I was parched. I took a sip of water from the red plastic cup on the coffee table. I could feel the Elmo face tactile against my calloused palm. I hadn’t sipped water out of a cup like this since I was a baby. Perhaps that was the point. Regressing.
“Percival,” I cleared my throat. “What was it you wanted to see me about?”
This was something of new setting for me, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the way the furniture in the room had been rearranged. For starters, the aura was all wrong. The cherry wood desk Percival sat on was set perpendicular to the back of the room, running into the floor-to-cieling windows to my left. The carpet, a mossy berber that probably had grown dark over the years from dropped ash and spilled herbal teas. The whole room felt vaguely funereal. The old chair I sat in was reupholstered in a dull floral print, and smelled like Chanel No. 5.
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Ben and I had the privilege of viewing Tommy Wiseau’s magnum opus, The Room, this friday. You may have seen The Room on Youtube:
This is not an isolated example of this movie being weird. If anything, this is TAME compared to the rest of it. It doesn’t make sense. No matter how you try to justify this film’s existence every explanation peters out before the finish line.
Wiseau spent $6 million dollars of his own money to produce this (where did the money come from?), hiring a serious film crew to produce his masterpiece. He could not decide which format to shoot in so he commissioned a special machine that juxtaposed a 35 millimeter camera and an HD camera and shot in both formats at once, causing horrible framing problems. He wrote, directed, and stars in the film, but none of the dialogue seems even remotely human. There’s also a very enlightening behind the scenes doc and a truly amazing Director’s interview (sadly, no commentary track). Oh, but perhaps the best thing – that scene on the roof? It’s shot in a basement. In fact, all the exterior roof scenes were actually shot indoors WITH GREEN SCREENS. This is because after filming them once in an alley Wiseau thought they lacked that extra punch, so he had all those scenes reshot ‘outside’. Makes sense, right? I don’t need to mention that the acting is just stunning. More after the jump.
At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, “This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we’ll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them.” I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.
That isn’t really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.
Walking to the gym monday, I noticed that someone had carved into the sidewalk along 14th street the following message: “THEY HAVE YOU ENSLAVED.” For sidewalk graffiti, I thought, that’s pretty awesome, and bonus points for the weighty medium. I laughed out loud, shook my head, and then worried for a moment that someone might be watching and would think I was crazy.
The sad thing is, if they knew what I had read and understood my reaction, they probably still would have concluded that I was crazy. I’ll try to take a picture, but, you know, I hope I don’t look too crazy taking pictures of the ground.
