flawedxdesign replied to your photoset “agree with all this and it’s why The Room getting an upcoming wide...”
He made his dreams come true against all the odds. He may have had the money, but that's not what made his film a success. The Room is a miracle in the sense that it had not a hope in hell of success, and yet remains a cult favorite over 10 years later in spite of it.
You absolutely cannot separate Tommy Wiseau’s money from The Room’s success. He wouldn’t have had the cast he had without the money. Hell, in The Disaster Artist novel, one of the first things Greg (Tommy’s only friend in LA) explains is that he didn’t even want to play Mark and only did it because Tommy offered him a shitload of money.
It’s also the reason that, despite being such a piece of garbage, The Room looks, to an extent, bizarrely kind of professional. Because he had a professional film crew working on it, again, because he paid everyone a lot of money. Arguably, it’s good he kept people employed and paid for a period of time, but he also used this as an excuse to treat them like shit, which is touched on both in The Disaster Artist film and novel.
His money also went into keeping a billboard up for The Room for an extended period, as well as negotiating with a theater to keep playing it for two weeks, which is an unnatural amount of time for a piece of media to have a public presence when that piece of media is a huge flop and, additionally, an independent production with no name actors. You could probably cite this specifically as the reason The Room eventually took off because it was near the end of this theater run that Michael Rousselet saw it and became The Room’s unofficial head PR man, drumming up ironic support for it and getting lots of his friends to come see it (and to throw spoons and such).
Basically, The Room wouldn’t have been made the way it was made and wouldn’t have had the opportunity to get the attention it did without Tommy Wiseau’s seemingly bottomless funds. There are plenty of abysmal films out there, as well as brilliant ones, that simply fade away because the people behind them do not have the budget to make them look like “real” films and/or the budget to get them seen by a significant enough audience.
You could argue that Tommy Wiseau deserves the success because he earned his money fair and square or whatever, but no one knows exactly how he earned his money so we don’t know that. Furthermore, when you have millions (The Room cost about 6 million to produce), it’s generally safe to assume that it wasn’t all “hard work.” It’s pretty much impossible that at least a portion of Wiseau’s fortune wasn’t made off of the backs of others, similar to how The Room wouldn’t have been made if a rich prick hadn’t been allowed to lord his cash over his cast and crew, allowing him to be a tyrannical, disrespectful asshole to everyone until his miracle picture reached the level of infamous success it has today.
If you want something closer to the miracle you’re describing, check out Neil Breen’s work. There are some similarities to Breen and Wiseau and Breen is probably no saint either, but his money is at least traceable back to his own architecture company so he fits the “self-made man” archetype at least a bit more. He’s also clearly nowhere near as rich as Wiseau. You’ll notice his actors are worse, his films look cheaper, and he’s (at least so far) hardly as infamous as Tommy. And I’d say that’s largely simply because he has less money.
