The Golden Globes took place this past week and among the most memorable moments — such as Oprah’s address about the #MeToo movement and Natalie Portman eviscerating the Globes sexist director nomination practice with a single sentence — there was a small, comparatively insignificant moment which grabbed my attention.
James Franco won the Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy for his transformative turn as Tommy Wiseau in The Disaster Artist, the story about how the disparate actor-director made one of the worst films of all time and brought the inspiration for the film onto the stage as he accepted.
As you may have seen gif’d across social media, Wiseau made a desperate play for the mic and Franco physically held him back while he thanked his collaborators and did his Tommy impression before shuffling off the stage again.
Perhaps this was a planned spot for laughs, but knowing how difficult a “performer” Wiseau is this looked like Franco hypocritically denying the man he based a now award filming after a chance to talk.
In an interview with Vox, Franco commented that the story of Tommy Wiseau was a story he “was born to tell”. The Disaster Artist as it came to be is indebted to the eccentric director because “it’s his bizarre story and his behaviour and his uniqueness that fueled the whole thing.”
He attempts to sell you of his earnestness in wanting to bring Tommy’s secret success story to the masses, a story about “having a vision that nobody believed in and pushing that vision out into the world.”
I read a lot into this minor action because — given how long The Room has been shunned from mainstream attention — for the one guy who “got” Tommy’s story enough to retell it, the simple action of hogging the mic spoke volumes.
Tommy represented the voiceless in Hollywood; an immigrant and self-made businessman who despite having no qualities of a star, threw himself and his extensive finances into movie making without a second thought.
If Franco had this burning desire to tell the world the “Tommy Wiseau Story” and owed so much to his egotistical struggle, then why, I ask, did he not let the man say a word or two?
Was there a more definitive way for him to tell Wiseau that the no one in Hollywood actually cared about his story than to do an impression of his accent, which Wiseau is famously self-conscious of, while not giving him a second of his award speech?
I try not to sympathize with Wiseau. The accounts from the production of The Room paint him as an abusive autocratic director who insulated himself from criticism through his ego and wealth.
Yet one can’t not feel something for the man; knowing the most exposure he is ever going to get is because the type of person who kept him out of Hollywood — Franco — is retelling his life story for laughs.
Franco’s silencing of Tommy at the absolute height of the odd celebrity’s relevance is the classical Hollywood gatekeeping The Disaster Artist tried to rally you against with its uplifting tribute to the weird dreamers the movie business attracts.
This is a man who sunk millions of dollars into a god awful film inspiring people the world over, and in reality, all that actually means is someone other than you gets the adulation.
It’s almost poetic that at the #TimesUp Golden Globes Franco used his power to silence someone when not even a week later his sexual misconduct allegations would be published, but I digress.
Part of telling someone’s story is preserving their unique voice and sharing it while knowing to step down when necessary, and Franco did not do that.
I read a lot into this minor action because — given how long The Room has been shunned from mainstream attention — for the one guy who “got” Tommy’s story enough to retell it, the simple action of hogging the mic spoke volumes.
In that same Vox interview, Franco says “The Disaster Artist is my story and my life” and frankly that’s disrespectful to the man whose life you are getting laughs out of.