The Disaster Artist is a movie opening December 1, based on a book about the experience of making a very bad movie. Tom Wiseau's opus The Room premiered in 2003 and proved to be so poorly made that a film buff (Michael Rousselet) made all his friends go see it. Word spread, and eventually it became a phenomena in the vein of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A writer (Tom Bissell) was fascinated and convinced Harper's Magazine to let him write an article on The Room. Meanwhile, Greg Sestero, who played Mark (Oh, hi Mark) in the film, was considering writing a book, and teamed up with Bissell. Also meanwhile, Simon & Schuster, whose vice-president was a fan of The Room, was trying to get a book deal with Tommy Wiseau. That didn't work out, but Sestero's book, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside ‘The Room,’ the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, did.
Three weeks after his book came out, Sestero remembered, Bernstein called to tell him that Franco and Seth Rogen were interested in turning The Disaster Artist into a movie. “My mind was blown,” Sestero said. After all, even before the memoir was written, he’d told Bissell that he wanted it to become a film in the vein of Ed Wood.
Sestero and Wiseau soon joined Franco on a conference call. Sestero recalled Wiseau asking Franco, “What is your vision?” Wiseau also emphatically suggested that he should be played by Johnny Depp. When an amused Franco softly shot him down by explaining that Depp was one of the biggest actors in the world, Wiseau responded with this: “So what? You will try even harder.”
But Franco wanted the role. He is also the producer and director of The Disaster Artist. Read the fascinating story of how a series of improbable events coalesced to produce The Disaster Artist, told by those who lived the story, at The Ringer. -via Digg