Oh hai, awards buzz. A work-in-progress screening of James Franco’s The Disaster Artist received rave reviews after South by Southwest, and with the release of the first teaser trailer, it’s not hard to see why. Franco directed and stars in this comedy about the making of The Room, a film so terrible it has deservedly been hailed as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.” Franco plays Tommy Wiseau, the mastermind and star of The Room, in this cinematic adaptation of The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, which was written by The Room co-star Greg Sestero (aka Mark).*
In the teaser, Franco re-creates one of The Room’s most infamous scenes, which, despite being only seven seconds long, took three hours and 32 takes for Wiseau to get it right, according to Sestero’s book: “Tommy couldn’t remember his lines. He couldn’t hit his mark. He couldn’t say ‘Mark.’ He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t find his eyeline. He would emerge from the outhouse mumbling, lost, and disoriented. He looked directly into the camera. He swore.”
The scene plays out in the teaser pretty much exactly how Sestero describes it. Franco’s resemblance to Wiseau is a little uncanny, and while the jury’s still out on whether he managed to nail the man’s enigmatic accent, it’s worth noting that Franco was apparently so in character during filming that he adopted Wiseau’s unusual speech patterns even behind the scenes. Here’s the scene from the final cut of The Room, for comparison’s sake:
The Disaster Artist co-stars Dave Franco as Sestero, as well as Seth Rogen, Josh Hutcherson, Zac Efron, Hannibal Buress, Melanie Griffith, and Sharon Stone. It’s set for a limited release in theaters Dec. 1.
*Correction, July 18: This post originally misspelled Greg Sestero’s last name.
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