The Room Scores an 8 Out of 10 Despite Being a Terrible Movie, All Things Considered

The scoring system here rates a film in two categories: the quality of the movie itself, and the production chaos that went on behind the scenes making it. The two scores are then averaged out for a final grade that reflects both the film and the madness it took to make it. A bad movie that's a five out of ten on its own might rise to an eight once the behind-the-scenes disaster is factored in. That is exactly what happens with The Room.

After seeing The Talented Mr. Ripley with friend and aspiring actor Greg Sestero, Tommy Wiseau was moved to write a play, which he then turned into a sprawling 600-page book that no publisher would touch. So he decided to turn it into a film and finance the entire thing himself to the tune of six million dollars. How he afforded that is genuinely unclear. Some claim the money came from commercial properties he owned and later sold. Others point to his discount clothing business importing leather jackets from Korea and selling Levi's jeans. There were also stories of a massive out-of-court settlement following an alleged car accident, or that the whole production was secretly bankrolled by a wealthy benefactor. Nobody really knows but Wiseau, and he's not exactly a reliable narrator.

Shooting on film and digital cameras at once inflated the budget for no reason

Instead of renting camera equipment like any other production, Wiseau bought it outright. Because digital cameras were relatively new at the time, he didn't understand the difference between them and film cameras, so he decided to shoot every scene on both formats simultaneously. That required additional equipment, more crew members, and extra time aligning both cameras before every single shot. After all that money and effort, Wiseau then threw away the digital footage entirely and only used the film version in the finished movie.

Expensive sound stage sets replaced cheap location shoots, and a carpenter got stiffed

Locations that could easily have been sourced for cheap, like an alleyway and a rooftop, were instead built on a sound stage. After the rooftop scene was filmed and the set dismantled, Wiseau suddenly decided he wanted additional shots, so he ordered the carpenter to return and rebuild the entire set. Once the job was finished, he refused to pay her the amount they had agreed on and would not even reimburse her for the nails she had purchased.

Four understudies for one role, and actors fired mid-shoot

Coming from theater, Wiseau hired understudies for many of the leads, including four separate understudies for the character of Lisa alone. There is no real reason to have an understudy on a movie, let alone four for one part. When he didn't like the original Lisa actor, he replaced her with Juliette Danielle, who had actually been understudying an entirely different character named Michelle. The same happened with Mark: Wiseau fired that actor on the first day of shooting and asked Sestero, who was helping out as a PA, to take the role instead. The character was named Mark because Wiseau thought Matt Damon's first name was Mark.

The actor playing Peter the psychologist only had a limited number of days available, and because filming dragged on so long, he had to leave before finishing all his scenes. His remaining lines were handed to a different character named Steven, who shows up in the finished film with zero introduction.

Wiseau showed up hours late and needed 32 takes for a seven second shot

Once filming began, Wiseau would often arrive around four hours late while everyone sat around waiting. As the star, he could never remember his own lines despite having written them himself. The now-famous rooftop exchange where he insists "I did not hit her, it's not true, it's I did not hit her, I did not, oh hi Mark" reportedly took 32 takes and three hours to film, despite the final shot lasting only seven seconds. That is also why most of his dialogue is so obviously dubbed in post-production.

The crew was replaced four times while Wiseau secretly recorded and reviewed set footage

Since Wiseau had no real idea what he was doing, the script supervisor basically took over directing duties for most of the shoot, until he eventually left for a job on a film with Spielberg's DP Janusz Kaminski. Plenty of others left too, either fired, quitting after clashing with Wiseau, or moving on to better opportunities. By Wiseau's own claim, he replaced the entire crew four separate times.

He also hired an assistant to record behind-the-scenes footage of the people making the movie, then spent hours every night watching it back to see who had been criticizing him. He would then use that against them, as happened when the film's first cinematographer quit and demanded to be paid. By the end of the shoot, morale was so low that take numbers stopped being recorded and entire scenes were shot out of focus because nobody bothered to check the lenses.

No water for the cast, a thrown bottle, and a contested nude scene

Wiseau gave himself his own private toilet but failed to provide basic necessities like water bottles or air conditioning for the cast and crew under the hot studio lights. When one actor complained about the lack of water, Wiseau threw a bottle at her head. The elderly actor playing Lisa's mother fainted on set from heat exhaustion and dehydration.

During the love scene between Lisa and Johnny, there are conflicting accounts of whether the set was open or closed, which matters because a closed set with minimal crew is standard for nudity. Allegedly Wiseau didn't bother closing it and even extended filming as long as possible because, according to Sestero, he was enjoying himself. Wiseau also allegedly insulted Juliette Danielle's skin on set, humiliating her to the point of tears, and the crew had to step in to defend her.

Paramount passed, so Wiseau put his own face on a billboard for five years

To distribute the film, Wiseau turned to Paramount, who turned him down immediately. He instead promoted the film with a single billboard in Los Angeles featuring an extreme close-up of his own face mid-blink. Asked why he chose it, Wiseau said it was provocative and that he looked like an evil man, which he wasn't entirely wrong about since most people who saw the billboard assumed The Room was a horror film. After low ticket sales, it was pulled from theaters almost immediately, though Wiseau paid to keep it running in one cinema for two weeks so it would qualify for Oscar consideration. The billboard itself stayed up for over five years, costing him five thousand dollars a month, and became something of a tourist attraction.

Production chaos earns a perfect 10 out of 10

This is a 10. It doesn't get worse than this, and it proves that when the writer, director, producer, financier, and star are all the same person, one man can generate an entire studio's worth of production issues by himself.

The movie itself is objectively a 1 out of 10, but it's genuinely entertaining

The first time I heard about The Room was from a friend back in film school, who described it as if an alien had come down to Earth to make a film about a species he didn't understand. After seeing it, he was right. Nothing in the movie makes sense. Lisa's mother casually announces she has cancer and it's never brought up again, the same goes for Denny and his drugs, and one character is literally replaced halfway through with no explanation at all. Characters throw a football around during dialogue scenes constantly, and the dialogue itself veers into non sequiturs that have nothing to do with the scene or anything else in the film.

The acting is just as bad. Wiseau's character has violent mood swings, says "Oh hi" nine times in the film, and is dubbed so poorly it feels like watching a foreign film. I will give the movie credit for one thing it does well, the rooftop green screen shots, which look genuinely good, so much so that for the longest time I didn't realize they were fake. Objectively, the movie is a 1 out of 10 and quite possibly the worst movie ever made. But it's one of those rare cases where a movie is so bad it's good, and I mean laughing to the point of tears. From an entertainment perspective it absolutely succeeds, and watching it with an audience in a packed theater is one of the all-time great theatrical experiences.

Why the entertainment value gets a 6 out of 10, not a 1

The Room fails by virtually every conventional measure, but it succeeds in the one way that actually matters: people genuinely love watching it. Not because Wiseau made the gripping drama he thought he did, but because his bizarre performance and inexplicable creative decisions combined into something no confident filmmaker could have deliberately made. Even Wiseau's later directorial effort Big Shark failed to capture the same lightning in a bottle, because you can't try to make a bad movie. It has to happen by accident.

The great irony is that The Room eventually became the success Wiseau always believed it would be, just not for any of the reasons he intended. What began as a disastrous theatrical release grew into a genuine cult hit through years of midnight screenings and home video sales, eventually becoming enough of a cultural phenomenon that its adaptation, The Disaster Artist, about the making of the movie, received an actual Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. I can't in good conscience give it a 1 out of 10 because the film is genuinely entertaining, and when it ends I'm happy and smiling. Compare that to a truly awful movie with no redeeming qualities, where I usually walk out angry, disappointed, and annoyed that I wasted my time and money. I'm giving it a 6 out of 10.

The final verdict: an 8 out of 10, all things considered

Taking a perfect 10 out of 10 for production woes and averaging it with a 6 out of 10 for sheer unintentional entertainment value, The Room rises to an 8 out of 10 all things considered. I'm anointing it with the highest honor available here, as a true miracle of cinema.

What score would you give The Room, all things considered?