Wiseau, Tommy

From MysteryWiki

'Tommy Wiseau is an American actor, director, and producer, responsible for the 2003 film The Room, the 2004 documentary Homeless in America, and the 2015 sitcom The Neighbors, among other things.

Early Life

Life in Poland

Wiseau has been very secretive of his early life. Greg Sestero claimed in his 2013 memoir The Disaster Artist that Wiseau was born in an Eastern Bloc country in the 1950s. Tommy seemed to back this claim in a November 2017 Jimmy Kimmel Live! interview. Additional research by Redditor ohbaimark, alongside linguistic analysis of Wiseau's speech patterns[1], seemed to conclude that Tommy Wiseau was born in Poland. In his 2016 documentary Room Full of Spoons, Rick Harper backed this assertion, saying that Wiseau was originally from Poznań.

HistoryvsHollywood.com, owned by CTF Media, claimed to have obtained Wiseau's Petition for Naturalization, dated 5 September 1984, which stated that "Thomas Pierre Wiseau" was born in Poland on 3 October 1955. At the time of the petition, Tommy Wiseau was already living in San Francisco.

Despite these relatively mundane explanations, some have claimed that Wiseau is actually the mysterious individual known as "D. B. Cooper"[2]. Tommy responded to these allegations in a 2015 Reddit AMA saying:

Uh... neowww, but what people speculate is incorrect referencing. Not familiar with that. Looking right now, they are wrong, let's put it that way.

Life in France

At some point in his youth, it seems that Tommy immigrated to Strasbourg, France, where he adopted the name "Pierre" and began working as a restaurant dishwasher. According to Sestero, Wiseau claimed that he was wrongfully arrested following a drug raid at a youth hostel. Due in part to his mistreatment by French police, Wiseau decided to move to the United States.

Life in Louisiana

Wiseau immigrated to the U.S., moving in with his uncle and aunt, Stanley[3] and Kathleen Edna Wieczor[4], in Chalmette, Louisiana.

Stanley was a Polish immigrant who was naturalized in New Orleans on 17 May 1956 (record #15536). During this time he changed his name to Stanley Wieczor from Stanley Wieczorkiewicz (original Polish: Stainsłav Więczorkiewicz). Więczorkiewicz's birthplace was Poznań. He had immigrated to New York on 25 July 1946 through Liverpool and Belfast, arriving in New Orleans on 18 December the same year. Stanley was the son of Zofia Abromovitz Wieczor and Stanislaus Wieczor. He had five siblings, Nicodem, Viktor, Conrad, Helena, and Marya Wieczor. Additionally, he fathered three children with Kathleen: Karen W. Guerra, Susan W. Andry, and Lauren W. Dubus. Stanley Wieczor was a longtime employee of Exxon-Mobil and a member of the OCAW Union[5].

Kathleen Wieczor (née Rainey) was the daughter of Ethel Louise Mooney and Walter Beldon Rainey. She had ten siblings: Lorraine R. Schorling, Lorna R. Robinson, Patricia R. Schulte, and David, Francis, Doug, Calvin, Rosemary, John, and Tommy Rainey.

Life in San Francisco

At some point, Tommy moved to San Francisco, California, where he worked as a street vendor selling toys to tourists near Fishman's Wharf.

Street Fashions

In January 1979, Wiseau incorporated Street Fashions at PO Box 422520, registering the telephone number 415-885-2908[6]. At the same time, another address was registered at 286 Jefferson Street, again with "Thomas Wiseau" as the owner[7].

Another listing wouldn't appear until January 1992, still under the name "Street Fashions," although this time appearing at 555 Beach Street. This time two phone numbers were listed, 415-885-5406 (which expired in November 2001) and 415-885-5209 (which expired in October 2004)[8].

Two years later, in January 1994, Wiseau would incorporate another Street Fashions, this time at 310 Sutter Street. Although "Thomas Wiseau" was listed as the owner, the individual "Matt Stagill" was listed as the manager[9]. This was the first registration to list the associated website, "www.streetfashions.com." Nothing much remains of this site, with only a warning about it being "graphically intensive" and a 1998 copyright to "CAFEDELSOL" being uncovered using a 22 February 2001 Wayback Machine capture.

According to WhoISrequest's Domain History Checker, the domain "www.streetfashions.com" was dropped or the nameservers removed in 1 April 2003. The domain was put up for sale the next month on 18 May 2003. However, tracking of the site had only begun on 7 July 2002.

Street Fashion USA currently operates at the domain "www.streetfashionsusa.com" (also stylized as "StreetFashionsUSA.com"). The company also joined Twitter at the handle @fashions_usa in November 2016. The current domain was created on 7 October 2013, having been registered by GoDaddy.com, LLC. This web domain lists the registrant contact as "Greg Sestero", with the mailing address P.O. Box 46189, Los Angeles, California 90046. The provided phone is 323-868-2377, with the provided email being tpw@gate.net. This is also the email listed on Tommy Wiseau's Facebook page and it is possible that the "tpw" simply stands for "Thomas Pierre Wiseau."

In Sestero's memoir, The Disaster Artist, he claims that Tommy had used Street Fashions in order to buy himself SAG membership[10]. According to Sestero:

It was a commercial for Street Fashions that he'd written, filmed, and produced himself. Almost every visual and thematic aspect of this commercial had been swiped from my demo reel. I was speechless. Tommy had bought himself SAG membership!

Career

Film

The Room

Undoubtedly Wiseau's best-known film is the cult classic The Room, released in 2003. It was an independent drama film centering on a melodramatic love triangle between Johnny (portrayed by Wiseau), his fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle), and his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero).

Development

The script began as a play written by Wiseau in 2001. In interviews, Tommy claimed that this play was then adapted into a 500-page book[11], which he was subsequently unable to get published. Thus, Wiseau decided to adapt the work for film[12], which he would produce himself in order to maintain creative control.

The budget for the film reached $6,000,000 USD and to this day it is unclear how Wiseau amassed such a sum. In a 2008 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tommy claimed he had made some of the money by importing leather jackets from Korea. Greg Sestero has claimed that Wiseau told him another source of his money was flipping real estate in San Francisco (to which Sestero responded that this could not possibly be true).

Room Full of Spoons

A statement of claim issued by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, dated 13 June 2017, discussed Room Full of Spoons infringing copyrights on The Room, its scripts, its soundtrack, its promotional materials, and more, including "Tommy Wiseau's moral rights in [Room Full of Spoons]." However, the judge later found that the documentary did not infringe upon The Room's copyright, as the film had been up on YouTube in its entirety for several years.

The Disaster Artist

Development

In 2013, Greg Sestero (who portrayed Mark in The Room) and Tom Bissell collaborated on Sestero's memoir The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. The book followed Sestero's relationship with Tommy Wiseau and the creation of Wiseau's film The Room. The book won several awards including Best Non-Fiction on Bookish Oscars in March 2014 and Best Non-Fiction at the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards in November 2014.

In February of 2014, Seth Rogen's production company Point Grey Pictures acquired the book and film rights to The Disaster Artist. It was soon later announced that James Franco would portray Tommy Wiseau and that his brother Dave Franco would star as Greg Sestero.

Best F(r)iends

Television

Internet

Notes

  1. msywiol noted that "Tommy Wiseau in The Room, interviews and in the dialogue from Disaster Artist makes many the same mistakes Polish people do (omitting 'a' and 'an', adding a lot of 'the' before names of people and places, false-friends expressions, like 'doing sex' or 'you think about everything', etc.)."
  2. The XKCD Comic #1400 (28 July 2014) directly references this theory and can be found here.
  3. Stanley Wieczor was born on 17 October 1921 and died in New Orleans on 1 March 2009. His obituary can be found here.
  4. According to Sestero, Wiseau's aunt's name was "Katherine," although the putative obituary reveals her birth name was Kathleen Edna Rainey. She was born on 13 February 1922 and died on 2 March 2009.
  5. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Interational Union, formed on 4 March 1955.
  6. The listing expired in August 2004. It had the associated S.I.C. codes 56110000, 56210000, 56419901, and 56610000.
  7. This location expired also in August 2004, and had the same four S.I.C. codes as the previous PO Box.
  8. This listing expired in October 2004, with the five S.I.C. codes 56999900, 56990000, 56990100, 56990200, and 56999903.
  9. This listing only had a single associated phone number, 415-834-9204. The three associated S.I.C. codes were 56219900, 56210100, and 56210000.
  10. The Screen Actors Guild was an American labor union, which merged with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists to create SAG-AFTRA in 2012.
  11. In a 2011 interview with IndieWire, Wiseau claimed that this book was actually 600 pages in length.
  12. He claimed that this script was a mere 99 pages in length.

External Links

References

No adequate sources have been found so far.