Tommy Wiseau: A Jay Gatsby Figure to Greg Sestero’s Nick Carraway Genna Rivieccio
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ust as New York possesses a “quality of distortion” for narrator Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, so, too, does Los Angeles in Greg Sestero’s memoir of making The Room with Tommy Wiseau, mincing no words with the title The Disaster Artist. In both respects, these more “subdued,” “sidelined” narrators (permitted more room, as it were, for greater objectivity in being eclipsed by the largerthan-life personalities of their respective friends) find themselves constantly managing the unexpected debris of a mysteriously wealthy man who has been deeply hurt by a woman somewhere down the line. Like Wiseau, Gatsby inhabits his own planet on West Egg, a symbol of being new to wealth and
therefore, often times, a hub for the nouveau riche, bombastically putting their over the top stylings on display. Playing into the stereotype is Gatsby with his lavish parties thrown every week for the sole purpose, we soon learn, of impressing Daisy Buchanan, who lives across the way in the “old money” territory called East Egg (code for Port Washington for you non-Long Island savvy types) with her husband, Tom. Speaking to the belief in one’s own planet, an entire chapter in The Disaster Artist—rife with beautiful similes and metaphors in its co-writing with journalist Tom Bissell—is called “Tommy’s Planet,” and commences with a quote from one of the primary movies that Sestero used to watch
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