Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has been called a "true successor" to the Rocky Horror Picture Show cult film throne. It's a horribly acted, written, and directed film which has the production values of a late-night soft-core porn film, from a guy who looks like he escaped from the set of a Geico cavemen commercial. Wiseau was an unknown to the film world, had no training or discernible knowledge of how to make a movie, but badly wanted to make a movie. The result was something so bad it became unintentionally great as a hilariously inept movie experience.
Based on the novel of the same name by Wiseau’s best friend Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist details the earnest effort by two men to make a good movie, but in the end get something which is so bad it’s good.
In the past, I've written pieces that asked what were the worst political gaffes and mistakes. I usually find the horribly run campaigns more fascinating to read about. It's either a rich asshole with more money than smarts, who decides in an act of public masturbation to get into politics. Or it's a group of supposedly smart people with millions of dollars in contributions, who fail spectacularly for one reason or another. Usually at the core of every political mistake is someone or a group of someones who came up with a policy proposal, campaign move, statement of reaction, or other cunning plan that wasn't thought all the way through, and it fails to live up in execution to how it was on paper.
Most bad movies are concocted in a similar manner, except instead of a group of political aides sitting around a table trying to fashion a poll-tested message, it's a group of producers and film executives sitting around a table trying to create a film around marketing research. But there are many ways to fail and screw up horrendously. There are many different levels of bad, with some films that are just plain bad, some that are godawful bad, and still others that are so bad they become an enjoyable experience.
So which bad film experiences stand out? And why?
From Scott Tobias at the A.V. Club:
Thanks mainly to an excellent Entertainment Weekly piece by Clark Collis, what was once a well-kept L.A.-only secret—or as secret as anything promoted by a bizarre billboard could be—has recently been spreading throughout the country, popping up in sold-out shows in New York and other cities, and on a recent episode of Tim And Eric Awesome Show Awesome Show, Great Job! Approaching the film as a Chicago-based outsider, with a healthy skepticism of L.A. phenomena of any stripe, I’m now convinced that it’s the real deal. It may not have the staying power of a Rocky Horror, if only because midnight-movie culture just isn’t as sustainable as it once was, but in the annals of bad cinema, The Room deserves shelf-space next to Ed Wood’s Glen Or Glenda? Both are personal and shockingly amateurish laughers that put their directors in front of the camera and are all too revealing of their odd peccadilloes. Wood has a thing for angora sweaters; Wiseau has a thing for pillow fights, red roses, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Who are we not to luxuriate in their fetishes?
Within film, music, television, etc., there exists the cult classic. It's usually a work that wasn't particularly successful when it was originally released, but found a small but loyal audience which appreciated it, and kept the memory of it alive in pop culture (e.g., The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, etc.). Sometimes that cult of fans grows and grows to the point that the work is no longer seen as fringe, and a popular reassessment occurs. The multibillion dollar Star Trek franchise began as a low-rated and canceled TV show that was brought back to life by a bunch of "geeks" at conventions. Such is the power of fandom.
But what if there is no cult? What if there's just a lonely contrarian out there? Everyone has a "guilty pleasure." A movie, song, book, etc., that everyone else probably thinks is crap, but they love it. And most people have the inverse of the guilty pleasure: the work that you just can't stand but all your friends and family love the hell out of.
Making a movie is a large undertaking. Even the independent filmmakers who're trying to make a name for themselves by maxing out their credit cards on a production are in for a long process. However, there are some films that while watching you start wondering how it's possible to spend hundreds of millions on a movie, and it seems like not a dime went toward the piss-poor script. On the other hand, there are times where the filmmakers' reach exceeds their grasp. People complain all the time about the same cookie-cutter movies being made over and over again.
But there's a thin line between creativity and going off the rails.
The George Lucas-produced Howard the Duck is an infamous bomb. It's a really expensive film where the people behind it had no idea which audience they were appealing to, so the movie has a really schizophrenic tone.
On the one hand it tries to be a big-budget science fiction film that appeals to families, and uses Lucas' name to market to the Star Wars audience. But it's also centered around a duck having sex with Lea Thompson, features "duck tits" and a giant alien penis/tongue going into a cigarette lighter. And to show you how far the MPAA ratings have moved in the last 30 or so years, this was a movie that was rated PG in 1986.
Howard the Duck is also indirectly responsible for the creation of Pixar. The company was originally a computer graphics division of Lucasfilm/ILM. However, because George Lucas was experiencing money problems from his divorce and the failure of Howard the Duck, Lucas sold off that division to Steve Jobs for $5 million and it became Pixar. In 2006, Pixar was sold to Disney for $7.4 billion.
There are many ways to waste money and destroy careers in the film industry. Right now, all you have to do is turn on cable and see a horrible, shitty film playing.
What are those things that you like, but no one else seems to? Or conversely, what are those works that everyone seems to love, but you just don't get?