Tommy Wiseau: Oh Hi, Chalmette

Oh Hi, Chalmette

Nobody knows exactly where Tommy Wiseau comes from, which is fitting for a man who made the most mysteriously funded, bizarrely compelling bad movie in the history of cinema. What we do know is that before he became a Los Angeles filmmaker, before The Room became a cult phenomenon, before James Franco played him in The Disaster Artist — Tommy Wiseau had a Chalmette connection.

Born Tomasz Wieczorkiewicz in Poland in 1955, Wiseau immigrated to the United States and, according to his longtime friend and collaborator Greg Sestero, lived with an aunt and uncle in Chalmette, Louisiana. Wiseau himself has claimed to have grown up in New Orleans and described having family in Chalmette. The details are murky — Wiseau has spent decades being deliberately vague about his backstory — but the Louisiana chapter of his life appears to be real.

And then there's The Room. Released in 2003, it cost six million dollars — money whose source has never been fully explained — and it is, by nearly universal agreement, one of the worst films ever made. Wiseau wrote it, produced it, directed it, and starred in it. The dialogue is incomprehensible. The plot makes no sense. The green-screen rooftop scenes are legendary in their awfulness.

And yet. The Room became one of the most successful cult films of all time. Midnight screenings draw packed houses where audiences throw plastic spoons at the screen and shout along with the dialogue. It inspired Sestero's memoir The Disaster Artist, which became a James Franco film that earned an Oscar nomination. Tommy Wiseau became famous precisely because of how spectacularly he failed.

Is Tommy Wiseau a New Orleans story? Maybe. The man is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in multiple belts. But if he really did pass through Chalmette on his way from Poland to Hollywood, then New Orleans can claim a small piece of one of the strangest careers in film history. Oh hi, Mark.