ROOM TONE: The Sound of the Room: A New Walk Down Memory Lane Into the Dark Recesses of The Room

The best worst movie in American film history was made by a blustering, arbitrary man who would later go on to buy skateboards for children without a means of transportation. Josh Folan, Ted Garvey, and Jonathan Mann’s 27-minute documentary ROOM TONE: The Sound of the Room tries to understand Tommy Wiseau. The man, the myth, the legend. The subject of numerous riffs.

The process requires sifting through the memories of two crew members—Zsolt Magyar and Tim D. Lloyd of the sound department—who survived their time on the set of cult film The Room. By using a talking heads format and a jovial tone, the film lulls you into believing its sole purpose is to have a few laughs about a dark time. But not quite. Instead, the laughs are tempered with a tentative search for perspective. What really happened? And who really was the person who was their boss?

The gaffs on screen are legendary, the behind-the-scenes that we already had was golden enough to spawn a memoir and a film; now, the new POV of two people who were just on the sidelines enough to watch as other people came in the line of fire brings a new dimension to the disaster. What’s more, Wiseau even comes out the hero who saves the day more than once. Which is to say that people are capable of being worse than even the disaster artist, and that is to say that maybe Wiseau is not nearly as much the outlier as you could be tempted to believe.

Watching The Room can be like discovering the sound and sensation of your laughter for the very first time. It is easy to recall that experience while watching ROOM TONE remember the sensation of slack-mouthed stupefaction of being newly skilled, very young, and very inexperienced while a production storm rages on ahead and around you. What is happening is a question you quickly become be too scared to ask.

The two men, especially Magyar, are affable interviewees (and there is the ever present gag of Lloyd’s Christmas sweater), polar opposites of the spectacles of control and chaos they recall. It has the added benefit of minimising the lack of much visual dynamism. But mention must be made of the animation reenactments. Deeply subjective, very funny, and in a deliberately hurried style that sets up the feeling of listening in on a whispered conversation in the back benches of (Wiseau’s) classroom.

ROOM TONE was already set up for success by virtue of its subject, but it also managed to be independently entertaining. Their first encounter with the finished film in a theatre with a paying audience is as characteristic of the capabilities of The Room as when Magyar recounts the consequences of having his personal details projected to the whole world. What’s special is that, though more than two decades have passed, they still appear a little dazed.

That’s The Room for you.

Watch ROOM TONE: The Sound of the Room Documentary Trailer