greg sestero the room tour

Greg Sestero

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Featuring a Live Q&A with Greg Sestero

Join us for a special evening of the hit cult classic The Room with Greg Sestero, star of The Room nd author of The Disaster Artist. Greg will be doing live commentary during the movie! Greg will also hold Q and A after both film screenings as well as a meet-and-greet opportunity!

Greg also recently wrote and produced Best F(r)iends Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Lionsgate) and was recently seen in Netflix's popular gothic-drama mini-series The Haunting of Bly Manor. His directorial/ horror genre debut, Miracle Valley, was released in 2022. It is the first very first film to ever shoot at Frank Lloyd Wright’s world renowned masterpiece Falling Water.

The Room : A Cult Classic 20 Years Later

Posted on July 10, 2023

By Isabella Echevarría

The Room is back on the big screen for its 20th anniversary. When the Independent Picture House announced two screenings — including an appearance by costar and producer Greg Sestero — tickets sold out almost immediately. The IPH ended up screening the cult classic four times on July 7 and 8, selling out three of them and nearly selling out the fourth.  

At the screenings, Sestero showing the audience a clip of the film’s recent remake, starring Bob Odenkirk, and led a hilarious live script reading by audience members. In a Q&A, Sestero talked all things The Room and The Disaster Artist, his 2013 book about making the film, which inspired a movie of the same name starring James Franco and Seth Rogen.

Directed and written by Tommy Wiseau, The Room  follows three protagonists, Lisa, Johnny and Mark, as they engage in a drama-filled love triangle. When it premiered in 2003, the critics panned it, but it has slowly built a devoted fanbase. “After 20 years, I think people genuinely love it,” Sestero told the audience. “I mean, you can make fun of something for a couple of weeks, but I think after this long there is something really there that speaks to people.” 

It was a pleasure having Greg Sestero visit the Independent Picture House, and we wish him the best during the rest of The Room’ s 20th anniversary tour!

Film enthusiast Isabella Echevarría loves talking about all things Wes Anderson, acting and independent filmmaking.

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Q&A: Greg Sestero, co-star in “The Room”

Hot off the celebrations from last year’s 20th anniversary of “The Room,” a cult-classic film, Greg Sestero, who plays the character Mark in the film, attended a screening of the film at the Coffman Memorial Union Theater on Saturday, providing live commentary and took questions from the audience before the showing.

Sestero’s 2013 memoir “The Disaster Artist,” a book about the making of “The Room” (which has been called “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” ), was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film directed by and starring James Franco in 2017.

Sestero has made feature films of his own in recent years, with his directorial debut “Miracle Valley” premiering at film festivals in 2021 and a UFO movie called “Forbidden Sky” currently in the works.

The Minnesota Daily spoke with Sestero ahead of his appearance at the Coffman Memorial Union Theater on Saturday.

The Minnesota Daily: I saw one interview where you said you had only seen “The Room” about five times yourself. Has that remained true? Greg Sestero: “So as of last year I had only seen it a few times, but most recently with it being the 20th anniversary I have seen it more times. I will admit that the more I’ve seen it, the more enjoyable it’s become, oddly, especially with the crowd. Because the audiences in the room are so much fun, it’s almost a new experience every time. I realize that it is just a really fun movie, it’s a really fun communal experience.”

Daily: Do you have a favorite part of the movie or a favorite part that the audience always gets a kick out of? Sestero: “I really enjoy the birthday party. That scene has so much going on and it feels like you’re at a birthday party. You go up on the roof, then you come back, there’s so many nuances that the crowd picks apart. So I’d say that’s definitely one of my favorites.”

Daily: The movie turned 20 years old last year. How has your relationship with the film evolved over time? Sestero: “I think I’ve come to appreciate ‘The Room’ more over the past couple years, realizing that it’s a movie that brings a lot of people together, makes a lot of people happy. I think that any filmmakers, that’s what they hope their films do – obviously ‘The Room’ is unique in how it does that. But I’ve definitely come to appreciate it, especially seeing crowds around the world that come out to see it.”

Daily: As the movie became a cult classic in the 2000’s, did you have any idea that you might still be attending screenings for it with a bunch of fans 20 years after the fact? Sestero: “No. Really I didn’t think that anybody would ever see it. So many movies come out every year, huge budgets, Marvels, dramas, you know movie-making has been an ongoing thing now for over 100 years. So especially making ‘The Room,’ being an indie film made with your friend, I never could have expected that, I don’t think anybody could have. But that’s sort of the beauty of cinema and art is you don’t know what’s gonna touch people.”

Daily: Shifting gears slightly, what was it like working with Tommy Wiseau again on his new movie “Big Shark”? Sestero: “It’s always a fun experience working with Tommy. We made a movie called Best F(r)iends which he acted in, he was really funny and really engaging playing a mortician. With this movie I think he really goes all out and makes something that, again, ironically is very very fun with a crowd.”

Daily: How would you say the audience reaction has been to “Big Shark” versus “The Room”? Sestero: “Well ‘The Room’ is, you know, it’s such a unique phenomenon in the way people respond to it and engage with it. So I think now, you know, Tommy is obviously very earnest in what he makes and he knows how to make something that the crowd gets excited by. I think it’s just for a different time, different era, I think both movies will play really well together and really give the audience when they leave the theater, they’re going to be feeling like ‘Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything quite like that.” I think that’s what makes these movies unique, they’re not studio-driven, they’re truly coming from one mind whos sees the world in a very different way.”

Daily: You released your directorial debut “Miracle Valley” a couple of years ago, do you have any other creative projects in the works right now? Sestero: “Yeah, I’m making a UFO abduction movie called ‘Forbidden Sky,’ and I’m gonna be making that later this year. We did a Kickstarter for it to involve the fans for the 20th anniversary and it was really great. A lot of people were excited for it. I’m also working on my Home Alone sequel that I wrote at 12-years-old called ‘Home Alone: Lost in Disney World.’”

Daily: Is it true that John Hughes wrote to you after you sent that screenplay in? Sestero: “He did. It was a sequel I mailed to his production office in Lake Forest, Illinois. So he was shocked at how far I took it and sent me a really nice letter about how important it is to follow your dreams.”

Daily: Back to “The Room,” there’s the “The Room Returns!” remake starring Bob Odenkirk, the more dramatized version of it. You’re in that playing Chris R., right? Sestero: “Yeah it was a charity shoot thing that they’re still kind of putting together. It was kind of a one-day thing for charity.”

Daily: What was your reaction when you heard about that concept coming to life? Sestero: “It’s for a charity called amfAR, they take classic works like ‘Breakfast Club’, or ‘Great Gatsby’ and do a reading of it. So I thought, what a great honor, you know with it being ‘The Room’s’s 20th anniversary, to do something like that with it.”

Daily: What was it like celebrating the 20th anniversary last year for “The Room?” Sestero: “It was great. I mean, just the support for it, it was screened around the country I think in 600 theaters. So many places around the world were now getting a chance to go. It’s really been a fun, fun journey to see where it started to see where it is now and the generations of people. Like families now, they saw ‘The Room’ when they were in their teens and now they have kids and it’s just a really, really cool full-circle moment.”

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Join us for a special evening of the hit cult classic The Room with Greg Sestero, star of THE ROOM and author of THE DISASTER ARTIST, the critically-acclaimed tell-all about the making of THE ROOM that inspired A24’s award-winning film THE DISASTER ARTIST.  There will be a Q and A before the film as well as a meet and greet opportunity for every ticket holder!

Greg Sestero is the New York Times best-selling author of the Oscar – nominated The Disaster Artist and Co-Star of the cult classic The Room. Greg also recently wrote and produced Best F(r)iends Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Lionsgate) and was recently seen in Netflix’s popular gothic-drama mini-series The Haunting of Bly Manor. His directorial/ horror genre debut, Miracle Valley, is slated for release in 2022. It is the first very first film to ever shoot at Frank Lloyd Wright’s world renowned masterpiece Falling Water.

More info: Greg’s  2013 memoir  “The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made” was published by Simon & Schuster and adapted into a Golden Globe-winning film by Warner Bros and A24.  It showcases an all-star cast including James Franco, Seth Rogen, Dave Franco, Sharon Stone, Bryan Cranston, and Alison Brie. The hilarious and heartfelt film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2018 Oscars.

Items Available for Sale/Signature:

• THE DISASTER ARTIST paperback
• THE ROOM original screenplay
• BEST F(R)IENDS Volume 1-2 Blu-ray *limited edition
• THE ROOM / DISASTER ARTIST Posters
• Miracle Valley Blu-ray
• “Oh, Hi Mark” t shirts

In San Francisco, an amiable banker’s seemingly perfect life is turned upside down when his deceitful fiancée embarks on an affair with his best friend.

**No outside props permitted.  Bags of spoons will be available for sale in the concession stand.

DOORS OPEN: 5:00 PM SHOWTIME: 6:00 PM ADMISSION: $20, tickets available in advance and at the door.  Tickets on sale June 30 at 10am. RATING: R RUN TIME: 1 hour 39 minutes

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Screen Rant

The room interview: tommy wiseau & greg sestero on making the best-worst movie.

We interview Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero on making The Room, adapting the Disaster Artist to film with James Franco, and The Room on Broadway.

After years on the midnight circuit, The Room  burst into the mainstream with James Franco's adaptation  The Disaster Artist.  Recently, we had the chance to interview stars Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero - who reflected on their time making the best-worst movie in Hollywood history along with Franco's adaption of Sestero's book, The Disaster Artist .

That said, despite the explosion of Room  awareness among non-cinephiles, it's safe to say that the film's writer/director/star and his acting partner-turned-friend haven't been changed by any increased attention the last five years (not to mention a 2018  Academy Award adapted screenplay nomination for the film's writers); instead, they're still the same guys who dreamed of making a name for themselves in Hollywood - on their own terms. In the end, The Room might not have been received the way the pair had hoped - but the cult-classic film has, for better or worse, allowed Wiseau and Sestero a platform on which they have been able to produce other projects, such as their reunion project: Best F(r)iends. In our interview, Wiseau and Sestero discuss their original intentions for The Room , its legacy, a possible Room 3D re-release , The Room on Broadway , and which superhero characters they'd like to portray on screen (together).

Screen Rant: I’m curious, what has been most surprising to you guys about the new wave of interest in The Room ? I have been attending midnight screenings of The Room for years but it’s cool as a fan of The Room to see the community expand the last five years.

Greg Sestero: The Room has just been something that has spread for so many years in such an organic way because, it’s just people wanting to share it with their friends and take people to the theater to see it. So what was really exciting, I think, for The Disaster Artist was it told a universal story that was original and that brought people into this phenomenon, through a personal story rather than this film that people go interact with. And I thought it was great because The Room has just gotten so many different audiences over the years that with The Disaster Audience I feel like it brought, perhaps, people that wouldn’t have checked out The Room but now can really enjoy it and really understand it in a different way and I think it rounded out the audience and grew it in a way that I think has been really interesting to watch. Tommy Wiseau: Yeah, I think that the more people who see The Room, the better. That’s what I can tell you. We've been screening The Room for the past 14 and a half years. The Disaster Artist was beneficial, is very beneficial to actually explore with the audience but we’ve been very grounded with the audience the past 14 and a half years. I noticed in the past few years this very positive response from the media, etc - and I like it.

Screen Rant: I know Tommy that you might re-release The Room in 4K and 3D. Do you have any idea when that might happen and if you’re going to include any special features that weren’t included on the original Blu-ray?

Tommy Wiseau: Well, first I want to do The Room on Broadway, that’s to be the first thing. Keep an eye out for that not off-Broadway - on-Broadway. And then my idea is to actually do 3D, but you know, technology has been changed and I’m leaning to maybe reshooting it, with all the imperfections of course, in 3D. Because I do think with that style, it’s cheaper to reshoot it, if you ask me, based on the technology and my resources, than just using what we have. So that’s the plan for The Room and I’m working on other projects as well. I’m still doing Q & A and other projects as well.

Screen Rant: Was there anything, as it was adapted into The Disaster Artist film, that you guys were especially nervous about seeing? Something that you felt was an important moment in the original production that you knew had to be portrayed in a very specific way to be true to what happened.

Tommy Wiseau: Well keep in mind that The Disaster Artist is based on the Greg Sestero book, The Disaster Artist, so Greg can tell you more than I do, but I think overall the team on The Disaster Artist did a good job. So people have an opportunity to see behind-the-scenes. Just frankly speaking, I think the way that it was presented, I like it because, it’s truthful. Like I said before, the team on The Disaster Artist, they took a risk because it’s a movie about the movie. As you know, people say, “What are you talking about?” And I think it’s very interesting how sincere and how serious they put into practice their ideas. Otherwise it will not work, over past 14 years we've allowed parody on YouTube, which I’m against it, because parody equals stealing. Simple as this. However, I’m for freedom. [SIC] Nothing wrong with people sending out emails saying, “Hey, you know what? I’m only using one minute of your movie.” For those, I say 99% yes. But, as you know, as soon as you grab it or duplicate it from DVD or Blu-ray any footage, I don’t care if from my movie or Paramount Pictures, the same principle – you don’t have the same image, you don’t have the same quality. I speak very openly about it because I want people to understand that you, average person – you, me – we all have ideas. And yes, you can do it. We’ve done it. I’m glad you asked me these questions because I think it’s essential to understand transpired here.

Screen Rant: Was there anything on your experience that influenced how you guys approached reteaming for  Best F(r)iends ? Anything that you made a conscious effort to do again or do differently?

Greg Sestero: [Laughs] Yeah, I learned a lot from The Room and Best F(r)iends was a very different experience from making The Room. It was just more personal. It was smaller in the sense in the amount of people – it was mainly Tommy and I getting to work together. So, there’s a lot of true story, friendship stuff thrown in there and it was just really refreshing, all those years later, to work on something different. And in a very different setting and just go out and try to make a film that - I’m happy we tried to do something all those years later because I knew there was more to us than just The Room. I thought it was a good chance to go out and do something different for your fans.

Screen Rant: I know Tommy you’ve repeatedly expressed interest in playing The Joker for DC [Comics] and we were a little bit curious: if, for some reason, that part isn’t available is there a different villain or a different hero that you would like to take a stab at? And Greg, once Tommy has said which hero or villain he would play, what hero or villain would you want to portray alongside Tommy?

Tommy Wiseau: I would say that I’m still ready to play Joker, but you know what, I’m ready for anything. I personally think that I’m very strong. I can play strong person, strong character, caricature or otherwise hero or villain or whatever. At the end of the day, if the producer says he has a part for me, let me know. [LAUGHS] I’m ready for whatever you have from any kind of role, if you guys want to put something together, I’m ready to do it.

So Greg, he’s sticking with Joker.

Greg Sestero: Something funny I put in the opening few pages of The Disaster Artist, I said that Tommy and I were more like Marvel Comics nemesis than people who could be friends and this was like 10 years ago, so I still stick with the fact that Tommy should play The Joker and I should play Bruce Wayne. Why not? Why not?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how Robert Pattinson's upcoming Batman reboot works out - or there's always the multiverse!

For more information about Tommy Wiseau, check out the filmmaker's official website at  TommyWiseau.com .

NEXT: What Tommy Wiseau Would Look Like as The Joker

The Room is currently available on Blu-ray (and playing as a special engagement in select theaters).

Key Release Dates

The disaster artist.

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• The Making of the Movie Based on the Book About the Making of the Best Bad Movie Ever Made

Ahead of James Franco’s ‘The Disaster Artist,’ a re-creation of the production of Tommy Wiseau’s ‘The Room,’ we talked to the creators, authors, and fans to explore how the movie became literary fodder and Hollywood gold

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This is where his dream died. “A bunch of times,” he said. On a clear early-October morning, Greg Sestero drove me around West Hollywood in a rented Hyundai after happily agreeing to my request for a meta-celebrity tour. The 39-year-old actor, who appeared alongside the inexplicable auteur Tommy Wiseau in the breathtakingly incoherent cult favorite The Room , had plenty to show me.

The first stop was a luxe residential complex on Crescent Heights Boulevard. For a stretch in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he subleased from, then shared an apartment there with Wiseau. “It’s obviously nicer now,” Sestero, a tall and lean ex-model with a whoosh of brown hair, said as he leaned back in his seat. Next we passed the former Laemmle Sunset 5, the theater that hosted dozens of midnight Room screenings, and headed down Fairfax to Canter’s Deli. It was at the matzo-ball-slinging Los Angeles institution that Wiseau told his friend that he’d finished the script of his bizarro opus.

Soon we made our way east on Melrose to Highland, where Sestero pulled up to the onetime site of renowned camera supplier Birns & Sawyer. The company permitted Wiseau to film The Room in its lot after selling him hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. (Most productions — big or small — typically rent.) Spotting a few people milling around, Sestero laughed. “They’re probably like, ‘Don’t ever come back here for what you did!’”

Moments later, as we went north on Highland, Sestero pointed at the billboard that for five years served as a towering advertisement for The Room . Now it touted the television series Mr. Robot .

As we rode west on Sunset, it became clear that Sestero was comfortable narrating this story, even if it belonged to someone else. “ The Room wasn’t mine,” he said. But without Sestero, Wiseau might not have finished his surrealist antimasterpiece, a melodramatic attempt to depict the descent of a character (Johnny) who learns that his fiancée (Lisa) is cheating on him with his best friend (Mark). The movie is stuffed with abandoned subplots, continuity errors, abrupt tonal shifts, profoundly unsexy sex scenes, stilted performances by unknown actors, and dozens of ironically quotable lines. During filming, Sestero was at once costar, fixer, and Wiseau whisperer.

“Anybody working that close to Tommy who has their sanity is pretty OK,” said Ron Bernstein, an agent at ICM Partners, which specializes in getting high-profile authors’ books adapted for the screen .

Sestero didn’t realize it while making the movie, but surviving the maddening experience with his easygoing nature intact meant that he was the perfect person to tell the surreal tale. “Tommy paved the way by making The Room ,” he said. “It was up to me to say, ‘What do I do with this opportunity?’”

In 2013 he published a memoir, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside ‘The Room,’ the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made . On December 1, a film version of the book hits theaters. James Franco directs and stars as Wiseau. These days, Sestero’s dream is alive. This is how it came back from the dead.

To understand why a motion picture based on a book about the origins of what a film professor once dubbed “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” was made, you must acquaint yourself with the obscure source material. “I spent a year explaining to people that it’s not the Brie Larson Room ,” said Scott Neustadter, who cowrote the Disaster Artist screenplay with Michael H. Weber. “Most people have never seen The Room .”

The film is Wiseau’s brainchild. In addition to playing the lead, he wrote, directed, produced, and financed the $6 million movie. The true source of his wealth is still a mystery, but he reportedly made his fortune in fashion and real estate.

With long, messy, jet-black hair, a protruding jaw, and a face seemingly shaped from industrial-strength putty, Wiseau resembles an amusement park caricature. And then there’s his unique method of speaking, which likely wasn’t fully formed until after he arrived in the United States by way of his native Poland and France. (In Sestero’s memoir, it’s described as “an Eastern European accent that had been hit by a Parisian bus.”)

“The whole appeal of The Room is, Who is this man? ” said Room obsessive Michael Rousselet , a cofounder of the viral video factory 5-Second Films . “Because he’s fascinating.” To Sestero, who reluctantly plays Mark, watching the absurd film is like peering into its creator’s mind.

But after it premiered on June 27, 2003, the passion project appeared destined to remain undiscovered. Wiseau paid L.A. chain Laemmle Theatres to show the film at two locations during the original two-week run, which reportedly grossed only $1,900.

That summer, Rousselet found the movie by accident. He’d remembered seeing a trailer for it before Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) , a documentary about They Might Be Giants. “It was so dramatic and it bombarded you with all this information that didn’t make any sense,” he said. So when the USC film student noticed The Room on the Laemmle Fallbrook marquee in early July, he had to drag his friends to see it. The movie made less sense than the trailer. Wiseau’s vision felt almost extraterrestrial. “I’ve heard people say it’s as if an alien watched a bunch of soap operas and tried to figure out what the human race was about,” said Rousselet, who was smitten. Before the end credits rolled, he was on the phone letting his buddies in on the secret of The Room .

“We saw it four times in three nights and on the last night we had 100 people,” said Rousselet, whose pals turned each viewing into an interactive party. They dressed in costume, brought spoons as a tribute to the framed pictures of the utensil that pops up in The Room , and loudly riffed on the film’s dialogue. It was The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the 21st century.

Gradually, Wiseau added more screenings. The Laemmle Sunset 5 started showing it at midnight on the last Saturday of every month. “It was kind of a stoners’ thing,” said then-theater-manager Isaac Wade. But through word of mouth, the movie gained famous fans. Wade said that celebrities used to call and ask if they could reserve tickets to avoid waiting in line. After a group that included Judd Apatow and Jonah Hill came to see The Room , the crowds grew. Soon, the Sunset 5 went from showing the film on one screen to showing it on all five.

Wiseau attended these raucous gatherings, and before the lights went down, he’d answer questions from the audience. To ensure that each Q&A session was relatively brief, Wade would tell Wiseau that he had four minutes when he really had seven. At the five-minute mark, Wade would instruct Wiseau to wrap things up. Eventually, for some unknown reason, Wiseau began introducing Wade as his personal manager.

Occasionally, Wade would see Sestero with Wiseau at Room screenings. But by the end of the last decade, Sestero was ready to move on. With his movie career stagnating, he booked overseas modeling gigs and commercial work. “The acting dream was still there, but it wasn’t a reality,” Sestero said. Then, in 2008, he got an email that shocked him. It was an interview request from Clark Collis, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly . He was reporting an article about the budding Room phenomenon.

Sestero remembered sitting on the floor of the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport while speaking to Collis on the phone. When the reporter informed him that The Room was being studied at universities, Sestero couldn’t believe it. In the moment, he had a single thought: “Wait, is this a joke?”

That December, EW published “The Crazy Cult of The Room .” Sestero expected Collis’s piece to be short. What he found when he opened the magazine was a sprawling feature. Until then, Sestero had assumed that he’d been part of something inconsequential. The story helped change his mind.

In 2009, as The Room was slowly beginning to infect theaters across the country, author and journalist Tom Bissell fell down a YouTube rabbit hole. He’d just moved to Portland and his furniture hadn’t yet arrived. Bored and without anything in his new apartment other than a laptop and the air mattress he was sitting on, Bissell discovered clips of Wiseau’s film. “What the fuck is this?” he remembered saying to himself. Perplexed, he looked up the movie on Wikipedia. Then he Googled the title. By chance, The Room was premiering in Portland that night .

Bissell attended the screening. The very next morning he called Roger D. Hodge, then his editor at Harper’s Magazine . “I’m writing about this movie,” Bissell recalled saying. When Hodge replied, “That’s not the kind of piece we usually do,” Bissell refused to let the subject go. Hodge finally relented. “He was so persistent,” Hodge said. “He was so sure that he needed to write about this movie.” Bissell spent two and a half hours interviewing Wiseau for an article headlined “Cinema crudité,” which ran in the August 2010 issue of Harper’s .

When Sestero read the essay, he was impressed. “This guy took The Room and intellectualized it in a way that was really, really funny,” he said. “By treating Tommy as a real person, the humor just spilled out.” By that point, Sestero was toying with the idea of asking a writer to collaborate on a book. Bissell was his dream partner.

That September, Sestero nervously sent Bissell an email asking to meet. Over lunch at Urth Caffé on Melrose in West Hollywood, Bissell listened in a state of astonishment as Sestero told his story. He and Wiseau’s friendship had been forged long before The Room . They met in 1998 at an acting class in San Francisco, across the Bay from Sestero’s hometown of Walnut Creek. The teenaged Sestero found Wiseau’s over-the-top commitment to his scenes, despite his obvious lack of natural talent, endearing. The two Hollywood wannabes hit it off. One after another Sestero and Wiseau moved to L.A., where the latter owned an apartment. In 2002, after their relationship had deteriorated due to Wiseau’s difficultness, the eccentric offered Sestero a part in The Room .

“I had no idea,” Bissell said. “I just thought he was a dude that answered a casting call and ended up in a disaster.” Bissell’s interest grew after every new detail Sestero revealed. “You have to write a book about this,” said Bissell, who initially didn’t think he’d have time to work on the project. But after the writers he recommended to Sestero proved to be the wrong fit, Bissell agreed to be the coauthor. There was, however, a problem.

“We almost couldn’t sell the book,” Bissell said. What he didn’t know was that Simon & Schuster vice president and executive editor Trish Todd was a Room fan. She’d heard about the movie from her nephew. After seeing a few clips of the film, she was hooked. Todd then assigned an editor to contact Wiseau to gauge his interest in writing a making-of book. Someone claiming to be his assistant emailed back, Todd said, “in the same broken English Tommy wrote in.” Whoever responded offered to give Simon & Schuster a look at a proposal for $1 million.

“We abandoned that idea and moved on,” Todd said. And then one day her assistant ran down the hall toward her office and said, “You got a proposal about The Room !” It was Sestero and Bissell’s. To acquire the book at auction, Todd said, Simon & Schuster outbid Amazon.

Sestero and Bissell worked fast, occasionally holing up for days at a time. (Sestero recalled one fruitful period spent at a hotel in Bissell’s hometown of Escanaba, Michigan, when it was minus-14 degrees outside.) Their process was simple: They watched behind-the-scenes footage from The Room . Sestero interviewed members of the cast. Bissell interviewed Sestero. Bissell used their notes and transcripts to draft pre-planned chapters, which they took turns rewriting. “Greg was a cowriter,” Bissell said, “in every sense of the word.”

Although there’s plenty of on-set turmoil caused by the inexperienced, often frenzied Wiseau in The Disaster Artist , it isn’t merely a backstage account. It’s a buddy dramedy. “Originally people only wanted the story of the making of The Room ,” Sestero said. “And Tom thought, ‘No, no, no, your story with Tommy is more interesting.’” Without the events leading up to Wiseau conceiving The Room , the story would feel incomplete.

The memoir’s alternating timeline smoothly toggles between Wiseau and Sestero’s relationship and the production of the movie. The former half of the narrative contains one of Bissell’s favorite scenes: When Sestero’s worried mother warns the unearthly Wiseau, who’s about to drive Greg from San Francisco to L.A., not to hurt or have sex with her son. “If my son had gotten in the car with Tommy Wiseau and driven off I don’t know what I would’ve done,” Todd said. “Only young people can do crazy shit like that.”

The Disaster Artist was published in 2013 to mostly positive reviews. In an essay for Vice , James Franco wrote that “the book turns Tommy’s sometimes ridiculous struggle into a paradigm for those wishing to be creative in a world where it is usually too hard to be. In so many ways, Tommy c’est moi .” That last part turned out to be aspirational.

Ron Bernstein had never heard of The Room until he read The Disaster Artist . After finishing it, he attended a midnight screening at a theater near UCLA. “I was the oldest person there,” he said. “The audience was rabid. They knew every line.” The book-to-film agent, whose extensive client list includes Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood , was enthralled. “I’m always fascinated by unusual things and unusual stories,” he said.

Yet Bernstein, who has shepherded the film adaptations of nonfiction books including Jarhead and Black Hawk Down , kept hearing the same refrain. “Everybody said to me, ‘You’ll never be able to sell it.’” They claimed the mercurial Wiseau would never approve. Bernstein’s response? “Try me.” Getting Wiseau to bless the project, Bernstein said, “was not a difficult arm twist.”

Several filmmakers expressed interest in The Disaster Artist . “There were a lot of people that chased it,” Bernstein said. The most passionate of those, the agent added, was James Franco.

Three weeks after his book came out, Sestero remembered, Bernstein called to tell him that Franco and Seth Rogen were interested in turning The Disaster Artist into a movie. “My mind was blown,” Sestero said. After all, even before the memoir was written, he’d told Bissell that he wanted it to become a film in the vein of Ed Wood .

Sestero and Wiseau soon joined Franco on a conference call. Sestero recalled Wiseau asking Franco, “What is your vision?” Wiseau also emphatically suggested that he should be played by Johnny Depp. When an amused Franco softly shot him down by explaining that Depp was one of the biggest actors in the world, Wiseau responded with this: “So what? You will try even harder.”

In February 2014 , Franco’s Rabbit Bandini Productions announced that it had optioned the rights to The Disaster Artist and was partnering with Rogen’s Point Grey Pictures on the movie. Franco would coproduce, direct, and star. His brother Dave would play Greg.

Later that year, Franco and Rogen — who has the supporting role of script supervisor Sandy Schklair, the author of a forthcoming book claiming that he actually directed The Room  — sent Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter the book. By the end of October, the duo had officially joined the project . The writing partners, whose credits include (500) Days of Summer and adaptations of the John Green novels The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns , were familiar with The Room . On their first trip to L.A., they’d noticed the billboard on Highland. Weber thought it was an ad for a costume store.

Neustadter had never actually seen the cult classic. But after reading a few chapters of The Disaster Artist , he put the memoir down and cued up a DVD of The Room . “I watched it in the most inappropriate way, which is at home by myself,” he said. “And I was pretty darned fascinated.”

Still, Neustadter and Weber knew that for it to be enjoyable, their script needed to transcend The Room . “We need to approach this movie as not just fan service,” Weber recalled vowing at the time. “It has to work for the people who haven’t seen The Room or even heard of it.” To keep that promise, the writers invested in the relationship between Sestero and Wiseau. Neustadter and Weber tweaked the structure of the book to fit the film, frontloading material from the even-numbered chapters (the main characters’ friendship) before transitioning to the events of the odd-numbered chapters (the production of The Room ).

As the narrative progresses, Wiseau becomes more and more exasperating. Yet Sestero never gives up on his friend. “If it weren’t for Greg, there would be no Room ,” said Rousselet, who cast Sestero as an affable frat boy in 5-Second Films’ crowdfunded comedic slasher flick Dude Bro Party Massacre III . “That friendship is real. It’s the perfect yin and yang of filmmaking.” To Weber, the willingness to stick with his tormentor makes Sestero even more mysterious than Wiseau. “We understand Tommy’s motivations during a lot of moments in this journey more than we understand Greg’s,” Weber said. “He takes a lot of abuse and hangs in there.” There are times in The Disaster Artist , Neustadter said, when he wanted to grab Sestero and yell, “Dude, stop it!”

Sestero may have had cynical reasons — to name two: cheap rent and a movie role — for standing by Wiseau. But The Disaster Artist is an argument against that. “Both of us were stuck; neither of us knew what to do next,” Sestero wrote early in the book. “If either of us bailed on the other now, I thought, we’d both sink.”

As Sestero put it to me: “It came down to support.” That went both ways.

Shortly after The Disaster Artist was published, Bay Area publication 7x7 talked to Wiseau . In the interview, he said that he’s supporting Sestero’s memoir “only 50 percent” and added, “I think it’s an exaggeration but I’ll leave it alone, because he is my best friend, Greg, and I don’t like to criticize any person.” That sounds like a slight, but it was as close to an endorsement as the fiercely self-protective Wiseau could give. After all, this is a man who pushed for a recently lifted injunction to stop the release of a documentary about the making of The Room .

The movie, which Wiseau started calling a comedy only after audiences started laughing at it, is still his Citizen Kane . The Sunset 5, now an AMC theater , no longer shows The Room . But Wiseau continues to screen the film across America .

Neustadter and Weber were relieved when Franco and Rogen’s vision of The Disaster Artist matched theirs. “We didn’t see it as a This Is the End sort of high jinks comedy,” Neustadter said. They imagined a combination of Ed Wood and Boogie Nights . Franco has also likened the story to another Paul Thomas Anderson epic, The Master , and to The Talented Mr. Ripley .

Maybe the most apt comparison came from Bernstein. The Disaster Artist reminded him of My Favorite Year . Directed by Richard Benjamin, the 1982 comedy centers on the relationship between up-and-coming TV writer Benjy Stone (Mark-Linn Baker) and aging alcoholic actor Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole). Because no one else can, Stone has to motivate, protect, and clean up after his charismatic guru. Sestero has been there before.

By now, though, enough time has gone by that he doesn’t mind reliving The Room . During filming of The Disaster Artist , Sestero visited the set. “Most of the days he showed up were Room re-creation days,” Weber said. “Or days when there was really high drama between him and Tommy.” The production’s attention to detail wowed Sestero, who even loaned Dave Franco the denim jacket he wore in The Room . More than once, Sestero let the screenwriters know that lines they thought they’d made up for Wiseau were things that he actually said. “Which is a compliment,” Weber said, “but made us think: ‘Holy crap, are we in the head of Tommy?’”

Making such a deeply metatextual movie caused its share of brain glitches. When Bissell first saw Franco in full Wiseau makeup on set, drifting in and out of character while directing, the author burst out laughing. “It was so fucking crazy,” he said. The morning after the single production day when the director wasn’t also in character, Weber recalled a van pulling up and Franco jumping out in costume. “Where was everybody yesterday?” he shouted. It was as if, Weber said, “the real Tommy existed but couldn’t find us.” (If you’re wondering, Wiseau enjoyed The Disaster Artist . “I approve 99.9 percent,” he reportedly said , taking slight exception with how the movie was lit.)

Theater manager Isaac Wade auditioned to play himself and didn’t win the role. “I have to live with the reality that I can’t even get cast as myself,” he said with a laugh. And during The Disaster Artist premiere, the real-life Wiseau and Sestero sat together watching the scene depicting The Room premiere, which featured their characters staring up at themselves on the big screen. “It was like M.C. Escher,” Neustadter said.

But beneath all the strangeness is a simple story about friendship. “They were two outsiders who made something,” Weber said. “Technically, you could pick apart all the reasons why The Room is not a good movie. For us, they made something lasting. That’s what we are always trying to do.”

On a Sunday afternoon in October, Sestero met me at a coffee shop near his home in Pasadena. He picked the place, I think, partly because it’s less than a block from Michael Myers’s house from Halloween . It’s no surprise that someone who at age 12 wrote a sequel to Home Alone remains a movie buff.

The night before, he’d attended the world premiere of Best F(r)iends at Beyond Fest . The film chronicles the relationship between a handsome drifter and a ghostly mortician. Sestero and Wiseau play the leads.

The origin of their onscreen reunion can be traced back to last year, when Sestero attended a screening of The Disaster Artist . “The ending was really moving to me in a way that really helped me see this whole thing from a different perspective,” he said of the film, whose distributor, A24, recently put up a Disaster Artist billboard above Highland near where The Room one once loomed. “I never really gave it my all when I worked with Tommy. I tried to phone it in with The Room . It was never something I believed in. I thought: What if I created a project that I believed in, that I put Tommy in, so the roles were reversed?”

The next day Wiseau texted him. “Maybe it’s time,” the message read, “that you take a risk.” Sestero quickly shared an idea for a new movie with his friend, who agreed to participate. Over the last decade, Wiseau’s TV and film appearances have felt exploitative. This is different. Sestero didn’t write a part for the guy from The Room . He wrote one for Wiseau. In the new movie, he sounds human. Almost.

“Here’s what I was impressed with: He’s a professional,” filmmaker Justin MacGregor, a Room fan who directed Best F(r)iends , said with complete seriousness. “He would always say, ‘If you want to do 100 takes, do 100 takes.’”

With Best F(r)iends, Sestero was able to do something that he couldn’t with The Room : bring out the best in Wiseau. It was Sestero’s way of paying his friend back for helping him resurrect a dream that should still be dead. “It’s come back,” Sestero said, “in very strange ways.”

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• 6′ 0¾″ (1.85 m)
• July 15 , 1978
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• Parents Marie-José Citro
• Other works Author of the book "The Disaster Artist". New York: Simon and Schuster
• 1 Biographical Movie

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• Trivia Attended Monte Vista High School in Danville, California from 1992-1995 before leaving to Milan, Italy to model at age seventeen.
• Quotes [on the unexpected success of The Room] At its center is an enigmatic filmmaker who claims, among many other things, to be a vampire.
• Trademark Frequently collaborates with Tommy Wiseau

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Remembering ‘The Room’

By Danielle Bacher

Danielle Bacher

“Right now, we’re standing at the place where we shot this terrible movie ten years ago,” says actor Greg Sestero, 35. “I haven’t been back since. This is so weird.” That terrible movie is The Room , in which he played the character Mark and about which Sestero has written his first book.

We’re in the parking lot of Levels Audio, a post-production facility on Highland Ave. in Hollywood, California, where self-taught auteur Tommy Wiseau and his crew filmed the $6 million indie. The outdoor space served as the rooftop, alley, bedroom and apartment sets for what one critic has called “ the Citizen Kane of bad movies .”

Sestero book, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room , the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made , was co-written with Tom Bissell, a veteran journalist who penned an article about The Room for Harper’s three years ago. It alternates between the story of The Room ‘s production and Sestero’s personal struggles, including his complicated relationship with writer-director-producer-star Wiseau. “We didn’t want this to be a book about a bad movie. We wanted it to be a really inspiring story that’s filled with humor, craziness and sadness and all the elements that make this journey relatable,” he explains.

As we walk up the street, Sestero adjusts his shades and glances up at a large billboard. For five years, Wiseau paid $5,000 a month for an unintentionally creepy advertisement to promote the film here. Now, it heralds the release of The Disaster Artist , so things have come full circle for Sestero. He says proudly, “I think people will really enjoy this book, and now, this sign. I wanted to be creative and give an homage to the infamous billboard that scared the life out of all those people driving through Hollywood.”

I laughed so hard reading The Disaster Artist that I cried. Is all of it true? Yes. I interviewed Tommy quite a bit about his life. He opened up little by little over the years. I felt like I shared those bits that he was comfortable sharing and pieced it together. I guess when he is ready to share the rest of those gaps, well, that’s his decision. I also changed a couple of names to protect people. It’s as honest as you can get.

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I was impressed with how much you recall of your 15-year relationship with Wiseau. Was it hard to detailing your experiences after all these years? It was such an intense experience. It was so surreal, something that I could never forget. And I told many stories about it over the years of how crazy it was, so it stayed very clear in my memory.

Are you still friends with him? Yeah, I still see him occasionally. He’s kind of the off-beat cousin we all have in our family.

What made you want to write this book? I felt really strongly about the story. The only way to tell how this thing went down – the good, the bad, the ugly and the inspiring parts – was to write it and explain how it all happened. Really, when you read this book you can walk away with a great laugh, which we all need these days. It’s weirdly inspiring that Tommy had all the odds against him, but he didn’t take no for an answer.

You were one of the only people to have seen the entire script for The Room during the shoot.  Did you ever feel compelled to confront Wiseau about the glaring errors and plot holes? [ Laughs ] I felt like if I tried, it would have taken ten years to fix it. I thought about it, but he wouldn’t listen. There was no use in trying to fix or alter it, because he was making it from his standpoint. I just tried to support him getting his movie made. Also, I thought a lot of it was really funny, so why change a masterpiece?

Did you view the script as a joke? I don’t think Wiseau saw it as one. I thought the whole thing was very humorous and kind of endearing. I mean, it was one big joke. I always considered Tommy to be someone who saw life differently, and I appreciated that. I appreciated that with his script, too. I enjoy it the way everyone else does. It was interesting to see what was going to come next and why things happened the way that they did. I think he saw it as a searing, intense drama. And I think his life experience was like that, so if he put it down on paper, people would see and feel it that way. But intention and execution are two very different things.

How did you feel when you first saw your sex scenes? Did they seem over the top to you? Well, at the premiere, I walked out before they started, because I didn’t want to see what was in it. It’s a part of the movie at which I always fast-forward or run for the exit because it’s just painful to watch.

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You didn’t want to do the sex scene unless your pants were on. How come? Tommy was out to make this, well, not “Skinemax” film, but he definitely wanted to show some flesh. I was like, “Uh, that’s not going to happen with me.” So, he luckily made the exception, so I could have my jeans on.

Did you actually think those scenes were sexy with that ridiculous R&B music over them? It just makes it all the more baffling and embarrassing. The soundtrack, he is proud to say, is totally original. He found local artists and a composer who works at Loyola Marymount University. One of the guys, Clint Gamboa, was later on American Idol . I’m sure he didn’t tell the judges about that. If Tommy had written the songs himself, man, I can’t even imagine that.

Has the movie ruined your own sex life? Has anyone ever called you “Mark” in bed? Not yet. Hopefully never. [ Laughs ]

You’re also listed as line producer and “Assistant to Mr. Wiseau” in the credits. Other than acting, what were your day-to-day duties on set? I did everything that needed to be done. I would help organize crew stuff, make sure everyone was paid and receiving meals. I was really the only one who could speak Tommy’s language. To reward me, he credited me as much as he could. I told him, “Tommy, being an assistant isn’t really an honor. Lead actor and assistant don’t really go together.”

There were two executive producers other than Wiseau listed in The Room ‘s credits. You claim Chloe Lietzke was confined to a wheelchair and never was involved in the film. Even crazier, Drew Caffey died four years before the film was made. What the hell was that about? Tommy was the main person in charge. He had friends supporting his vision, so he felt that they deserved credit somewhere in the movie. He has an interesting way of acknowledging credits.

Why was he so fearful of losing control of his movie? He had a very specific vision of what he wanted this to be, and not many other people saw it. He wanted to do it his way. I think he was just careful to not let people convince him to do something he didn’t believe in. There were a couple of scenes that editors and other people suggested be cut, like the scene in which I push the guy down with the football. They thought it made no sense and didn’t belong, but he liked it. And more power to him, because those are the scenes that get the most laughs.

Was it difficult to be on set and watch Wiseau struggle so often with his lines, especially since he wrote them? Yeah, it was tough. He had nerves. It can be really difficult if you haven’t been in a movie before. You are trying to convey emotions and then are overtaken with all the other things with the crew. It’s understandable.

Is that his accent in real life? Or could it all be just an act? Oh, God, it would be brilliant if it were an act. It’s as real as it gets. That’s straight up how he talks. I know it’s hard to believe.

One of the most recognizable lines in the movie is when Wiseau screams, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” This was lifted from one of James Dean’s lines in Rebel Without a Cause . It seems that you and Wiseau share a love for Dean. What about him fascinates you? I like the legend behind him. James Dean symbolizes the young actor’s dream. He struggled to get into Hollywood. He shot to fame at the age of 24, but only got to star in three films. It’s kind of a fantasy of what could have been. I think for Tommy, he represents America and being cool. For him, I think that’s important.

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To this day, audience members throw spoons each time they see the framed photographs of spoons in Johnny’s apartment. Why the hell didn’t anyone think to replace the stock photos in the frames? I think everyone was just trying to get through it. There was an empty table there, and they tried to fill it as fast as they could to continue shooting. No one took a second look. It wasn’t noticeable until those film students in the Valley saw it and thought, “What the heck are plastic spoons doing in the frames?” They called it out and started bringing plastic spoons to the screening and throwing them.

Why do you think The Room is the greatest bad movie ever made? It has everything you could possibly want. I think the best bad movies are not really genre movies like, let’s say, Troll 2 , because those are easy to mess up. I think when you make a genre or horror movie, you need a budget. When you skimp on blood and special effects and all that, it automatically looks cheesy. But a movie like The Room is psychologically bad, which goes a lot deeper than just technically bad. You know that there is something there that’s profound, but the way it was executed went awry. So, it’s enjoyable in a lot of different ways, and it’s just really weird. It is so weird that you wonder, “What in the hell was this person thinking?” And you want to know, which makes it a great bad movie.

Did you ever think The Room would turn into a cult classic? When did you realize it was something “special?” The Ziegfeld screening in New York in 2010. The place sold out 1,200 seats. I overheard someone say it was the first time a movie had done that since the re-release of Star Wars in 1997. At that point, I knew The Room had arrived.

How does it feel to know that this probably will be the role for which you’re known for the rest of your life? I think it will definitely be a part of my life. There’s a lot of time left and a lot of movies to be made. I think I could have been in ten great movies that no one ever saw or cared about. When people show up to your work and enjoy it for years like the way they have The Room , what do you say to that? You accept it and think it’s pretty cool.

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‘The Room’ Star Greg Sestero on the Role He Never Wanted in the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

The author of the new book “The Disaster Artist” tells TheWrap that he was never intending to play Mark in director Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic

Greg Sestero is an actor mostly known for playing Mark in “The Room” — a midnight movie with a reputation for being so bad that it’s actually amazing. But here’s a fun fact for the movie’s faithful following: Sestero never wanted to be writer-producer-director-sole financier Tommy Wiseau’s film at all.

“I was just trying to help Tommy get the project off the ground,” Sestero told TheWrap . “And then the night before filming, through a strange set of circumstances, I ended up being in the movie.”

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Those  circumstances are recounted in the entertaining first chapter of Sestero’s new book,”The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside ‘The Room,’ the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made,” co-authored by Grantland’s Tom Bissell.

The book, from publisher Simon & Schuster, hits shelves Tuesday. As the title suggests, it explores the making of  the 2003 $6 million cult classic, which was shot for four months in a parking lot behind a Hollywood equipment rental shop and famously marketed by just one Los Angeles billboard for an astonishing four years.

In conjunction with the book’s release, Angelenos can also look forward to Sestero reuniting with the film’s cast at the New Beverly Cinema on Tuesday night for a book signing and discussion, following a screening of a behind-the-scenes documentary about “The Room.”

Sestero began his odyssey in “The Room” — a wannabe drama about a love triangle between Johnny (Wiseau, pictured at left), Mark (Sestero) and Johnny’s  fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle) — as the film’s line producer. Although, neither he or Wiseau actually knew what a line producer did.

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“Basically, I was doing anything that needed to be done,” Sestero writes in the book. “I scheduled all auditions, meetings and rehearsals; ran the casting sessions; helped find equipment; and, most challenging, made sure Tommy didn’t sabotage his own film.”

“Disaster Artist” makes it perfectly clear, however, that the latter was an impossible task. The night before shooting, the aspiring filmmaker desperately tried to convince Sestero to replace an actor already cast in the role.

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Sestero was hesitant, and for good reason. The script — devoid of any structure, consistent character motivation and logical plot development — was as puzzling as the mysterious millionaire he had met four years earlier in a San Francisco acting class, where Sestero says he was intrigued by Wiseau’s “comic-book pirate presence.”

This wasn’t the first time Wiseau had offered Sestero the part. But it was the first time he had offered the part with a fat paycheck and a brand new car, which was too much for the then struggling 24-year-old actor to turn down.

And why would he? “The Room” was just a friend’s peculiar passion project that was already so bad on the page that nobody would ever want to watch it on the screen. Right?

“I didn’t think anybody would ever see it,” Sestero told TheWrap. “Tommy was desperate that I be in the movie, so I was like, well, ‘I guess I’ll try to survive it.’”

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Sestero has been surviving “The Room” for over 10 years now. While the 2003 release was initially panned by critics and only accumulated $1,800 at the box office, it still managed to find an audience that not only appreciates its nonsensical plot but grows every year.

“I’ve been to almost every major city,” Sestero said about the raucous screenings that take place all over the world, from L.A. to Jerusalem, thanks to a 2008  Entertainment Weekly article  that Sestero credits for bringing the underground sensation to the attention of the general population.

Audiences typically enjoy “The Room” by mocking every second of it. When audience members aren’t shouting a plethora of  bad dialogue (“Oh,  hi Mark ,” “You are tearing me apart, Lisa,” and Sestero’s personal favorite, “In a few minutes,  bitch!, “) at the screen, they’re throwing plastic spoons at it — a nod to the unbelievable amount of framed spoon pictures featured in the interior scenes.

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The movie has attracted a legion of fans from all walks of life, including celebrity admirers such as Jonah Hill , Kristen Bell , Rob Lowe and Paul Rudd . Sestero says he has received support from “Reno 911!” creator Thomas Lennon, as well as comedian Patton Oswalt — who offered a blurb on the cover of Sestero’s book, calling it “a surprising, hilarious, and compelling account of the making of the modern ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space.’”

Despite the recognition and international appreciation for the film, though, Sestero is quick to downplay any notions that he is a celebrity.

“Making a movie or being part of a project that you just see as kind of like an inside joke that no one’s ever going to see, it always feels a little bit surreal when people recognize you from that,” Sestero said. “To  me, being famous or being a celebrity, I think it’s for work you did that deserves some kind of merit.”

Still, Sestero has embraced the anomaly in independent cinema with open arms. He began touring the film with Wiseau in 2010 and took advantage of the opportunity to research his book — which certainly deserves some merit.

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“The Disaster Artist” effectively captures Wiseau’s off-the-wall personality and comical misunderstanding of American culture (and just about everything else), while offering insight into the “The Room” and the personal story behind it, that only Sestero could provide.

In honor of the release, the bizarre billboard  ( above ) that Wiseau used to market his movie is back up right where it used to be: overlooking the west side of Highland just north of Fountain.

“I just thought it was his way of saying, ‘This movie’s not going to die, and I’m going to keep it alive as long as I can,” Sestero said, after noting that Wiseau “definitely”  has “a lot of ambition” to make a new movie.

Also read:   ‘Sons of Anarchy’ Star, Artist Turn to Kickstarter to Create Physically Disabled Action Hero

Sestero did not specify whether Wiseau would make an appearance at the cast reunion and book signing on Tuesday, but he did ensure that he had the auteur’s blessing to write the book — even if he has some issues with it.

“He’s read excerpts of it,” Sestero said. “The one thing with Tommy is that he believes ‘The Room’ is the greatest movie ever made, and nothing really is ever going to change that, so I’m sure there are aspects of the story that he’ll have his own say on.”

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THE ROOM Celebrates Twenty Years With Five-City Australian Tour By Star And Bestselling Author Greg Sestero

In by Dov Kornits January 25, 2023

Greg Sestero, star of THE ROOM and author of bestselling memoir The Disaster Artist, will embark on a nationwide tour through Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne to screen the cult classic and premiere his directorial debut MIRACLE VALLEY.

Self-described ‘survivor of THE ROOM’, Greg Sestero, returns to Australia this February for the first time in five years to celebrate the 20 th Anniversary of the 2003 cult disasterpiece’s. Commencing Q&A appearances at Sydney’s Hayden Orpheum on February 12 before travelling to Brisbane ( Dendy Coorparoo , February 14), Perth ( Luna Palace , February 15), and Adelaide ( Palace Nova , February 17), Sestero will conclude at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova on February 18, which first brought Tommy Wiseau’s unintentional comedy to Australian audiences in February 2010.

THE ROOM – written by, directed by, produced by, and starring the enigmatic Tommy Wiseau –  is a misguided tragicomedy that spectacularly bombed at the US box-office upon its filmmaker-distributed release. Given new life through midnight screenings and an obsessive, dedicated fanbase, THE ROOM grew into a cult phenomenon. In 2013, Greg Sestero chronicled his unlikely friendship with Wiseau and his experience on the set of THE ROOM in his bestselling book The Disaster Artist , later adapted into an award-winning film starring James Franco as Wiseau and Dave Franco as Sestero.

“Few other countries have embraced THE ROOM as Aussies have,” says Sestero, “so it feels right to celebrate twenty years of a film few expected would be remembered beyond the premiere with the fans Down Under. This will be my fifth visit to Australia, and I can’t wait to get back there.”

Melbourne independent Cinema Nova began screening THE ROOM in 2010 and has screened it monthly ever since. The event regularly attracts hundreds of passionate fans who quote the film, heckle, and throw spoons at the big screen. “A film like this, when you put it in front of an audience, it takes on a life of its own,” says Cinema Nova CEO Kristian Connelly.

Alongside event screenings of THE ROOM, Greg Sestero will premiere his feature directorial debut MIRACLE VALLEY ahead of a Q&A. Sestero’s horror-drama follows an obsessive photographer and his girlfriend on a desert getaway who are threatened by sinister forces.

Tickets and times for each feature can be found on the respective cinema websites.

Food & Drink

Arts & entertainment, design & style, travel & leisure, search concrete playground, oh hi mark: 'the disaster artist' author greg sestero is touring australia to celebrate 20 years of 'the room'.

As well as chatting about (and screening) Tommy Wiseau's disasterpiece, Sestero is showing his new horror flick 'Miracle Valley'.

When you're watching The Room , or reading behind-the-scenes memoir The Disaster Artist , or seeing the star-studded film the latter spawned as well, one big fact is always glaringly apparent. It's inescapable. It's as obvious as Tommy Wiseau's lanky hair and awkward demeanour. It's as plain as the spoons scattered throughout The Room . Yes, Greg Sestero went through one helluva experience.

Of course, if it wasn't for The Room , Sestero mightn't have enjoyed his current fame. When you're in a movie that's so bad it's bad but also someone great to watch — but definitely not great itself by any standards — that's a particular kind of success. So, Sestero has made the most of it. He penned The Disaster Artist . He popped up in the flick based on it. He reteamed on-screen with Wiseau for the two-part Best F(r)iends . And he heads to screenings, doing Q&As to chat about all things The Room , too.

It's been five years since Sestero last came to Australia to indulge the nation's The Room fixation, but for a week from Sunday, February 12–Saturday, February 18, he's back. His timing is perfect given that Wiseau's disasterpiece notches up 20 years in 2023. Spoons at the ready, clearly.

Sestero is heading to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne to do two things: get talking about The Room as part of 20th-anniversary sessions, and also show his new horror film Miracle Valley . This one is a horror movie on purpose, rather than accidentally like The Room , and also marks Sestero's feature directorial debut.

"Few other countries have embraced The Room as Aussies have," said Sestero, "so it feels right to celebrate twenty years of a film few expected would be remembered beyond the premiere with the fans Down Under. This will be my fifth visit to Australia, and I can't wait to get back there."

For newcomers to The Room — with your pristine minds currently untainted by its wonders, and your vocabulary free from constantly saying "oh hi Mark" — it tells the tale of a banker, his adulterous fiancée, his conflicted best friend, a local teen caught up in a drug deal, a mother with cancer, a particularly tense party, a bunch of guys playing football in tuxedos and the worst apartment decorating scheme you've ever seen. Wondering how all of these things come together? Even the wildest combination you can come up has nothing on The Room .

As for Miracle Valley , it's about an obsessive photographer and his girlfriend, who head off on a desert getaway but get threatened by sinister forces. No — disappointingly or welcomely, depending on how you feel about The Room — Wiseau is not among the credited cast.

GREG SESTERO AUSTRALIAN TOUR 2023:

Sunday, February 12 — Hayden Orpheum, Sydney Tuesday, February 14 — Dendy Coorparoo, Brisbane Wednesday, February 15 — Luna Palace, Perth Friday, February 17 — Palace Nova, Adelaide Saturday, February 18 — Cinema Nova, Melbourne

Greg Sestero is touring Australia from Sunday, February 12–Saturday, February 18. Head to the Hayden Orpheum , Dendy Coorparoo , Luna Palace , Palace Nova and Cinema Nova websites for tickets and further details.

Australia's Biggest-Ever Yayoi Kusama Retrospective Is Coming to the NGV with a Brand-New Infinity Mirror Room

Coming soon: longwang is edward street's new modern-asian restaurant with a rooftop bar and cocktail lounge, sarah snook just won best actress at the olivier awards for sydney theatre company's 'the picture of dorian gray' , ben & jerry's free cone day is returning in 2024 to give away one million scoops worldwide, brisbane's first-ever river pride parade will float through the city during 2024's inaugural melt open.

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2018 Primetime Emmy & James Beard Award Winner

In Transit: Notes from the Underground

Jun 06 2018.

Spend some time in one of Moscow’s finest museums.

Subterranean commuting might not be anyone’s idea of a good time, but even in a city packing the war-games treasures and priceless bejeweled eggs of the Kremlin Armoury and the colossal Soviet pavilions of the VDNKh , the Metro holds up as one of Moscow’s finest museums. Just avoid rush hour.

The Metro is stunning and provides an unrivaled insight into the city’s psyche, past and present, but it also happens to be the best way to get around. Moscow has Uber, and the Russian version called Yandex Taxi , but also some nasty traffic. Metro trains come around every 90 seconds or so, at a more than 99 percent on-time rate. It’s also reasonably priced, with a single ride at 55 cents (and cheaper in bulk). From history to tickets to rules — official and not — here’s what you need to know to get started.

A Brief Introduction Buying Tickets Know Before You Go (Down) Rules An Easy Tour

A Brief Introduction

Moscow’s Metro was a long time coming. Plans for rapid transit to relieve the city’s beleaguered tram system date back to the Imperial era, but a couple of wars and a revolution held up its development. Stalin revived it as part of his grand plan to modernize the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. The first lines and tunnels were constructed with help from engineers from the London Underground, although Stalin’s secret police decided that they had learned too much about Moscow’s layout and had them arrested on espionage charges and deported.

The beauty of its stations (if not its trains) is well-documented, and certainly no accident. In its illustrious first phases and particularly after the Second World War, the greatest architects of Soviet era were recruited to create gleaming temples celebrating the Revolution, the USSR, and the war triumph. No two stations are exactly alike, and each of the classic showpieces has a theme. There are world-famous shrines to Futurist architecture, a celebration of electricity, tributes to individuals and regions of the former Soviet Union. Each marble slab, mosaic tile, or light fixture was placed with intent, all in service to a station’s aesthetic; each element, f rom the smallest brass ear of corn to a large blood-spattered sword on a World War II mural, is an essential part of the whole.

The Metro is a monument to the Soviet propaganda project it was intended to be when it opened in 1935 with the slogan “Building a Palace for the People”. It brought the grand interiors of Imperial Russia to ordinary Muscovites, celebrated the Soviet Union’s past achievements while promising its citizens a bright Soviet future, and of course, it was a show-piece for the world to witness the might and sophistication of life in the Soviet Union.

It may be a museum, but it’s no relic. U p to nine million people use it daily, more than the London Underground and New York Subway combined. (Along with, at one time, about 20 stray dogs that learned to commute on the Metro.)

In its 80+ year history, the Metro has expanded in phases and fits and starts, in step with the fortunes of Moscow and Russia. Now, partly in preparation for the World Cup 2018, it’s also modernizing. New trains allow passengers to walk the entire length of the train without having to change carriages. The system is becoming more visitor-friendly. (There are helpful stickers on the floor marking out the best selfie spots .) But there’s a price to modernity: it’s phasing out one of its beloved institutions, the escalator attendants. Often they are middle-aged or elderly women—“ escalator grandmas ” in news accounts—who have held the post for decades, sitting in their tiny kiosks, scolding commuters for bad escalator etiquette or even bad posture, or telling jokes . They are slated to be replaced, when at all, by members of the escalator maintenance staff.

For all its achievements, the Metro lags behind Moscow’s above-ground growth, as Russia’s capital sprawls ever outwards, generating some of the world’s worst traffic jams . But since 2011, the Metro has been in the middle of an ambitious and long-overdue enlargement; 60 new stations are opening by 2020. If all goes to plan, the 2011-2020 period will have brought 125 miles of new tracks and over 100 new stations — a 40 percent increase — the fastest and largest expansion phase in any period in the Metro’s history.

Facts: 14 lines Opening hours: 5 a.m-1 a.m. Rush hour(s): 8-10 a.m, 4-8 p.m. Single ride: 55₽ (about 85 cents) Wi-Fi network-wide

Buying Tickets

• Ticket machines have a button to switch to English.
• You can buy specific numbers of rides: 1, 2, 5, 11, 20, or 60. Hold up fingers to show how many rides you want to buy.
• There is also a 90-minute ticket , which gets you 1 trip on the metro plus an unlimited number of transfers on other transport (bus, tram, etc) within 90 minutes.
• Or, you can buy day tickets with unlimited rides: one day (218₽/ US$4), three days (415₽/US$7) or seven days (830₽/US$15). Check the rates here to stay up-to-date.
• If you’re going to be using the Metro regularly over a few days, it’s worth getting a Troika card , a contactless, refillable card you can use on all public transport. Using the Metro is cheaper with one of these: a single ride is 36₽, not 55₽. Buy them and refill them in the Metro stations, and they’re valid for 5 years, so you can keep it for next time. Or, if you have a lot of cash left on it when you leave, you can get it refunded at the Metro Service Centers at Ulitsa 1905 Goda, 25 or at Staraya Basmannaya 20, Building 1.
• You can also buy silicone bracelets and keychains with built-in transport chips that you can use as a Troika card. (A Moscow Metro Fitbit!) So far, you can only get these at the Pushkinskaya metro station Live Helpdesk and souvenir shops in the Mayakovskaya and Trubnaya metro stations. The fare is the same as for the Troika card.
• You can also use Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

Rules, spoken and unspoken

No smoking, no drinking, no filming, no littering. Photography is allowed, although it used to be banned.

Stand to the right on the escalator. Break this rule and you risk the wrath of the legendary escalator attendants. (No shenanigans on the escalators in general.)

Get out of the way. Find an empty corner to hide in when you get off a train and need to stare at your phone. Watch out getting out of the train in general; when your train doors open, people tend to appear from nowhere or from behind ornate marble columns, walking full-speed.

Always offer your seat to elderly ladies (what are you, a monster?).

An Easy Tour

This is no Metro Marathon ( 199 stations in 20 hours ). It’s an easy tour, taking in most—though not all—of the notable stations, the bulk of it going clockwise along the Circle line, with a couple of short detours. These stations are within minutes of one another, and the whole tour should take about 1-2 hours.

Start at Mayakovskaya Metro station , at the corner of Tverskaya and Garden Ring,  Triumfalnaya Square, Moskva, Russia, 125047.

1. Mayakovskaya.  Named for Russian Futurist Movement poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and an attempt to bring to life the future he imagined in his poems. (The Futurist Movement, natch, was all about a rejecting the past and celebrating all things speed, industry, modern machines, youth, modernity.) The result: an Art Deco masterpiece that won the National Grand Prix for architecture at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It’s all smooth, rounded shine and light, and gentle arches supported by columns of dark pink marble and stainless aircraft steel. Each of its 34 ceiling niches has a mosaic. During World War II, the station was used as an air-raid shelter and, at one point, a bunker for Stalin. He gave a subdued but rousing speech here in Nov. 6, 1941 as the Nazis bombed the city above.

Take the 3/Green line one station to:

2. Belorusskaya. Opened in 1952, named after the connected Belarussky Rail Terminal, which runs trains between Moscow and Belarus. This is a light marble affair with a white, cake-like ceiling, lined with Belorussian patterns and 12 Florentine ceiling mosaics depicting life in Belarussia when it was built.

Transfer onto the 1/Brown line. Then, one stop (clockwise) t o:

3. Novoslobodskaya.  This station was designed around the stained-glass panels, which were made in Latvia, because Alexey Dushkin, the Soviet starchitect who dreamed it up (and also designed Mayakovskaya station) couldn’t find the glass and craft locally. The stained glass is the same used for Riga’s Cathedral, and the panels feature plants, flowers, members of the Soviet intelligentsia (musician, artist, architect) and geometric shapes.

Go two stops east on the 1/Circle line to:

4. Komsomolskaya. Named after the Komsomol, or the Young Communist League, this might just be peak Stalin Metro style. Underneath the hub for three regional railways, it was intended to be a grand gateway to Moscow and is today its busiest station. It has chandeliers; a yellow ceiling with Baroque embellishments; and in the main hall, a colossal red star overlaid on golden, shimmering tiles. Designer Alexey Shchusev designed it as an homage to the speech Stalin gave at Red Square on Nov. 7, 1941, in which he invoked Russia’s illustrious military leaders as a pep talk to Soviet soldiers through the first catastrophic year of the war.   The station’s eight large mosaics are of the leaders referenced in the speech, such as Alexander Nevsky, a 13th-century prince and military commander who bested German and Swedish invading armies.

One more stop clockwise to Kurskaya station,  and change onto the 3/Blue  line, and go one stop to:

5. Baumanskaya.   Opened in 1944. Named for the Bolshevik Revolutionary Nikolai Bauman , whose monument and namesake district are aboveground here. Though he seemed like a nasty piece of work (he apparently once publicly mocked a woman he had impregnated, who later hung herself), he became a Revolutionary martyr when he was killed in 1905 in a skirmish with a monarchist, who hit him on the head with part of a steel pipe. The station is in Art Deco style with atmospherically dim lighting, and a series of bronze sculptures of soldiers and homefront heroes during the War. At one end, there is a large mosaic portrait of Lenin.

Stay on that train direction one more east to:

6. Elektrozavodskaya. As you may have guessed from the name, this station is the Metro’s tribute to all thing electrical, built in 1944 and named after a nearby lightbulb factory. It has marble bas-relief sculptures of important figures in electrical engineering, and others illustrating the Soviet Union’s war-time struggles at home. The ceiling’s recurring rows of circular lamps give the station’s main tunnel a comforting glow, and a pleasing visual effect.

Double back two stops to Kurskaya station , and change back to the 1/Circle line. Sit tight for six stations to:

7. Kiyevskaya. This was the last station on the Circle line to be built, in 1954, completed under Nikita Khrushchev’ s guidance, as a tribute to his homeland, Ukraine. Its three large station halls feature images celebrating Ukraine’s contributions to the Soviet Union and Russo-Ukrainian unity, depicting musicians, textile-working, soldiers, farmers. (One hall has frescoes, one mosaics, and the third murals.) Shortly after it was completed, Khrushchev condemned the architectural excesses and unnecessary luxury of the Stalin era, which ushered in an epoch of more austere Metro stations. According to the legend at least, he timed the policy in part to ensure no Metro station built after could outshine Kiyevskaya.

Change to the 3/Blue line and go one stop west.

8. Park Pobedy. This is the deepest station on the Metro, with one of the world’s longest escalators, at 413 feet. If you stand still, the escalator ride to the surface takes about three minutes .) Opened in 2003 at Victory Park, the station celebrates two of Russia’s great military victories. Each end has a mural by Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli, who also designed the “ Good Defeats Evil ” statue at the UN headquarters in New York. One mural depicts the Russian generals’ victory over the French in 1812 and the other, the German surrender of 1945. The latter is particularly striking; equal parts dramatic, triumphant, and gruesome. To the side, Red Army soldiers trample Nazi flags, and if you look closely there’s some blood spatter among the detail. Still, the biggest impressions here are the marble shine of the chessboard floor pattern and the pleasingly geometric effect if you view from one end to the other.

Keep going one more stop west to:

9. Slavyansky Bulvar.  One of the Metro’s youngest stations, it opened in 2008. With far higher ceilings than many other stations—which tend to have covered central tunnels on the platforms—it has an “open-air” feel (or as close to it as you can get, one hundred feet under). It’s an homage to French architect Hector Guimard, he of the Art Nouveau entrances for the Paris M é tro, and that’s precisely what this looks like: A Moscow homage to the Paris M é tro, with an additional forest theme. A Cyrillic twist on Guimard’s Metro-style lettering over the benches, furnished with t rees and branch motifs, including creeping vines as towering lamp-posts.

Stay on the 3/Blue line and double back four stations to:

10. Arbatskaya. Its first iteration, Arbatskaya-Smolenskaya station, was damaged by German bombs in 1941. It was rebuilt in 1953, and designed to double as a bomb shelter in the event of nuclear war, although unusually for stations built in the post-war phase, this one doesn’t have a war theme. It may also be one of the system’s most elegant: Baroque, but toned down a little, with red marble floors and white ceilings with gilded bronze c handeliers.

Jump back on the 3/Blue line  in the same direction and take it one more stop:

11. Ploshchad Revolyutsii (Revolution Square). Opened in 1938, and serving Red Square and the Kremlin . Its renowned central hall has marble columns flanked by 76 bronze statues of Soviet heroes: soldiers, students, farmers, athletes, writers, parents. Some of these statues’ appendages have a yellow sheen from decades of Moscow’s commuters rubbing them for good luck. Among the most popular for a superstitious walk-by rub: the snout of a frontier guard’s dog, a soldier’s gun (where the touch of millions of human hands have tapered the gun barrel into a fine, pointy blade), a baby’s foot, and a woman’s knee. (A brass rooster also sports the telltale gold sheen, though I am told that rubbing the rooster is thought to bring bad luck. )

Now take the escalator up, and get some fresh air.

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