Be it alchemy, good fortune, or a deal with the devil; somehow The Room went from an indie stinker to a cult classic thanks to an overnight Internet following. With his new show, The Neighbors on Hulu, Tommy Wiseau would seem vindicated and ready to write his own ticket in Hollywood, and even he knows the score. Which makes one of the next projects he's proposed sound even more ridiculous, as he wants to tackle a very serious issue in American history: the slave trade.
Fusion had an in depth conversation with Wiseau, which highlighted the writer/director's hope of winning an Emmy out of his new sitcom. Apparently, though he didn't say it in as many words, an Oscar might be on his mind too, as he not only wishes he could play Abraham Lincoln in a future movie role, but he also wants to make a full film about slavery. The extent of his plans so far are as follows:
I want to actually do a movie about slavery, in New Orleans. To go back to the history and present the way it was.
While it's not a lot to go on, it's still pretty telling that Tommy Wiseau is looking to parlay his fame from The Room into other projects. This of course begs the question of whether Wiseau thinks people are laughing with him, or at him, especially considering that The Room's fandom mostly comes from the fact that people see it as one of those movies so bad that it's fun to watch. Just picture a film about the southern slave trade, directed by the man who brought us the following display of so-called dramatic gravitas.
Now, imagine an alternate universe where Steven Spielberg hasn't gotten his hands on Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team Of Rivals, and the rights are just floating in the wind. Through some sort of twist of fate, Tommy Wiseau lands those rights, and produces his own version of the following scene from the Earth Prime version of Lincoln.
Right now you're either laughing your ass off, or thanking a deity of some sort that this didn't happen, and we can't blame you for either. While Wiseau definitely has potential to become the next Roger Corman, he's not exactly on the right track to becoming the next Steven Spielberg. That's not an insult to the man as, again, The Room is entertaining in an un-conventional way that most films do not aspire to. Its half-baked qualities are matched only by the earnestness that Tommy Wiseau pours into the film. Still, a film about a subject as serious as slavery isn't something you'd really expect Wiseau to tackle with the same dramatic heft as other, more prominent directors have.
In the meantime, if you want relive the hit that started it all, you can watch The Room in its original form, or with two flavors of RiffTrax commentary – one of which is their recent live performance recorded a couple of months ago. It couldn't hurt, could it?
