Filmmakers win major case against The Room director

I remember going to a midnight screaming of cult classic The Room at the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF). Honestly, I had little knowledge of how much a fantastic subculture of film fans has developed around this 2003 so-bad-it’s-good movie by US director Tommy Wiseau. The movie, as stilted as it might possibly be, is a romantic drama mainly taking place in, well, one living room and involving a ménage a trois. Okay, I get it. The Room is a dreadfully bad movie. But why it has taken off as a cult classic I’ve never fully understood. In the midnight screening I attended devoted fans laughed uproariously at, natch, the most awkward scenes and spouted from memory the most dreadfully hackneyed lines, of which there are innumerable ones. And of course there is the repetitive throwing of spoons at the screen (batches of plastic ones had been handed out, constantly swept from the floor and redistributed) when the camera focuses on some spoon motif, of which there are, for some reason, several. The whole audience atmosphere is very much like going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman 1975) (how come that film isn’t shown anymore?). Except, that is, that Rocky Horror had artistic merit. I get the reason for The Room’s cult fetishism – it’s bad, bad, bad! The only thing is I still found it stultifying boring even as kitsch. All this is to tell you that a group of Canadian filmmakers last month won a major legal battle against, of all people, the iconic and supposedly much-loved Tommy Wiseau. The Ottawa-based filmmakers started out wanting to make a documentary, Room Full of Spoons, about the iconic The Room. And in good faith they’d approached their hero, Wiseau. They had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Wiseau was a control freak extraordinaire and an all out, well, a-hole. In a decision by Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul Schabas, the filmmakers were awarded US$550,000 in compensatory damages and CDN$200,000 in punitive damages against Wiseau for how he treated them and their film. The filmmakers obviously had wanted to use clips from The Room in their documentary. But Wiseau demanded full control, threatened legal action, waged a social media campaign and successfully got Room Full of Spoons cancelled from many film festivals. In his ruling Schabas found the director’s actions more than high handed, describing Wiseau’s negotiations as being in “bad faith” and his behaviour “oppressive and outrageous.” So now this loser of a director, as (in)famous as he may be, is now equally a loser in the court of law. Hopefully WIFF will soon screen Room Full of Spoons.