“Paul Scheer’s Guide to Making a Great Bad Movie”

The actor dishes on five types of ‘great’ bad movies.

Paul Scheer is an actor (The League, Fresh Off the Boat, Veep), co-host of the podcast “How Did This Get Made?”, and writer most recently working on the TV adaptation of the 1999 movie Galaxy Quest for Amazon Studios. He’s also one of the actors in the movie The Disaster Artist. From the A24 website:

With The Disaster Artist, James Franco transforms the tragicomic true-story of aspiring filmmaker and infamous Hollywood outsider Tommy Wiseau — an artist whose passion was as sincere as his methods were questionable — into a celebration of friendship, artistic expression, and dreams pursued against insurmountable odds. Based on Greg Sestero’s best-selling tell-all about the making of Tommy’s cult-classic disasterpiece The Room (“The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made”), The Disaster Artist is a hilarious and welcome reminder that there is more than one way to become a legend — and no limit to what you can achieve when you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.

The screenplay for The Disaster Artist was written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.

Having established his bona fides as something of an expert on the subject, Vanity Fair asked Paul Scheer for some guidelines as to what qualifies as a ‘great’ bad movie.

The Auteur-Driven Spectacle

First and foremost, Scheer loves bad films that make bold choices, because “a big swing is way more interesting than middle-of-the-road nothing.” Movies that both fail to entertain and also don’t try to do or say anything new or different — the sort that engage in what New York Times critic A.O. Scott once called “deliberate mediocrity” — are simply boring.

But when grand ambition and hubris fail spectacularly — when a film that takes itself deathly seriously can’t inspire that same feeling in anybody else — the result is always fascinating. There’s something good-hearted and admirable about these kinds of movies, despite the depths of their shortcomings. “I can sit and talk about Valerian for two hours, because it’s like, ‘What’s going on here, and why was this choice made?’” Scheer says, after citing other ambitious catastrophes like Jupiter Ascending and Maximum Overdrive (“such a cocaine-fueled masterpiece”). “I just want to get excited by things. I want to have an experience. I don’t want to sit there going, ‘Eh, that’s fine.’”

Scheer notes four other dynamics common to ‘great’ bad films:

The Studio Thirst Trap

The Otherwordly Failure

The Re-Watchability Factor

The Communal Experience

Like the movie The Room:

Here is a trailer for The Disaster Artist:

Can’t wait to see The Disaster Artist which is drawing rave reviews.

For the rest of the Vanity Fair article featuring Paul Scheer, go here.

What are your favorite ‘good’ bad films?

Twitter: @paulscheer, @VanityFair.