The Disaster Artist

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell                 Audiobook: 11 hours, 30 minutes       Hardback Book:  288 pages                             

Greg Sestro met Tommy Wiseau when he was nineteen.    Greg was an aspiring actor who needed a push to believe in himself.    Tommy Wieasu was a weathered, mysterious, older foreign guy who wanted to make a movie.    This book is the culmination of everything that transpired in the many years it took to work out a friendship, a roomateship, a mentorship, then a colleagueship between Greg Sestero and Tommy Wiseau.    Tommy is a whirling ball of energy from some mysterious eastern block nation he would never divulge which one, who grows up loving everything American as he is being stifled under a political regime that does not tolerate the decadence they feel America represents.   Despite being beat up and bullied throughout his younger years until he finally escaped totalitarianism and worked his way across Europe until finally achieving his desire of arriving in America.     Tommy was a flag waving American patriot with an indecipherable accent.     He would not allow anyone in his presence to make any jokes or say anything disparaging about the land he loved that had been so good to him in return.    Throughout the book Tommy has a child-like excitement and exuberance about everything he is involved in especially the film he wants to write, direct and star in which for most of the book he has yet to write but knows what he wants it to be about.   For most of the book Greg has a love/hate relationship with Tommy mostly due to Tommy’s waves of extreme hyper good moods to his devastating lows.    Greg waffles from admiration to pity for Tommy.   Greg also tells one heck of a story about the making of one of the most awful (Greg’s word) movies in cinematic history that is so bad it is good and has developed a very strong following over the years – which in the end is maybe not exactly what Tommy was going for, but, in an ass-backward way, Tommy did achieve his goal of making a movie that would be memorable and that many people would see.    It has gone down in the annals of cinematic history as the Citizen Kane of bad movies.   I have yet to see the film but I do have it on request after all the press it gets in this book and maybe after this book, I will love it, too, as I know a lot of the background and the actors and activities, hardships and goodtimes everyone involved went through to bring it to being.    I also want to see not just the original, actual film but the rendition that James Franco and Seth Rogen star in based on the book with the same title.     I really enjoyed this book.    It gives an in-depth look into two very different but very likeable guys’ lives and how to look on the brighter side of adversity.   Good book.