As he stands behind the protective confines of a perspex barrier and snaps photos with dozens of fans, “Escape” – Rupert Holmes’ flirtatious 1970s anthem – plays unabashedly on the overhead sound system. He inexplicably wears leather gloves and sunglasses indoors, and although he appears to be middle-aged, his skin is pearly and smooth, and his hair is still the 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 screening 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 he wrote, directed, produced and wrote starred as the besieged protagonist. Perhaps best known as one of the worst films ever made, Variety cruelly described it as a film “whose main goal seems to be to convince us that wacky Wiseau is actually a normal, everyday guy.”
His new horror film Big Shark is exactly what its title suggests. It’s about a bloodthirsty 35-foot shark wreaking havoc on the streets of Louisiana, the southeastern state where Wiseau claims to have once lived. The idea hit him like a beacon in the night. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the region, “the question came up,” he said. “What if you know what I mean?”
An international man full of secrets
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 filming of The Room in San Francisco and its subsequent cult success.
To date, the facts about Wiseau’s country of origin, source of wealth and true age are still unclear. His shadowy background notwithstanding, it seems like he might leave a bigger footprint in San Francisco than most people realize. “I make money from real estate,” he says. “You know I built some buildings in the Bay Area? That’s fact.”
According to Curbed San Francisco’s Adam Brinklow, Wiseau filmed several scenes from The Room in the city — and one of those locations happened to be the Pizza Zone at 555 Beach St. near Fisherman’s Wharf. Those who’ve walked past it know it’s impossible to miss — that might be because it has a giant billboard promoting “The Room” with Wiseau’s face on it, as well as a massive disembodied pair of blue jeans that like some kind of denim ghost looms over it. A quick search of the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder’s Office database shows that Wiseau is listed on the 1992 charter.
Tommy Wiseau claims he helped build 555 Beach St., a confusing commercial park near San Francisco’s Fishmerman’s Wharf that houses a pizza joint and a “spy shop.”
Google Street View
Frustratingly, despite the badass nature of Big Shark, its famous director is still as cryptic as ever. After he called me twice unannounced, we finally arranged to meet up and talk about his past in San Francisco and his very human motivations behind the film. “Time flies very quickly,” he tells me one afternoon. “I want to shape the world”
On the phone, Wiseau is friendly but opaque: He says he still has a soft spot for Oakland and San Francisco, but doesn’t say where he likes to hang out when he comes to live screenings. He also says he helped fund “The Room” and “Big Shark” through his longtime Bay Area brand, Street Fashions, but no such company appears under his name in the California Secretary of State’s business database.
When asked if he really emigrated from Poland, as his IMDb page suggests, Wiseau emphasizes that he is a “proud American” and “is treated like one” before prompting me with the next question to proceed (Clerks from the San Francisco circuit courts also told me they could not locate his naturalization records as they were physically missing).
Oh hello shark
But other than that, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like the boldness of Big Shark.
The film is another low-budget gem that’s packed with abrupt cuts, cheesy CGI, stilted dialogue, and, yes, action-packed sequences starring the aforementioned great shark. Once it finally explodes on the scene, it terrorizes everyone and significantly thins the population of New Orleans.
Street musician? Went. Inconspicuous buyers? Also gone. Shirtless, muscular boxers sparring inside the ring? Didn’t stand a chance. The poor TV news reporter who had the ill-fated job of covering that fateful evening live on the streets of Louisiana also did not survive (RIP). While many of the film’s scenes felt like a grind — and didn’t make a lot of sense put together — “Big Shark” was practically made for live audience interaction and piggybacked on the art-house longevity of “The Room” screenings.
The audience screamed with delight whenever the shark made an outrageous, cruel act; They cheered when one of the film’s cowboy hat-wearing protagonists declared that they had to “blow his ass up” with dynamite, and they happily sang along with Wiseau’s firefighters, who were responsible for killing the bloodthirsty monster. Most of the dialogue is confusing, but at times it’s wonderfully direct.
“C’mon man, you’re living in a delusional mind!”
“Kill the shark at all costs.”
“We have to kill that 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 the enigmatic person behind it. Maybe “Big Shark” really was a complex allegory, as one viewer suspected, or maybe it wasn’t all that self-aware. While Wiseau’s true identity and motivations are still a stubborn question mark, one thing remained clear from the screening: in Tommy’s world, we are all just spectators watching him play the hero.
