I’m Listening!

“Fine,” Tommy said, spinning around to face the remaining members of his production. “Let him go! We don’t need this guy. We don’t need him.”

Raphael was willing to leave without picking up his last paycheck, but his crew was not nearly as accommodating. They wanted to be paid. Now. It was quickly turning into a mob scene, with the remaining crew yelling at Tommy and Tommy yelling back at them. Poor Peter Anway wedged himself between Tommy and the angry crew members, who might as well have been brandishing pitchforks and torches. “Please, guys,” Peter said. “Let’s all just calm down and talk this through.”

Tommy, the most irate of anyone, yelled, “I don’t have to talk! Calm down nothing! Raphael’s disrespectful. It’s his problem. It’s not my problem!”

“Just pay us, you son of a bitch,” one of Raphael’s people demanded. You could feel weeks of frustration burbling up. Some of these guys were plainly prepared to worsen the asymmetrical quality of Tommy’s face.

Tommy looked at the guy who called him a son of a bitch, his eyes lidded and heavy. Then, something seemed to reboot in his mind, and he made a big, sweeping, carnival-barker gesture. “Everyone, inside! We have emergency meeting!”

Knowing they had to suffer through Tommy’s emergency meeting to get paid, everyone simultaneously groaned as they filed into Birns & Sawyer. The office we wound up in was not large, and the air was suffused with the hot stench of anger, body odor, and bad breath. “Okay,” he said. “So here we are. Let’s have discussion. We have obviously problem today, but we here to talk. It’s America. I’m an American, just like you.”

The absurdity of this comment was met with some giggling.

“American with accent,” Tommy said, waving away the laughter. “So be it.” He looked around. “We like to know who stay today. Because we will continue production. Okay? We are not going anywhere. No one will ruin my movie.” His voice, by this point, was slightly quivering. “Production will continue. Cameras will keep rolling.”

In fact, the cameras were rolling at that moment. At the beginning of production, Tommy had hired a young Czech kid named Markus — he’d been doing odd jobs at Birns & Sawyer when Tommy found him — to shoot the rough footage for a making-of documentary about The Room. Tommy’s orders to Markus were to film everything, all the time. Oftentimes Markus stuck his Canon right into people’s faces. Sandy, at one point, shoved the camera away and said, “Turn that off or I will.” Other members of the production more bluntly told Markus to “stay the fuck away” whenever they saw him coming. Markus revealed this resistance to Tommy, who said, “We don’t care what they say. Keep going.”

And now Markus, ever diligent, was filming Tommy’s emergency meeting. No one much liked that, given the circumstances. “Get your fucking camera out of my face!” one of Raphael’s people said.

Tommy noticed this and said, “No!” His outburst momentarily shut up everyone in the room. Tommy pointed adamantly at Markus. “You keep filming. You may film this strike.” What no one knew — what I didn’t even know at the time — was that Tommy was daily watching all of Markus’s raw footage until the wee hours, which went some way toward explaining why he was always so late in the morning. All this time, Tommy had been spying on his own production. So just about every time someone made an unkind comment about Tommy, Markus was there recording. Just about every time someone laughed about Tommy’s acting, which was often, Markus got it. Tommy knew more about how he was perceived on set than anyone was aware. And now he let people know what he knew. He began pointing out crew members in the crowd and repeating back to them some nasty comment they’d made. “This guy,” Tommy was saying, “this guy here, with the hat? I know what you’re saying. You say I’m bad actor? I say you’re bad crew member.”

Tommy’s emotional insurance policy scheme, if that’s what it was, worked. The mood in the room softened immediately — whether because people felt bad or guilty or genuinely worried, I have no idea, but there was now enough fragile goodwill between all parties to move forward in a civil manner. “We’ll work for you,” one of Raphael’s people said, “if you meet our basic demands.”

Tommy said he was willing to hear those demands.

They were : Tommy couldn’t keep showing up four hours late. Tommy couldn’t take the HD camera home with him every night, because it delayed the already delayed process of setting up in the morning. Tommy needed to pay the crew decently. If the crew stayed for ten hours, Tommy needed to include dinner.

Tommy had heard enough. “Please stop,” he said. “Stop this nonsense. Have respect for producers. You guys are flying in the sky.”

“Then pay us,” someone new said, astonished that these reasoned and reasonable demands could be called “nonsense.” “We’re done!”

“Yeah,” another said. “Just give us our check and we’ll get out of here. We don’t want to work for you.”

Tommy kept repeating, over and over, that all this was “nonsense,” that in Hollywood this was “how things work.” “Be professional,” he said. “Stop this crying.”

I said, over the arguing, “Tommy, just pay them.”

Again there was silence. Tommy looked at me, at them. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t have enough checks at this time. And I notice you guys, all of you, you say very condescending things in your statements. It’s on the camera. Look, we will pay you later. We cannot pay you now.”

Uproar. The crowd was closing in on Tommy; his directorial force field was rapidly giving way. “Guys!” Peter Anway said. He was standing next to me, in the back of the room, trying to shout sense into someone, anyone. “Everybody calm down! It’s fine.” No one acknowledged him. Peter looked over at me, terrified. This shoot was his responsibility. If a fight broke out and Birns & Sawyer got turned upside down, Meurer would likely fire him. The battery powering Peter’s famous, plugged-in grin had expired. Tommy was almost certainly going to be assaulted if something wasn’t done — even though he might well have deserved it.

Tommy would milk this power position as long as he could. Even if he were physically attacked, he’d refuse to do the right thing. “Tommy has checks at his house,” I said to Peter.

“Go get them,” Peter said.

I muscled through the crowd and went to Tommy’s apartment to grab a handful of Bank of America checks from the huge stack on his living room table. When I got back, everyone was lined up waiting outside Birns & Sawyer. I held up the checks and they cheered. “Thank you,” Peter Anway kept saying. “Thank you. Thank you.”

Tommy spent an hour writing out checks. His signature, illegible on the smoothest and most lucid of days, was an infuriated slash. After every slash, he handed the check to its recipient and said, “Go inside and make copy. We need a copy!”

“No, no, no, Tommy,” Sandy was saying. “I’m not your assistant. And I’m telling you this scene is just . . . this is ridiculous. It’s totally, totally ridiculous.”

“No, it’s not,” Tommy said. “It’s how I want it.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not ridiculous!”

When I approached them, Sandy looked over at me with an all-praise-God-you’re-back expression. Sandy mistakenly believed that Tommy listened to me.

At issue was the fact that Lisa begins the scene talking to her mother on the phone and ends by walking her to the door. Yet, somehow, their entire conversation gets recorded on Johnny and Lisa’s answering machine? Tommy was adamant that the answering machine record the conversation, so that, in the next scene, Johnny can find the tape on which Lisa admits she’s having an affair. Tommy had been alerted to the rather intractable space-time conundrum the scene created, but he was fixated on having Johnny find the recorded conversation. In the end, Tommy decided to shoot the scene so that Johnny overhears Lisa and Claudette’s conversation from the condo’s spiral staircase. Then, when Lisa and Claudette leave the scene, Tommy wanted Johnny to proceed to the phone and hook it up to a tape recorder.

I’ll start with the most obvious problem : The living room set was fifteen feet across. Johnny would have had as much luck hiding from Lisa and Claudette on the staircase as he would lying at their feet. An only slightly smaller problem was the method by which Johnny sought to record his future wife’s future conversations. Bugging a phone generally takes a little more effort than plugging it into a yard-sale tape recorder, and you need a different kind of tape than a ninety-minute Maxell — which Johnny, of course, happens to already have in his shirt pocket. None of it made any sense, but this was what Tommy wanted to shoot. Some crew guys were setting up the coverage shot of the tape recorder when I came in.

“You can’t shoot that,” Graham told Tommy. “Sandy’s right.”

Tommy was wholly unruffled by their concerns. “We shoot like this. How we want.”

“How you want,” Sandy said. “I don’t want to shoot it this way. You don’t need to have Johnny record anything. You already have him overhearing the conversation.” It was an undeniable point. Johnny hears his future wife admit she’s having an affair. Does he now need proof he has proof?

“I disagree,” Tommy said.

In interviews about The Room, Tommy always shows an unusual amount of defensiveness about Johnny’s tape-recorder surveillance of Lisa. He maintains that Johnny’s method is a legitimate way to record telephone conversations. Tommy believes this because, in his personal life, he has taped his own phone calls for years using similarly low-tech techniques. Whenever anyone called him — including me — he put the call on speaker and hit record on the same yard-sale tape recorder he now wanted to film. This was why he always said “I’m listening” whenever I called. He was listening. He was also recording. I know all this because I eventually found a huge cache of tapes with hours and hours of phone calls on them, some of which were ours. I confronted him. He denied it at first. When he realised he couldn’t deny it, he claimed he’d done this to study my accent, in order to lose his own. I told him that didn’t sound like a very plausible explanation, and from then on, I hung up on him if he ever put me on speaker. Then he became paranoid that I was taping him. Whenever we were on the phone, he would repeatedly ask me, “Does anybody listen this conversation?”