everything, but he insists that he wanted it to be received as a comedy all along, and that he’d directed it in the spirit of camp.

John Wilson, who founded the Golden Raspberry Awards (those are the awards that go to the worst films of the year), said that while he never got around to watching “The Room,” he’s seen at least one auteur try to save grace like this before. Norman Mailer might’ve been one of America’s most celebrated writers, but when he turned his own “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” into a film in 1987, the result was a thriller so laughable that, yes, he tried to pass it off as a comedy.

“He did a good enough job – Norman Mailer – convincing people that this had been intended as a comedy all along that it actually got a handful of rave reviews as a dark comedy,” he said on the telephone. “You kind of have to come up with something, or you just look really stupid.”

Of course, even if movies like “The Room” don’t work the way they should, Wilson said they should still be thought of as rare things of beauty. “Something like this has to rise generically – it can’t be manufactured,” he said. “If it’s enough of a mess, it takes on a life of its own, and can actually be funnier than something that was intended to be a comedy.”

There might be more going on here than Wilson realizes, though. Lewis Lovhaug, a critic who’s got his own comedy series on a site called That Guy with the Glasses, recently turned up in a review of “The Room” with Doug Walker, who calls himself the Nostalgia Critic. Although the film’s camp value isn’t lost on him, Lovhaug stated that one of the things that made it a smash was that audiences couldn’t believe how awful it was.

“A lot of it is just fascination with a movie this horrible,” he wrote in an e-mail. “And make no mistake – from an acting, editing, writing and directing point of view, the film is absolutely dreadful.”

You can say the same thing about lots of movies, of course. In that light, how did “The Room” become this popular with so many other dreadful films floating around?

“I’m not sure how any particular film gains infamy over others – just word of mouth, I guess,” Lovhaug wrote. “The YouTube generation helps, spreading the word about such things and then building up a following from shared interest, like with any fandom.”

Lovhaug’s theory seems about as good as any. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, after all, and though “The Room” has left audiences howling with laughter, the heartiest laughs are probably coming from Wiseau when he brings another check with him to the bank.

This article originally appeared on AllMediaNY.com.