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........

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