10 Unbelievable Behind-The-Scenes Stories About The Room
8. Nobody Knows Where The Budget Came From
There are many mysteries surrounding The Room, but one of the most interesting is just how it got financed in the first place.
For an independent film, The Room had a shockingly large budget. The film allegedly cost $6,000,000 to make in 2003, which is the equivalent to $8,000,000 in today’s money. To put that into perspective, Whiplash had a budget of $3,300,000 in 2014. If that doesn’t tell you the entire story, I don’t know what will.
If you’re wondering how a movie with no big stars, a terrible script, and a director straight out of The Twilight Zone got such a big budget, then you are not alone, because nobody knows for sure just where the money came from.
Wiseau has never fully divulged the origins of the movie’s budget; he claimed in one interview that he made some of the money by selling imported leather jackets, which is about as convincing as all of the acting in The Room.
Sestero wrote in The Disaster Artist that Wiseau had made a lot of money as an entrepreneur and real estate developer and theorises that this is where the movie’s budget came from.
Was The Room just the passion project of a mad millionaire? Was there a mysterious benefactor funding the movie as a perverse social experiment? Is Tommy Wiseau the world’s greatest art thief? Most likely we will never know.