The Room is a 2003 American independent romantic drama and black comedy film written, directed, produced, and starring Tommy Wiseau. The film also stars Juliette Danielle and Greg Sestero. Set in San Francisco, the film is centered on a melodramatic love triangle between amiable banker Johnny (Wiseau), his deceptive fiancée Lisa (Danielle), and his conflicted best friend Mark (Sestero). The work was reportedly intended to be semi-autobiographical. According to Wiseau, the title alludes to the potential of a room to be the site of both good and bad events. The stage play from which the film is derived was so named due to its events taking place entirely in a single room.
A number of publications have labeled The Room as one of the worst films ever made, one even describing it as "the Citizen Kane of bad movies". Originally shown only in a limited release in California, The Room quickly became a cult film due to its bizarre and unconventional storytelling, technical and narrative issues, and Wiseau's performance. Although Wiseau has retrospectively described the film as a black comedy, audiences have generally viewed it as a poorly made drama, an opinion shared by some of the cast. Although the film was a box-office bomb, home-media sales and notoriety following its initial release significantly increased its public profile.
The Disaster Artist, Sestero's memoir of the making of The Room, was co-written with Tom Bissell and published in 2013. A film of the same title based on the book, directed by and starring James Franco, was released in 2017; the book and film received widespread acclaim and numerous award nominations. A remake of The Room starring Bob Odenkirk was released in 2025; it was initially planned to be released in 2023, which would have coincided with the twentieth anniversary of The Room.
Plot Johnny is a successful banker who lives in a San Francisco townhouse with his fiancée Lisa, who has become disenchanted with their relationship. She seduces Johnny’s best friend Mark, and the two begin a secret affair. After Johnny fails to get a promotion at work, Lisa tries to cheer him up by getting the two of them drunk.
Johnny and Mark then rescue Denny, a neighboring college student whom Johnny financially and emotionally supports, from being shot by an armed drug dealer, Chris-R for owing him money. Denny later confesses to Johnny that he lusts after Lisa, and though he sympathizes with him, Johnny encourages him to pursue one of his classmates instead.
When Lisa starts falsely claiming that Johnny become physically abusive, the night the two got drunk, Johnny becomes depressed and calls upon both Mark and his psychologist, Peter, for advice. Mark confides to Peter on the rooftop that he feels guilty about his affair. When Peter infers that the affair is with Lisa, Mark suspends him over the roof's edge before relenting.
After having overheard Lisa confessing her infidelity to her mother, Johnny attaches a tape recorder to their downstairs phone in an attempt to identify her lover by recording their phone conversations.
At a surprise birthday party for Johnny, Johnny's friend Steven catches Lisa and Mark kissing while the other guests are outside and chastises them. To distract Johnny, Lisa falsely claims that they are expecting a child, which Johnny announces to the party. At the end of the evening, Lisa and Mark flaunt their affair, leading to a physical altercation between Mark and Johnny, which culminates in Johnny kicking everyone out.
Johnny locks himself in the bathroom and berates Lisa for betraying him, prompting her to call Mark from the upstairs phone. Johnny retrieves the cassette recorder that he attached to the phone and listens to the intimate call. He has a nervous breakdown, furiously destroying his apartment, and commits suicide by shooting himself in the mouth. Lisa tells Mark that they are finally free to be together, but he rejects her, angry over her manipulative behavior towards Johnny. Together with Denny, they wait by Johnny's body for the police to arrive.
Cast
Production Development Tommy Wiseau wrote The Room as a play in 2001, after seeing the film The Talented Mr. Ripley. He then adapted the play into a book, which he was unable to get published. Frustrated, Wiseau instead decided to adapt the play into a film, producing it himself in order to maintain creative control.
Wiseau has been secretive about how he obtained funding for the project, but he told Entertainment Weekly that he made some of the money by importing leather jackets from Korea. According to The Disaster Artist (Greg Sestero's book based on the making of The Room), Wiseau was already independently wealthy at the time production began. Over several years, he claims to have amassed a fortune through entrepreneurship and real estate development in Los Angeles and San Francisco, a story Sestero found impossible to believe. Although many of the people involved with the project feared that the film was part of a money laundering scheme for organized crime, Sestero also found this possibility unlikely. Wiseau spent the entire budget for The Room on production and marketing; Wiseau stated that the film was relatively expensive because many members of the cast and crew had to be replaced. According to Sestero, Wiseau made numerous poor decisions during filming that unnecessarily inflated the film's budget, such as building sets for sequences that could have been filmed on location, purchasing production equipment rather than renting it, and filming scenes multiple times using different sets. Wiseau also forgot his lines and place on camera, resulting in minutes-long dialogue sequences taking hours or days to shoot. Wiseau's antics on the set further caused the film's cost to skyrocket, according to Sestero.
According to Sestero and Greg Ellery, Wiseau rented a studio at the Birns & Sawyer film lot and bought a "complete Beginning Director package", which included two film and HD cameras; Wiseau was confused about the differences between 35 mm film and high-definition video, yet he wanted to be the first director to film an entire movie simultaneously in two formats. He achieved this goal by using a custom-built apparatus that housed both cameras side by side and required two crews to operate. However, only the 35 mm film footage was used in the final cut.
Casting
Wiseau selected actors from thousands of head shots, although most of the cast had never been in a feature film prior to The Room. Sestero had limited film experience and agreed to work as part of the production crew only as a favor to Wiseau, whom he had been friends with for some time before production began. Sestero then agreed to play the character "Mark" after Wiseau fired the original actor on the first day of filming. Sestero was uncomfortable filming his sex scenes and was allowed to keep his jeans on while shooting them.
According to Greg Ellery, Juliette Danielle had "just gotten off the bus from Texas" when the shooting began, and "the cast watched in horror" as Wiseau jumped on Danielle, immediately beginning to film their "love scene". Sestero disputed this, stating that the sex scenes were among the last filmed. Wiseau said that Danielle was originally one of three or four understudies for the Lisa character and was selected after the original actress left the production. According to Sestero, the original actress was "Latina" and came from an unidentified South American country; according to Danielle, the actress was closer to Wiseau's age with a "random" accent. Danielle had been cast as Michelle but was given the Lisa role when the original actress was dismissed because her "personality... didn't seem to fit" the character. Danielle corroborates that multiple actors were dismissed from the production prior to filming, including another actress hired to play Michelle.
Dan Janjigian, who portrayed drug dealer Chris-R, was the roommate of the actor originally cast to play Mark, a man only identified as Dan (or Don, as director Wiseau mistakenly referred to him). He was suggested despite the proposal by Wiseau to cast Scott Holmes, who had already portrayed the character Mike within the film, to play Chris-R with a disguise so as to distinguish him from his original character.
Even though Kyle Vogt (who played Peter) told the production team that he had only a limited amount of time for the project, not all of his scenes were filmed by the time his schedule ran out. Despite the fact that Peter was to play a pivotal role in the climax, Vogt left the production; his lines in the last half of the film were given to Ellery, whose character is never introduced, explained, or addressed by name.
Writing The original script was significantly longer than the one used and featured a series of lengthy monologues; it was edited on-set by the cast and script supervisor Sandy Schklair, who found much of the dialogue incomprehensible. An anonymous cast member told Entertainment Weekly that the script contained "stuff that was just unsayable. I know it's hard to imagine there was stuff that was worse. But there was." Sestero mentions that Wiseau was adamant characters say their lines as written, but that several cast members slipped in ad libs that made the final cut.
Much of the dialogue is repetitive, especially Johnny's. His speech contains several catchphrases: he begins almost every conversation with "Oh, hi!" or "Oh, hi [name of character]!". To dismissively end conversations, many characters use the phrase "Don't worry about it", and almost every male character discusses Lisa's physical attractiveness (including an unnamed character whose only line is "Lisa looks hot tonight"). Lisa often stops discussions about Johnny by saying "I don't want to talk about it."
In The Disaster Artist, Sestero recalls that Wiseau planned a subplot in which Johnny was revealed to be a vampire because of Wiseau's fascination with them. Sestero recounts how Wiseau tasked the crew with devising a way for Johnny's Mercedes-Benz to fly across the San Francisco skyline, revealing Johnny's vampiric nature.
Filming Principal photography lasted four months. Shooting took place mainly on the Birns & Sawyer soundstage in Los Angeles, with some second unit shooting in San Francisco, California. The many rooftop sequences were shot on the soundstage, and exteriors of San Francisco were greenscreened in. A behind-the-scenes feature shows that some of the roof scenes were shot in August 2002. The film employed over 100 people, and Wiseau is credited as an actor, writer, producer, director, and executive producer. Other executive producer credits include Chloe Lietzke and Drew Caffrey. According to Sestero, Lietzke was Wiseau's ESL tutor and had no involvement in the film, and Caffrey, who had been an entrepreneurial mentor to Wiseau, died in 1999. Wiseau had several problems with his behind-the-camera team, and claims to have replaced the entire crew four times. He also assigned multiple (and often disparate) responsibilities to several crew members, a process Sestero described as "sandwich[ing] two roles into one" that frequently resulted in shooting delays: aside from playing the role of Mark, Sestero worked as the film's line producer, helped with casting, and assisted Wiseau; Schklair also served as a de facto first assistant director, and Birns & Sawyer sales representative Peter Anway acted as another assistant to Wiseau. Wiseau frequently forgot his lines or missed cues, and required numerous retakes and direction from Schklair and a stagehand named Byron; much of his dialogue had to be dubbed in post-production.
Soundtrack