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Tommy Wiseau cult members have been waiting for The Disaster Artist to be released on December 1 for what feels like forever now.
But Boston singer/songwriter and pianist Dan Masterson has been waiting longer.
A devout fan of The Room, Masterson penned a track called “You are tearing me apart Lisa” back in 2011, and six years later, the time is right to release that bugger in tandem with the debut of The Disaster Artist. Masterson’s ditty strings together the plot of The Room from the perspective of main character and “American hero” Johnny (played by Wiseau himself, who else?), right down to Wiseau’s baffling dialect.
“I was obsessed with the film, and had met Tommy [Wiseau] and Greg [Sestero] at a sort of tongue-in-cheek award ceremony, and just as a sort of songwriting exercise,” Masterson tells Vanyaland. “I wanted to see if I could take all these quotes and string them into a coherent narrative. And having learned some of Tommy’s background later I kind of wove a few things from his backstory in and filled in the gaps. It was a weird like musical theater/songwriting challenge almost.”
Peppered throughout the song are key movie quotes like “I am fed up with the world,” “I’d do anything for my girl,” and “I did naht,” culminating in the exasperated but iconic line “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” for the chorus, mystery accent in full effect.
“I originally wanted to sing it normally, more like a musical theater tune,” he explains. “Annie, a friend of mine from college a cappella was producing vocals for Atlas [one of Masterson’s albums] when we recorded this, and so she pushed me to do the accent. I literally pulled up each line from the film in the booth and practiced copying it, then we’d hit record and grab it phrase by phrase for the most part.”
Masterson’s song comes complete with a music video and highlight reel of The Room, which you can check out below while you’re pregaming for the big release of The Disaster Artist this weekend.
“All I can say is that if Tommy and James Franco decide to take the story to Broadway I hope they give me a call,” Masterson concludes.