10 Unbelievable Behind-The-Scenes Stories About The Room
6. Wiseau Kept A Billboard Of The Movie Up For Five Years
There are many ways to advertise a film. Trailers, posters, spots on talk shows, all of which are very valid marketing strategies. However, your name is Tommy Wiseau, the only strategy that makes any sense is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single billboard in Hollywood.
In The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero writes that the sole piece of marketing for The Room upon its initial release was one billboard situated on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, California.
The board displayed a single image from the film; a close-up of Wiseau’s face mid-blink that the director christened “Evil Man”. Most other people just call it “disturbing”.
The very unflattering picture of Wiseau would go onto soil the Highland Avenue landscape for some considerable length of time, as, according to an interview Wiseau gave with Wired in 2013, the billboard was kept up for five years following the original release of the movie in 2003.
The madness surrounding the billboard doesn’t stop there; according to The Disaster Artist, Wiseau paid $5,000 a month to keep the board up.
If you take five years as being 60 calendar months, this means that Wiseau paid a whopping $300,000 for the billboard in total. All so Hollywood residents could see his face pulling a weird expression every single day for five years.
Despite its obscene cost, the billboard may actually have turned a profit, as it became somewhat of a tourist attraction following the cult success of the movie. Although, because of the bizarre image displayed on the board, many people actually thought The Room was a horror. They weren’t far off.