It’s a brisk Friday afternoon at Fisherman’s Wharf, and I’m looking up at a pair of disembodied blue jeans that loom over me like a weary ghost. 

Tucked away on the corner of Beach and Jones streets and isolated from the Lids stores, piercing parlors and nearby crab shacks, it’s an unsettling architectural landmark that’s been haunting this seaside strip for years. But behind these spectral, 20-foot-tall trousers is something even scarier: a gigantic poster of Tommy Wiseau’s floating visage, which is so faded and sun-bleached that it’s been reduced to a pair of floating eyes. 

This ancient relic is an advertisement for “The Room,” Wiseau’s unintentional cult masterpiece that was shot in San Francisco in the early 2000s and has since become a global phenomenon. The notorious drama-romance film, which Wiseau wrote, directed and starred in as its afflicted protagonist, has been decried as one of the worst movies ever made. Decades later, it’s still unclear how the eccentric auteur paid $6 million out of pocket to film it, or how he’s managed to maintain a commercial real estate presence in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

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It turns out that the key to solving both of these mysteries was literally standing in plain sight all along. 

Selling the threads of American culture

When I last spoke with Wiseau in 2023, he told me that Street Fashions, his defunct retail chain at the wharf, bankrolled his widely misunderstood feature film. But during our interview, I was skeptical. After all, this was coming from a man with an undefinable European accent who claimed to be from Louisiana. The company didn’t appear in the California Secretary of State’s business database, and another report from 2013 said the store was “an intriguing, if incomplete, sketch” of how Wiseau made his rumored fortune. Besides, could a small outpost that peddled Levi’s and Converse really generate enough money to create one of the most infamous San Francisco films ever made?

Actor/filmmaker Tommy Wiseau poses at Los Angeles Comic Con, which was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles on Dec. 2, 2022. 

Tommy Wiseau-themed merchandise at “The Room” screening and Q&A events, which were held at the Prytania Theatre in New Orleans on Dec. 5, 2014. 

A general view of actor Tommy Wiseau-themed goodies ahead of the premiere of “The Disaster Artist” at Le Grand Rex in Paris on Feb. 15, 2018.

According to a former employee and close friend of Wiseau who handled the cash directly, the answer is yes. 

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Don't let Google decide who you trust.

“My job was to make sure there was money in the bank account to fund that film,” local circus director Gregangelo Herrera told me over video call, adding that “The Room” was self-financed and that Wiseau “earned every f—king dime” to do it. 

With his long gray ponytail and affinity for roller skating, Herrera is exactly the type of person I’d imagine befriending such an iconoclastic figure. And according to the Velocity Arts & Entertainment founder, Wiseau played a pivotal role in his early adult life. 

Though he never anticipated working in retail and jokes that he still has nightmares about it years later, Herrera said that hustling at the store trained him to become the successful ringmaster that he is today. His event company, Velocity Arts, has been operating in San Francisco for over three decades, and he currently lives in a kaleidoscopic museum space. 

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“I can’t stand when they call our government a circus,” Herrera lamented. “That’s not a circus. That’s a disaster. A circus is a well-organized, well-oiled machine.”

Without Wiseau — and his business — Herrera wouldn’t have been able to put a down payment on the vibrant home he’s currently sitting in, he explained. 

Local artist and circus director Gregangelo Herrera, the owner of the eponymous Gregangelo Museum, appears in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district. 

When the two first met, Herrera was still in college and working a series of odd jobs. It was around 1985, and the AIDS epidemic was beginning to gain national attention. One night, while out dancing at the Stud, he met Wiseau’s then-business partner who operated the store. For reasons he wouldn’t explain, when he and his friends started hanging out with Wiseau, they didn’t call him Tommy or Thomas — they called him Pierre. Herrera began roller-skating to and from Street Fashions, where he helped with screen printing projects. Before he knew it, he became its financial gatekeeper, and ended up working there for 10 years in the ’80s and ’90s. 

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Unlike most Bay Area entrepreneurs, Wiseau didn’t start out with capital funding or general wealth. To say that he began with nothing and used “his own powerful will” to succeed is “an understatement of this man,” Herrera told me. Long before “The Room,” the actor-writer-director sold yo-yos, Herrera said, and was a scrappy businessman who knew how to capitalize on San Francisco’s famous image. 

Out of sheer pride, Wiseau put an American flag on the Fisherman’s Wharf building, which was so large and obtrusive that residents who lived nearby started complaining that it was blocking their view, Herrera said. 

In addition to operating Street Fashions, the mercurial salesman sold trinkets and souvenirs to tourists at a separate kiosk by the wharf. But the real moneymaker, it seemed, was his boutique with the giant inflatable pants on the front of it (today, however, they’re metal). After all, it sold Levi’s, the ultimate symbol of Americana. Crucially, this was also before Levi’s had its own retail locations, meaning tourists had to go to middlemen like Wiseau to buy the coveted jeans. 

Soon, Wiseau opened several Street Fashions locations in the city. The enterprise was so lucrative that he bought a building on Sutter Street, with grand visions to turn it into a loft and retail space, Herrera said. Actually making his dream a reality would be egregiously expensive — but once Wiseau had a vision, he refused to let it go, no matter what obstacles lay ahead of him.  

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One night, Herrera received an urgent phone call from his boss at 2 in the morning. Wiseau needed help, but he wouldn’t go into much detail. Regardless, Herrera agreed. When he arrived at the Sutter Street location, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “I roller-skated down to the store, and here he is, like, sweaty with a sledgehammer,” he said. Apparently, Wiseau had taken it upon himself to completely demolish half of the second floor all by himself. “I was like, ‘How the f—k?’ And that just shows this man’s determination and will,” Herrera continued. “I don’t know how it was even humanly possible.”

But there were other, more important problems they had to deal with. After all, they were basically sitting on a fortune in blue gold, and management had to protect it. 

Two photos of a building on San Francisco’s Sutter Street. 

According to Herrera, young seasonal employees from Europe would sneak off to the second or third floor of the Sutter location to snatch up jeans and then huck them out the window to their accomplices on the street below. Though it’s unclear whether they’re related, around that same time in 1996, news outlets reported that a complex, multinational crime ring had been stealing and exporting 5,000 illicit pairs of pants a week. Lebanese nationals would allegedly take the Levi’s and resell them at Eastern European markets, earning up to $200 per pair, the article said, which is $423.00 when adjusted for inflation. Retailers complained about these thefts so much that federal agents got involved to help crack down on the heists. 

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As business boomed, Herrera split his time between Street Fashions and Velocity Arts, his circus that was steadily growing and booking international shows. Meanwhile, Wiseau was bouncing back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles every few weeks to pursue his film career. When Wiseau finally held a private screening of “The Room” for his close group of friends, Herrera was aghast. “I wanted to crawl into a dark cave when I saw it,” he said. No one else knew what to say either, so they all quietly moved on. 

Eventually, Herrera was so busy managing Velocity Circus that he could no longer toil in the retail trenches. In addition, Levi’s announced that it was opening a 4,400-square-foot retail location in downtown San Francisco, directly competing with Street Fashions and other local denim retailers. When Herrera emotionally packed up his belongings and left the store one day in the mid-1990s, his career with Wiseau abruptly ended. So did their relationship. The last time he reached out to his former boss was about five years ago when Herrera’s sister died, the ringmaster said, because she and Wiseau were close. He never heard back. 

Capitalizing on disaster

A view of the Street Fashions store in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. 

A view of Levi’s merchandise. Tommy Wiseau’s Street Fashions sold the famous San Francisco products before Levi’s had its own retail locations. 

A glimpse inside the Street Fashions store in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. 

Though Wiseau still owns the former Street Fashions space, he leases it out to a kitschy spy shop that sells surveillance cameras, stink bombs and ISIS action figures. A cashier I spoke to when I visited said that he’s never met his landlord, but he’s certainly heard the lore. The Street Fashions logo, along with signs that still proudly advertise a sale that ended over 20 years ago, stubbornly remain on the side of the building like a dated tattoo. 

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Next door, Wiseau’s presence is inescapable. Pizza Zone, the nondescript pizza parlor in the same building, has a faded advertisement for “Big Shark,” Wiseau’s other dubious feature film, taped to the wall. Right by it is another crumpled photo of Wiseau in sunglasses at an awards ceremony with the cast of “The Disaster Artist,” the James Franco film that retold the origin story of “The Room” to the masses. 

As I write this, I can’t help but think about an anecdote that Wiseau once shared with Herrera about his arrival to the United States.

Though Herrera wouldn’t say where Wiseau’s plane departed from out of respect for his old friend, he said that as Wiseau took in his surroundings, he was completely overwhelmed with joy. With cosmic timing, a woman approached him and gave him a tiny American flag that proudly greeted him with red, white and blue. Wiseau, already euphoric, was deeply moved by her gesture. Then, just as he was about to leave, that same woman tapped him on the shoulder and asked for $5.

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This experience showed him that no matter who you are or where you come from, in the U.S., you can sell literally anything to anyone and start life anew. For Wiseau, embracing the public’s cruel response to “The Room” and rebranding it as a cult classic served as the only path forward. 

“He’s the only person who I know,” Herrera said, who could “take something that was such a disaster and have the perseverance to turn it into what it is today.”

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