Franco became the beautifully, illogically mysterious Wiseau during the filming. His method acting created a meta environment as Franco directed actors in character as Wiseau through the production. Franco went full method for authenticity during the filming of “The Disaster Artist,” we wanted to be just as authentic when marketing the movie.

In 2003, Wiseau purchased a billboard in Hollywood featuring the title of the film in large yellow font and a prominent photo of his own intense, looming visage with his own personal phone number to call for locations and showtimes. Despite making only $1,800 opening week and being pulled from circulation, the billboard remained for 5 years, privately funded by Wiseau.

We purchased the same iconic location and recreated the billboard with a twist: Franco was to loom over Hollywood as Wiseau and the phone number would go straight to a private flip phone in Franco’s possession.

We purchased an iconic billboard in the heart of Hollywood (Highland and Santa Monica) for six weeks starting October 24th, and we painstakingly recreated the late 90’s homemade-in-Microsoft-Word aesthetic. James Franco recreated the “evil” look of Wiseau, and we set up a phone number with an era-specific cellphone to link Franco directly to curious callers. Texts auto-responded with “Call me”, but if mobile users called, there was a chance you could talk to “Tommy Wiseau!”

Franco and Seth Rogen were our only tools to amplify on global scale, expanding callers from just Los Angeles to as far as New Zealand. Further, we integrated the promotion into the press tour. Franco was all too excited to introduce the hilarity of the program to his friends on Conan O’Brien.

It was shared on mobile devices to social media platforms and quickly went viral due to the social nature of its announcement.

“The Disaster Artist” invested under $10k to earn 3.5 billion impressions worldwide.

Opening weekend earned $1.2MM from 19 theaters, an impressive average of $63,755 per theater.

To date, “The Disaster Artist” has grossed $29.8m worldwide and is the fifth top-grossing film for our client.

The billboard and social campaign garnered over 151,000 calls from fans worldwide. That’s an average of 42 calls an hour.

Seth Rogen's Tweet increased calls by 10x to 2,360 calls per hour.

The six videos of the recorded James Franco-as-Wiseau conversations saw a 447% increase in CTR and over 240,000 views from cult classic fans.

We had a number of calls from other movie studios, including: 69 calls from Warner Bros, 47 from Fox/20th Century Fox, and 2 calls from comedian Paul Scheer.