No one leaves A Star.
That’s what makes one A Star.
—Norma Desmond,
Sunset Boulevard
One afternoon, during the fifth week of production, Raphael approached me on set and said, “We need a line producer. If we don’t have a line producer by the end of this week, I’m leaving.”
Raphael confessed to feeling “embarrassed” by the blinding amateurism of Tommy’s project, especially when he had to do his job in front of Birns & Sawyer’s owner, Bill Meurer, who’d recently taken to yelling at the crew about the disorder that was now disrupting his business. Worse, Raphael kept having to do other people’s jobs. There was simply no organisation. Tommy was constantly hiring and casting and firing and hiring again, all while finding ways to sandwich two jobs into one : I was a lead actor but also the line producer. Sandy was the script supervisor but also the first assistant director. Peter Anway was the Birns & Sawyer sales representative but also, somehow, Tommy’s assistant.
Tommy knew Raphael was upset but didn’t believe he would actually ever follow through on his threat to abandon the production. After all, Tommy had a line producer : me. So what was The Problem? The Problem was this : Tommy didn’t really know what a line producer was. He didn’t know how a film set was supposed to operate. Being a line producer on a chaotic movie shoot is a consuming full-time job, to say the least. The line producer has to run the production, make sure people are paid, help the art department fetch stuff, schedule call times, and do everything else that no director wants to do — and Tommy Wiseau was incapable of doing. To ask a person who is also a lead actor to do these things was self-defeating and ridiculous. I was being forced to rush away from scenes I was shooting, thereby stalling production, so I could order pizza for a starving cast and crew. Raphael was right. We needed help.
Obviously, I understood Raphael’s concern, but I also knew what Tommy’s response was going to be. Tommy had to feel that all decisions were coming from him. If someone else proposed something, no matter how strong the proposal, Tommy would refuse to take any action. And unless Tommy believed he would directly benefit from an idea, no money would be spent, not under any circumstances. If Raphael needed a line producer, he was going to have to tell Tommy in such a way as to make Tommy feel like the idea was his and not Raphael’s — and good luck with that.
