As he stands behind the protective confines of a plexiglass barrier and takes photos with dozens of fans, “Escape” — the flirtatious 1970s anthem by Rupert Holmes — unabashedly plays on the overhead sound system. Inexplicably, he’s wearing leather gloves and sunglasses indoors, and even though he appears middle-aged, his skin is pearly and smooth, and his hair is still that same drugstore black. Up close, he looks like a wax statue from Madame Tussauds, but with the rock ’n’ roll flair of Slash or a late Michael Jackson.
It’s a sold-out showing at San Francisco’s Balboa Theater on a Saturday night, and I’m here to see “Big Shark,” Wiseau’s first feature film since “The Room,” the 2003 cult masterpiece that he wrote, directed, produced and starred in as its beleaguered protagonist. Perhaps best known as one of the worst movies ever made, Variety cruelly described it as a film “whose primary goal, apparently, is to convince us that the freakish Wiseau is actually a normal, everyday sort of guy.”
His new horror film, “Big Shark,” is exactly what its title suggests. It is about a bloodthirsty 35-foot-long shark that wreaks havoc on the streets of Louisiana, the southeastern state where Wiseau claims to have once lived. The idea struck him like a beacon in the night. After Hurricane Katrina flooded the region, “the question arrived,” he said. “What if, you know what I mean?”
An international man of mystery
For decades, Wiseau has eluded audiences, in large part because he reveals so little about his past. However, he was thrust back into the spotlight in 2017 after A24 released “The Disaster Artist.” In it, James Franco portrays Wiseau during the making of “The Room” in San Francisco and its subsequent cult success.
To date, the facts surrounding Wiseau’s country of origin, his source of wealth, and his true age are still murky. Regardless of his shadowy background, it appears as though he may have a bigger footprint in San Francisco than most people realize. “I make money in real estate,” he said. “Do you know I built a few buildings in Bay Area? That’s a fact.”
According to Curbed San Francisco’s Adam Brinklow, Wiseau shot multiple scenes of “The Room” in the city — and one of those shooting locations reportedly happened to be the Pizza Zone on 555 Beach St. near Fisherman’s Wharf. Those who have walked by it know that it’s impossible to miss — that might be because it has a gigantic poster advertising “The Room” with Wiseau’s face on it, as well as a massive pair of disembodied blue jeans that hover over it like some sort of denim specter. A quick search in the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder’s Office database shows that Wiseau is listed on the deed from 1992.
Tommy Wiseau claims that he helped build 555 Beach St., a confusing commercial space near San Francisco’s Fishmerman’s Wharf that’s home to a pizza parlor and a “spy shop.”
Google Street ViewFrustratingly, despite the balls-to-the-wall nature of “Big Shark,” its famous director is still as cryptic as ever. After he cold-called me twice, we finally set up a time to talk, during which we discussed his past in San Francisco and his very human motivations behind the film. “Time is going very fast,” he tells me one afternoon. “I want to make a mark on the world.”
Over the phone, Wiseau is friendly, but opaque: He says that he still has a soft spot for Oakland and San Francisco, but won’t say where he likes to hang out when he visits for live screenings. He also says that he helped fund “The Room” and “Big Shark” through his longtime Bay Area brand, Street Fashions, but no such business appears in the California Secretary of State’s business database under his name.
When asked to confirm if he really did emigrate from Poland like his IMDb page suggests, Wiseau emphasizes that he’s a “proud American” and “will be treated like one” before prompting me to move on to the next question (Clerks from the San Francisco District Courts also told me that they couldn’t locate his naturalization records, saying that they were physically missing).
Oh, hi shark
But, all this aside, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the audacity of “Big Shark.”
The film is yet another low-budget gem that’s rife with abrupt edits, chintzy CGI, stilted dialogue and, yes, action-packed sequences involving the aforementioned big shark. Once it finally explodes onto the scene, it terrorizes everyone and significantly thins out the population of New Orleans.
Buskers? Gone. Unassuming shoppers? Also gone. Shirtless, muscular boxers sparring in the ring indoors? Didn’t stand a chance. The poor TV news reporter who had the unfortunate task of reporting live on the streets of Louisiana that fateful evening also did not survive (RIP). Even though many of the film’s scenes felt like a slog — and didn’t make much sense strung together — “Big Shark” was practically made for live audience interaction, piggybacking off the arthouse longevity of “The Room” screenings.
The audience screamed with delight every time the shark made an outrageous, gruesome appearance; they cheered when one of the film’s cowboy hat-wearing protagonists declared that they needed to “blow its ass up” with dynamite, and they gleefully sang along with Wiseau’s firefighters in charge of killing the bloodthirsty monster. Most of the dialogue is baffling, but every now and then, it’s wonderfully straightforward.
“Come on man, you live in a delusional mind!”
“Eliminate the shark at any cost.”
“We got to kill this bitch!”
And so forth.
As the credits rolled, fans lined up for the Q&A, trying to unravel the meaning of Wiseau’s latest work and, in turn, the enigmatic person behind it. Maybe “Big Shark” really was a complex allegory like one viewer suggested, or, maybe, it wasn’t that self-aware at all. While Wiseau’s true identity and motivations are still a persistent question mark, at the screening, one thing remained clear: In Tommy’s world, we’re all just audience members watching him play the hero.