As The Disaster Artist shows, some of the stuff behind-the-scenes of The Room is pretty scary.
- Greg's first night in Los Angeles. Tommy left him with his apartment and the key, but after spending the day in town and returning late at night, Greg found that the key he received didn't work. Tommy, however, was back in San Francisco and insisted the key would work. So, Greg had to spend his first night alone in LA at a sleazy motel on Sunset Blvd., with people having sex in the next room and hookers waiting for him outside. Not a very pleasant chapter...
- Tommy's mental breakdown with Greg in the car.
- Tommy casually mentioned having dreams about Greg killing him. It's never brought up again, and Greg didn't seem the least bit fazed.
- Greg realizing that Tommy opened up all of his mail and viewed how much money he was making from his movies.
- Greg's got a job that puts him in Romania around Christmas. Suddenly he hears a knock at the door, telling him he has a telegram. Confused, Greg takes it to find that it's from Tommy, wishing him well. He has no idea how Tommy knew where he was staying.
- Tommy Wiseau, beside all the rudeness and incompetence, is paranoid. Let us count the ways:
- Tommy hired some Czech boy named Markus to videotape the cast and crew while not on set. He claimed it was for a "making-of documentary", but really just wanted to know what they'd say about him behind his back.
- He'd taped his phone calls with Greg for years.Tommy believes this because, in his personal life, he has taped his own phone calls for years using similarly low-tech techniques. Whenever anyone called him—including me—he put the call on speaker and hit record on the same yard-sale tape recorder he now wanted to film. This was why he always said “I’m listening” whenever I called. He was listening. He was also recording. I know all this because I eventually found a huge cache of tapes with hours and hours of phone calls on them, some of which were ours. I confronted him. He denied it at first. When he realized he couldn’t deny it, he claimed he’d done this to study my accent, in order to lose his own. I told him that didn’t sound like a very plausible explanation, and from then on, I hung up on him if he ever put me on speaker. Then he became paranoid that I was taping him. Whenever we were on the phone, he would repeatedly ask me, 'Does anybody listen this conversation?'"
- If Tommy's backstory is to be believed, he was tortured by cops in Strasbourg, France who wanted him to sign a false confession on some trumped up charges. Their threats went from beatings to outright sticking a gun in his mouth.
- The backstory also hints that a very young Tommy was either forced to turn to prostitution to survive, or that he very narrowly escaped this fate.
- Tommy had a brief enthusiasm for setting up a surprise reveal that his character Johnny was really a vampire. The crew managed to talk him down from this. However, considering how autobiographical the rest of the script was... and no one was ever able to figure out where he was getting all that money... and he's got that dead-white skin and muddled Eastern European accent...
- Greg's first visit to Tommy's condo reads like the beginning of the least subtle kind of horror movie. First off, the car in the space next to Tommy's was covered in dust, all the tires were flat, and somebody had drawn the Zodiac Killer's cross-in-circle symbol on it. The old elevator to the the floor Tommy's condo was on clatters and creaked "as ominously as [Greg] imagined an elevator in an old mental hospital would". The condo itself was a mess, and not even a comprehensible mess: Tommy had a supermarket cart filled with shopping bags for no discernible reason. In a corner, a life-size mannequin was posed as if it had been mangled and left for dead. The red drapes covering the windows dyed the whole room "a hysterical, horror-film red". There's stuff less creepy and more surreal, like the zebra skin rugs over the partially ruined floor, or countless Dalmatian figurines and Disney toys that lined the shelves, but it all adds up to the kind of place you'd imagine a creepypasta villain would live in.
- Amongst all of it, Greg finds an old picture of a young Tommy pinned to the fridge. He doesn't have the gaunt look, the sunken eyes, has natural chestnut brown hair, and is smiling a genuine smile. Considering that Tommy is a mess now, Greg aptly surmises: "Something horrible happened to this man."
- The movie brings up a moment of Fridge Horror regarding Tommy's idea of how a director should behave. He believed that since Alfred Hitchcock abused an actress on the set of The Birds, it must be okay for him to do the same. Good thing he didn't use Last Tango in Paris as a standard, given that this was during The Room's infamous sex scene.
- Although not a lot of time is spent on it, it's mentioned that a few years prior to him meeting Greg, one of Tommy's Street Fashions locations had caught on fire, and an unknown man had died, in Greg's words, gruesomely in the fire, after it became so large that it spread to a couple of nearby buildings, including the poor man's residence.
