Can you imagine a world without Tommy Wiseau’s The Room? The behind-the-scenes stories of one of the worst movies ever made are legendary. Just when you thought you’d heard it all from various perspectives, directors Josh Folan, Ted Garvey, and Jonathan Mann come at the production from the viewpoint of sound.
Zsolt Magyar and Tim D. Lloyd had one job on Tommy Wiseau’s The Room—capture clean dialogue on set. Under normal circumstances…simple. With The Room, nearly impossible. Zsolt was the production sound mixer and Tim his boom operator, and while crew members were quitting or getting fired every day, the two kept their heads down through the chaos and the infamous Wiseau meltdown.
Directors Josh Folan, Ted Garvey, and Jonathan Mann sit both men down to dig through their memories of what was, for each, their very first professional sound job. In fact, Wiseau purchased the sound equipment for Zsolt on the condition that he would do the sound for his second film.
“Zsolt Magyar and Tim D. Lloyd had one job on Tommy Wiseau’s The Room—capture clean dialogue on set.”
For superfans of The Room, Room Tone: The Sound of “The Room” does offer a lot of surprises regarding Tommy Wiseau’s exploits on set. While Magyar and Lloyd were on the set every day, they were not part of Tommy’s inner circle. Probably the most interesting aspect of their job was that they had only two wireless lavalier microphones and one boom mic. Picture a scene with half a dozen characters — you can’t mic them up correctly.
The other thing is that Tommy shot on both film and video, and the question was whether he would ultimately use the film or the video for the final cut. Tommy told them it would be film, but he wound up using video, which screwed up the sound and caused a lot of headaches in post-production. While the documentary offers a standard talking-head interview with Magyar and Lloyd, the filmmakers incorporate animation into on-set reenactments. The animation style is punk rock: hand-drawn and frenetic, designed to match the chaotic energy on set. But the film saves its best card for the end: a story about Tommy that nobody’s heard before and spotlights Wiseau’s softer edge.
Room Tone: The Sound of “The Room” hilariously adds to the Wiseau rabbit hole, with directors Josh Folan, Ted Garvey, and Jonathan Mann unearthing a genuinely fresh angle on a story that seemed fully picked clean. The punk animation keeps things lively, and that final Tommy reveal makes the whole 27 minutes worth the sit.
For screening information, visit the Room Tone: The Sound of “The Room” official website.
"…Can you imagine a world without Tommy Wiseau's The Room?"
