I recently read the book "The Disaster Artist" by Greg Sestero, about the production of the neo-classic so-bad-its-good movie "The Room" and his relationship with Tommy Wiseau. And I got to thinking about this case, because Tommy Wiseau is pretty much a man who has erased his previous identity and becomes pretty annoyed at any attempts at digging into it, even harmless questions. Over the then, 2012, 15 year relationship, Sestero has built a functioning knowledge of his past, lined out in the book, but admits that there is a reasonable change that everything he knows is false, because of a lot of "fantastical, sad, self-contradictory stories". Tommy was so paranoid over his privacy, that when Greg ad-libbed "Guerrero Street", Tommy was furious, because that was where his apartment at the time was, even though no one would be able to guess that, just from Greg adding a street name to a line. And he refused to let them use his car for a shot, because of "license plate issues", even though the license plates would never be seen. Tommy has consistently claimed to be from New Orleans, even with a heavy eastern-european accent (Tommy even wrote, in an ad for The Room, that he was a "true Ragin' Cajun"). At one point, Greg found Tommies drivers-license, that had his year of birth as "1969", making him 32 at the time, a lie if there ever was one, Tommy obviously being at least a decade older than that. He later got confirmation, in the form of a sister-in-law working in a government job being able to find his immigration papers, that Tommy was indeed born in the fifties, in soviet eastern Europe. He once talked to his friend about Tommy, and when the friend started asking Tommy questions, Tommy was absolutely furious and terrifying, and saw it like a personal betrayal, like Greg had no business even telling people that he existed.
Tommy, as far as I am aware, never stole any identities, in order to change his original, but the furious privacy just rings a bell. He built an entire life from scratch, once he arrived in San Francisco, even a fortune, and was and continues to be insanely private about his past. He probably never committed any crimes (Greg does mention that he may or may not have worked a menial position at a mafia-owned restaurant, but says, of Tommies abilities for crime, that Tommy would probably manage to screw it up completely, to the point that he would be loathe to even commit any crimes if Tommy was anywhere in the country, though a running joke on the set of the Room was that it was a strange money-laundering operation, since there is no clear way that Tommy built his fortune of several million dollars), and his need to plaster his head over LA on a billboard for five years probably means that he is not running from someone. He just up and changed his entire life, sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, name, age, origin, everything, for no apparent reason. Again, that reminds me of Lori. Angrily rebuffing most questions of her life, the little she did tell not adding up, angrily refusing her name being in the paper for the engagement announcement, though it would make little difference. Just a reminder that, in the words of Mark in The Room, as played by Greg Sestero, "people are very strange these days". And sometimes they don't need a reason to be.
