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Oh hi my Beautiful Watchers and welcome back to Lost in Adaptation,
a youtube show dedicated to comparing film adaptations of books to their source material.
Though it is a bold statement, I’m confident in saying that
everyone watching this video has seen The Room. Even if you’ve not seen The Room,
you’ve seen The Room because you watched at least one of the 20 bazillion videos made about it
during the rant review phase of the internet or seen the Rifftrax version or
the hugely popular dramatisation of the making of starring James Franco.
Premiering in 2003 it was the brainchild of the notorious Tommy Wiseau who bankrolled,
wrote, produced, directed and starred along with his best friend Greg Sestero.
It’s generally regarded as one of the worst movies of all time
because of its terrible acting, nonsensical plot and just generally bizarre creative choices.
Despite, or to be more precise, because of this, it developed a huge cult following
of people who enjoyed mocking it or just earnestly appreciated its atypical charm.
I did not hit her, it’s not true.It’s bullshit, I did not hit her. I did not! Oh hi, Mark.
It’ll be 18 dollars.
Here you go, keep the change. Hi doggy!
You’re my favourite customer.
Thanks a lot, bye!
Come on! Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Why, Lisa? Why, please talk to me, PLEASE!
Everybody betray me, I fed up with this world.
Over the years since its release, Wiseau has intentionally shrouded himself in mystery,
doing his best to keep his personal history and information a secret by refusing to
acknowledge his age, which country he grew up in before living in America and
how he got the funds to make his movie.
Some information has been dug up but to respect his wishes, I won’t go into any of it here.
What I WILL go into is the one thing that no one seems to ever talk about,
that despite what The Disaster Artist seems to imply, The Room was not an original screenplay.
It’s an adaptation of a 1976 novel by the late Polish author Prima Aprilis.
The book’s title roughly translates to “The Room I Died In”. It’s only available in paperback
in its original Polish currently, but you can download an English version on Kindle.
As Wiseau has never publicly acknowledged the origins of this story it might
be more apt to refer to this as Lost in Plagiarisation as opposed to Adaptation but
we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, for now.
Prima Aprilis began his career as a journalist, only branching into fiction writing in his late
20s with his debut novel Set Your Sights on Lublin and its sequel The Compass of Death. The
Room I Died In was the last book he wrote before tragically drowning while on holiday in Venice.
The book is split between four POV characters: Johnny,
Mark, Lisa, and weirdly enough, Peter, who has a much larger role than he did in the film.
I’m assuming these characters had different, more Polish sounding names in the original
but they were changed during the localisation process, which is unusual but not unheard of.
Again, probably due to the translation some of the book sounds a little awkward in English,
but I was actually impressed by Aprilis’ writing overall.
He has a real talent for creating atmospheric scenes and building tension.
While it’s never been confirmed, due to the way it ended some
fans believe that The Room I Died In was supposed to be the first of a trilogy, but
we’ll get to that in a bit. Oh boy will we get to the ending….
Part of the reason I want to talk about this today my Beautiful Watchers is to
bring this almost completely overlooked part of The Room’s history to light, but
to be honest I also just need to tell you about this book. Try to remain calm when you
hear this but as weird as The Room is, The Room I Died in is arguably weirder. Yeah.
And we’ll get into it, right after a quick word about our sponsor.
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As per usual let’s begin with a quick synopsis
of the elements of the film that are true to the book.
A gentleman by the name of Johnny is living with his fiancé Lisa in a small but
well cared for apartment. They’re regularly joined
by the neighbourhood kid called Danny whom Johnny has assumed a parental role over.
Lisa, who has been slowly falling out of love with Johnny for years,
develops an obsessive fixation with his younger best friend Mark,
who she seduces into having sex with her on the spiral staircase in their home.
Her immediate plans to leave her future husband are derailed by her dying mother,
who pressures her to stay with Johnny as she’s out of employment and needs financial support.
Danny gets in trouble with Chris R, a local drug dealer and loan shark,
but is saved by the arrival of Johnny and Mark.
Mark’s increasing guilt over sleeping with his BFF’s boo
leads to an awkward conversation on the roof of their building where he attempts to ascertain
the likelihood of Johnny reacting violently to Lisa and gets frustrated when it goes nowhere.
Danny confesses to Johnny that he’s in love with Lisa,
though because of his age (we’ll come back to that) it's not taken seriously.
Lisa, feeling trapped in her relationship by everyone's love for Johnny,
spreads lies about him hitting her to try to justify her future breakup to their friends.
Johnny, Mark, Danny and Peter decide to play sports in their
wedding tuxedos before doing a photoshoot.
Lisa and Mark continue their affair until Johnny becomes suspicious enough to tap his own phone,
culminating in a big reveal and scrap at his birthday party,
followed by Lisa walking out on him.
In a moment of despair, Johnny puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
The distinct lack of last names originated in the book. I suspect Aprilis was making
some sort of statement with this but I’m too ignorant of 1970s Polish culture to grasp it.
Funnily enough, physically Wiseau fits the bill for Johnny almost perfectly
as the character is described as being very tall, long dark-haired and in great
shape but in a slightly off-putting way that makes people who see his body uncomfortable.
Wiseau may well have been attracted to this book in the first place because
of the similarities between himself and the lead.
Hello?
What are these characters doing here?
As you have no doubt already surmised, the story wasn’t set in America originally. Johnny and his
friends lived in Warsaw, Poland in the book. It doesn't seem to make a huge difference as it is,
at the end of the day, a very personal story not a political one but it’s worth mentioning.
Wiseau’s handling of Danny is pretty hilarious because the lad was supposed to be 10 years old.
Wiseau seems to have cast a 20 something actor to play him but not updated his behaviour in
the slightest, so you have a grown-ass man acting like a child throughout the film.
Danny spent most of his time with Johnny and Lisa because his neglectful father was an alcoholic
and it was said father who took the loan from Chris R. Poor Danny was just
caught up in the middle of someone else’s mess.
Aprilis took pains to establish Johnny and Mark’s long friendship before he betrays him. There’s a
full chapter near the start of the book detailing how they met and became besties over the years.
I’m not sure if this is changed in the film or just not made clear, but
the gun that Johnny used to kill himself was the one that he and Mark had wrestled
away from Chris R before having him arrested. The chapter is told from Mark’s POV so there's a lot
of tension derived from him worrying why Johnny asked to keep it and if he should have let him.
As mentioned, playing football in inappropriate clothing features in
the book but it's not the kind of football you see here. It’s the European one that
primarily involves the feet and a ball so is actually deserved of the name.
Fans of the adaptation of The Disaster Artist will be interested to hear that Mark
never had a beard in the book so his dramatic removal of it half way through the film might
have well been part of a power-play between Wiseau and Greg Sestero as was portrayed.
Sex is only very vaguely implied in the book, despite infidelity being a big part of the plot,
I got the impression that Aprilis is a little prudish on the subject,
which makes the painfully long sex scenes in the film even funnier when you think about it.
One of the key differences between Aprilis and Wiseau’s stories that I
personally found the most interesting was the judgmental stance that Wiseau took on Lisa.
She was portrayed in a considerably more sympathetic light in the book.
Don’t get me wrong, her infidelity is still treated as the wrong thing to do but a lot
more emphasis is placed on how much unfair pressure was placed on her to stay with Johnny.
Her mother’s manipulations are shown (quite rightly in my opinion) to be more obviously
abusive. We’ll go into their complex relationship more in the next section but it's fair to say
that Lisa felt very trapped by her situation, and her attempt to sabotage it by sleeping with Mark,
while an undeniable dick move, was an act of desperation, not pure villainy.
Of course, this message gets a little complicated by the final plot twist
but I… I’ll still need a little longer before I can talk about it, let’s come back to it.
The iconic scene on the rooftop makes SO much more sense in the book,
with the simple explanation that Wiseau converted internal monologue to dialogue.
Johnny’s thoughts whirled around in circles as he stumbled up the stairs to the rooftop garden,
desperate for some fresh air to help calm his tumultuous emotions.
“She has everyone convinced I’m some sort of violent monster, but I did not hit her,
it’s not true! It’s bullshit!”
Daylight bathed his face as he exploded through the door but
its familiar comfort did little to distract him from his dark revelry.
“I did not hit her! I did not! I did not! I did not!”
He chanted the words in his head as if it were a counterspell
that could undo the curse Lisa had placed upon him.
He sensed movement in his peripheral vision
and realised with a start that he was not alone. He quickly tried to compose himself.
“Oh….. Hi, Mark.”
Likewise, Johnny’s reaction to Mark’s story about domestic abuse makes way
more sense in the book. Johnny just straight up wasn’t listening to it.
Johnny snapped out of his revelry, Mark was looking at him expectantly and he realised with
a fleeting stab of chagrin that he hadn’t taken in a word his friend had said for almost 2 minutes.
“Haha… What a story Mark,” he hazarded.
Damn, the wrong answer judging by Mark’s visible annoyance.
Alas, I must sadly admit that I was able to find no explanation in the book for all the
framed pictures of spoons. I suspect no one will ever be able to truly explain the spoons.
Ok, what do you have first? What kind of spoon did you have?
To go way back, I’d have to say wooden spoons.
That’s correct, they’re wood spoon.
It should shock no one familiar with this film or its reputation
to discover that Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer was a whole thing originally.
Suddenly having to come to terms with her mother's mortality throws Lisa into a mental and emotional
tailspin that leaves her wide open to being manipulated by her regarding maintaining the
status quo that her mother had come to depend on over the years. It’s a deeply tragic situation.
Its complete removal from the film would have been understandable I guess.
It's ALMOST complete but not quite removal is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen as
the end result was a SINGLE mention of terminal cancer that never comes up again.
As mentioned earlier, Peter the psychiatrist, who disappeared from the film completely part
way through, was a much more significant character in the original story.
He’s by far the least significant of the main characters, with less than 10%
of the book told from his point of view, but still.
He had a bunch of his own stuff going on which I won’t go into because it's not hugely relevant to
the main plot. His interactions with the other leads mostly took the form of him trying to
convince Mark to do the right thing, planning how he might mitigate the damage done once the truth
comes out, and a lot of internal struggling about if he should betray Mark and reveal it himself.
You might at this point be wondering if my earlier claim that this book is even weirder
than the film was hyperbole of the highest order but I assure you that is only because I’ve been
saving the single biggest, most shocking piece of information for last. Partly for
dramatic effect and partly because once I tell you nothing else in this review is going to matter.
But… Here goes. The single most significant omission from this film was the ending.
Johnny putting a bullet through the back of his head isn’t where the story concludes.
After Mark and Lisa find his body, and Mark finally decides to reject her,
they leave to take Danny home…. And Johnny starts writhing around again.
He groans incoherently for a bit until his injury miraculously heals and he rises from
the floor, with sharp fangs and red eyes. My Beautiful Watchers…. Johnny is a VAMPIRE!
When your brain is done exploding, you might question how he’s been in daylight this whole
time. Well, funnily enough that is the first thing that Mark asks when he and Lisa come back,
after he’s done screaming in horror.
Johnny explains that that's not how vampires work and casually
reveals that he was the inspiration for Dracula.
Mark is convinced that Johnny is going to kill him and is reduced to a blubbering mess,
while Lisa suddenly regrets everything and begs him to make her into a vampire too
so they can be together forever, but Johnny explains that he’s moved past the need for
petty revenge, and the whole plot of this book was actually a test to see if Lisa and
Mark were worthy of becoming his immortal companions that they had obviously failed.
They follow him up to the stairwell to the roof garden as he gives a long speech about
how the world would be a better place if everyone loved each other more but every
time he had tried to find it for himself everyone had inevitably betrayed him.
As a result, he had grown fed up of this human world. So, when he’s
done monologuing he beneficently forgives the two of them before
flying (because apparently, he can do that) off into the sunset.
As batshit insane as this ending is, when I look back at the events of the book after this twist
I have to admit that Aprilis was very clever in the way he foreshadowed it.
If you were to read it a second time small things surrounding Johnny suddenly make
way more sense like Mark remarking that he’s a lucky man because he doesn’t seem to have aged
a day in the 7 years they’ve known each other and Lisa’s mother complaining that
getting married in a church was one of the few things that Johnny wouldn’t be accomodating for.
There's even a scene where Johnny is clearly freaking
out because Lisa has spilled rice on the floor and he wants to count them.
It's all recontextualised like a second viewing of The Sixth Sense.
I’m not sure what else I can say about this plot twist except...
I just…I don’t… I just can’t with it…
Final thoughts… I guess.
So all in all this is a very odd film based on a very odd book and is a very
odd case of being very close to and very far from being a good adaptation simultaneously.
Wiseau stuck to the main plot beats so loyally almost all the
way through but obviously the lack of twist ending changes everything.
He also managed to warp what was there into something subtly different that I,
along with many other people believe to be largely autobiographical.
A story that took such pains to show that difficult situations are rarely a clear cut
story of good and evil became a villainization of a former lover who ceased to care for him,
despite him being a perfect, popular, generous, supportive guy.
Instead of being an immortal’s last tragic attempt to form a connection with humanity
before giving up on it forever, it's a love letter to Johnny/Tommy’s martyr-like perfection,
the self-fellatio of a narcissistic personality.
It’s the kind of adaptation I hate the most.
One that takes someone else’s story and tries to warp it to fit another’s vision.
Thank you for joining me, my Beautiful Watchers. If you enjoyed this bizarre,
wild ride of an episode then consider leaving the traditional marks of appreciation
i.e. likes, comments and shares on social media. Don’t forget to subscribe if you’re
new so you can find your way back here through the fog of youtube oversaturation
and check out my Patreon page for extra content. Take care of yourselves.
Much love and appreciation to my Patrons of Honour:
Shelby Hotz, Etel Sverdlov, and Trace Carter.
Shoutout to Il Neige for the credits music, check out his channel for
more parody and original songs, and a huge thank you to this video’s editor,
Sophia Ricciardi. Links to her work in the video description.
Be chill or be thrown out little dude, there are your options.
I know we go through this rigmarole every time.
Hi Mark. Oh hi, Mark. Oh h… why do pronunciation
websites always sound like they’ve been recorded in like an airport bathroom?
Prima Aprilis. Prima Aprilis.
Let’s try and William Shatner it up. Part of the reason I…
Johnny explains he’s moved past the past the past. Let’s move past the past, as they say.