“The Room” star/writer/director/producer/marketer Tommy Wiseau was granted a temporary injunction delaying the release of an unflattering making-of documentary, “Room Full of Spoons.” That initial halting document has now been ripped to shreds by a Canadian judge.
Judge Markus Koehnen took about three weeks writing up his findings and decision, and they were worth the wait. Basically, the Ontario court is allowing the third-party documentary to be released because there’s no way it could possibly mock Wiseau more than the original source material and its fanbase do.
“Although Mr. Wiseau complained in his affidavit that the documentary mocks, derides and disparages him and ‘The Room,’ he did not disclose that ‘The Room’s’ fame rests on its apparently abysmal quality as a movie,” Koehnen wrote. “People flock to see ‘The Room’ because it is so bad. People see the movie for the very purpose of mocking it; a phenomenon that has won the movie its cult status.”
The judge then went on to republish some terrible reviews of the movie, like Entertainment Weekly’s, which famously dubbed the 2003 flick, “The ‘Citizen Kane’ of bad movies.”
Here’s some more damning language from the court’s decision:
“In his affidavit, Mr. Wiseau uses [co-star Greg] Sestero’s book to enhance his and ‘The Room’s’ credibility. Mr. Wiseau refers to the book throughout his affidavit as ‘The Disaster Artist’ but never discloses the book’s full title: ‘The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made.’”
“As Mr. Sestero notes in his book, when the film was released at a single theater, the theatre posted a ‘NO REFUNDS’ sign on the ticket booth, below which was an extract from a review that stated: ‘watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head.’”
And these beautiful paragraphs:
“It is precisely because ‘The Room’ is so bad that it has acquired cult status. People come not to admire but to mock. They dress up in character costumes, they mimic lines from the script, and they throw objects at the screen to highlight its bizarre character.”
“The documentary’s title, ‘Room Full of Spoons’ provides an apt example. The title derives from a scene in ‘The Room’ at which audience members shout ‘Spoon’ and begin throwing plastic spoons at the screen. The audience reaction is prompted by a scene in the movie in which a side table displays a store bought picture frame with its stock photo still in the frame: a photograph of a spoon. A more sophisticated film maker might have replaced the photograph with something having more relevance to the movie.”
So, yeah, the judge dissolved the injunction. Enjoy “Room Full of Spoons” soon, everyone!
Additionally, James Franco’s making-of “The Room” feature film, based-on and sharing Sestero’s “Disaster Artist” book title, hits theaters (yes, more than one) on Dec. 8, 2017.
Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.