For more than a decade, Tommy Wiseau has been regarded as one of the most infamous Hollywood outsiders, the mysterious man known for directing what's considered the worst movie of all time. That film is The Room, a cult classic so-bad-it's-good phenomenon that last year inspired an award-caliber fictionalized feature film called The Disaster Artist. Wiseau, the long-haired, triple-belted, enigmatic "filmmaker"—who also starred, wrote, and produced The Room—has become something of a pop-culture fascination, a bizarro ironic "celebrity" whose origin story is as baffling as his movie.

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And while his phenomenally horrible movie brought him to the Golden Globes 15 years later for all the wrong reasons, one man is claiming that he actually directed The Room—not Wiseau.

Sandy Schklair claims that he was hired as The Room's script supervisor and ended up directing most of the film.

“You know what, I don’t care if it’s a shitty movie. I directed crap and got it noticed all around the world," he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I directed this entire movie, except for the love scenes and the second unit stuff in San Francisco."



Schklair outlines these claims in a new book aptly titled Yes, I Directed the Room, which is out on Friday via Canadian publisher Finding Dimes Literature. Anyone who's seen The Disaster Artist will recognize Schklair as the character played by Seth Rogen, the one who's often behind the camera filming and working with Wiseau on set. As Schklair explains, he was brought in as script supervisor (his credits include War, Inc and The Devil's Rejects) but was quickly made director and first assistant by Wiseau, who was in over his head. “He had no idea what the directing process was, no idea how you shoot," Schklair tells THR.

As The Hollywood Reporter points out:

In the original 2013 book The Disaster Artist, written by Greg Sestero (Wiseau’s close friend and The Room co-star) together with Tom Bissell, Schklair is given more credit than simply script work: “Sandy helped set up eyelines, blocked scenes, worked on the dialog, and established a basic through-line of minimum coherence,” it says, later adding he was the “only reason we’d gotten anything remotely watchable on film."

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In all honesty, it makes sense why Schklair would want to downplay his involvement with the film for the last 15 years and now, as it's become somewhat of a cultural touchstone, reveal his actual role in its creation.