THE ROOM: A Cult Classic At Midnight

“If a lot of people love each other, the world would be a better place to live.”

On the night of Saturday, August 26, my friends and I took a Lyft to the Tivoli Theatre in St. Louis, MO – about two hours from where we live – and waited in a huge line to meet Tommy Wiseau and to watch The Room at midnight.

For those of you not familiar with The Room, it’s been called “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”, which should tell you enough. It’s unintentionally hilarious, filled with dozens of head-scratching/bizarre one liners and extremely awkward moments.

I was introduced to the movie several years ago by a good friend and I’ve been crazy about the movie ever since, occasionally quoting it in everyday life situations.

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that the screening was set to begin at midnight. However, seeing as it was a sold-out event featuring Tommy Wiseau and he did greet a lot of people, the movie ended up starting just after 2 am. By that time, my friends decided that they didn’t want to stick around any longer and I decided to move from the back of the theater closer to the front, where I found myself sitting beside a couple of really nice guys named Nick and CJ.

Notice the spoon resting behind Nick’s ear? Well, spoons are a staple of late night screenings of The Room. I’ll get to that soon.

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Before the film officially began, Tommy came down to the front of the theater and held a quick Q&A session. When I say quick, I mean it lasted for, like, two minutes. I’m not complaining at all – I just figure that’s a very Tommy Wiseau thing to do. He answered the questions he wanted to answer (For example, “Did you hit her?!” “No.”) and ignored the ones he didn’t want to answer.

After the Q&A ended, the film was preceded by a trailer for Wiseau’s upcoming buddy film (co-starring The Room‘s Greg Sestero) Best Friends, a trailer for the highly anticipated movie The Disaster Artist, and a commercial for Tommy’s underwear line.

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FINALLY, just after 2:00, the movie began. What an experience that was.

Because everyone (or mostly everyone) who attends late night screenings of The Room has the movie memorized, there’s not a quiet moment in the audience until everyone files out of the theater. It’s truly one of the most quotable movies of all time and that night’s audience was not shy about proving it.

We all yelled along to the most famous lines, such as, “YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, LISA!”

There was one guy down in the lower left side of the theater who was basically a one-man version of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax. He had a quip for almost every single line and, at least in my case, it made the experience that much funnier. In fact, people throughout the audience made quips after terrible lines were delivered, booed at antagonist Lisa, and yelled at every character who forgot to close the door in the main character’s apartment (note: it happens a lot).

Now, back to the spoons.

If you watch closely, there are several picture frames placed on a table in the apartment. Of course, putting realistic pictures in them would be too simple. Inside the picture frames, there are pictures of single spoons in them. Someone somewhere decided that, at screenings of the film, audience members should throw spoons toward the screen every time the spoon photos appear in the shot. It happens several times.

So, why were there pictures of spoons in that apartment? Thankfully, Tommy Wiseau answered that question for us!

I admittedly bought four spoons for $1 while standing in line, but fortunately I capitalized on the purchase by recycling spoons, in a sense. Those of us who were not in the back rows got to pick up the spoons thrown by people behind us and re-use them. I should also mention that there were a few inflatable footballs being tossed throughout the audience which is an homage to the cringeworthy football tossing scenes. It was the closest I’ve ever gotten to being in the middle of a sporting event at a movie screening.

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As someone who has the utmost respect for and adoration of movie theaters, it kind of felt like I was, in a sense, sinning as I launched spoons up front. As you can see in the photos I took, parts of the theater were a mess after the lights came back up.

But really, it was one of the best cinematic moments of my life thus far. I was surrounded by really nice and good-humored people late at night and we all share a mutual love for horrible cult classic movies. My 2 am – 4 am brain was begging to go to sleep most of the time, but it was 100% worth it to stay up and watch it. (Even though I am a little jealous that my friends found Tommy in a nearby diner and ate with him while I was watching the movie. True story.)