"You may look for motive in an act, but only after the act has been committed. An effect creates not only the search for a cause, but the reality of the cause itself. I must warn you, however, that the attempt to establish relationships between acts and motives, effects and causes, is one of the most time-wasting games ever invented by Man. Do you know why you kicked the cat this morning? Or gave a sou to that beggar? Or set forth for Jerusalem rather than Gomorrah?"
-- *JEAN LE MALCHANCEUX

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@ "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got," -- Richard Nixon, November 27, 1973.

@ "We will understand and not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have." -- Gerald R. Ford, giving Indonesia the green light, in private conversations, to invade East Timor, which cost the lives of 230,000 people, December 6, 1975.

@ "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal." -- Ronald Reagan, quoted, Time Magazine, May 17, 1976.

@ "Read my lips: no new taxes!" -- George H.W. Bush, at the 1988 Republican Convention.

@ "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." --William J. Clinton, January 26, 1998.

@ "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." -- George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, March 17, 2003, on the Eve of the Attack on Iraq, one of a number of iterations of this idea over a year's time, which we now know was not true.

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Fake! (1970) . . . F FOR FAKE (1973) . . . HOAX (1981) . . . THE HOAX (2006-2007)

Which work adequately tells the truth about the origins of one of the greatest scandals of the early 1970's?

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A lack of historical accuracy is what most critics of Director Lasse Hallstrom's new film, THE HOAX, complain about. But, in this case, since the picture is a story of the 1971 pinnacle act of Author Clifford Irving, a congenital liar, who took McGraw Hill -- one to the largest media conglomerates of the time -- for a million dollars, perhaps helped bring down the Nixon Administration, the complaint may be a little hollow. Indeed, the great extent of Irving's larceny may be less hard to prove than whatever damage done to the film's essential truth by Hallstrom's revisions of detail.

**According to neophyte Screenwriter William Wheeler's vision, it all began in late 1971, as Irving (Richard Geer) had succeeded in having the Publishers of McGraw Hill evacuate the top floors of their New York City headquarters, so that reclusive billionaire, Howard Hughes, the richest man in the World, could land on the roof of their building. After the helicopter appeared in the distance, something happened that --

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We need a flashback:

A year earlier, sitting in the waiting room, glancing at a Newsweek article about Howard Hughes, ambitious author of Fake! (1970), an outrageous biography of Elmyr de Hory the Art Forger, cocky Clifford Irving has just about closed a deal with McGraw Hill to publish his new novel. Equally ambitious Editor Andrea Tate (Hope Davis) assures him that Harold McGraw (John Carter) likes the book, and new corporate head Sidney Fisher (Stanley Tucci) is about to give the Big Okay. Yes-men and women make appropriate blathering sounds. The run is to be for 30,000 copies, and there will be a large advance.

Irving announces the happy news to his painter wife Edith at their art colony home home in Croton Falls, Westchester County; goes out to buy a foreign sports car, a new wardrobe; and attends a masked ball, seeking Andrea. When he finds her, she has bad news. Head honcho Sidney Fisher considers the novel "second rate Phillip Roth," and the deal is off.

Irving returns home in furious disappointment; railing at this unfairness to his friend Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina), a writer of children's books; and later to his loyal Edith, as she paints. [Her canvasses are used in the movie -- big vanilla lips on blue backgrounds, various disguised genitalia, etc., like the work of a female Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, or Eugenio de Arnal.] Moping in her studio, he finds that Newsweek article, stuck to his foot. It gives him an idea.

Monday morning, Irving crashes his way into a McGraw Hill editorial board meeting to announce that Howard Hughes has contacted him, likes his novels and other writings, wants Irving to personally edit his Autobiography. No one has heard directly from World famous flier, movie producer, ladies man, and tycoon Hughes in a decade, and the McGraw Hill editors, publishers of Aviation Week, if suspicious, are also cooly impressed. Then, Irving "smiles and adds more value," giving them several pages of a holographic contract on yellow lined paper (which he has meticulously rendered from samples in the Newsweek article). In a few days, the firm's lawyers agree that the writings are authentic. Greed glitters on corporate faces. The new deal will be for $500,000 (a hundred thousand to Irving, four hundred thousand to Hughes); eventually the sum is upped to a million bucks.

Now, all Irving has to do is produce the Autobiography.

Enlisting shambling, shy, but expert researcher Suskind, and talented wife Edith, the flexible Irving begins to make it all up as he goes along. This quixotic quest takes them, one, two, or all, to the Bahamas (where Hughes is reputed to have a home); to Las Vegas (where his long-time fixer Noah Dietrich [Eli Wallach] lives); to Switzerland (where dual citizen Edith, in a black wig, deposits the million dollar cheque in a secret bank account under the name: "Helga R. Hughes")); and, becoming increasingly a surrealistic psychodrama, the story moves on to shadier spots, involving the CIA, the Mafia, and Hughes' goons (who either impede our nervous hoaxers, or leave them batches of inside research).

During this increasingly heady process, we learn that Clifford Irving is not only a liar, but an adulterer, a heavy drinker, a pill-popper, and something of a nut. At one point, he dons a moustache, parts his slicked back hair slightly off center (decreed by Hughes' 1942 Santa Monica plane crash), and dreamily channels Hughes' voice, in dictation. After the increasingly frantic Suskind starts to waver, and Edith is sent into hurling anger when she finds Clifford has returned to his Ibiza mistress, Baroness Nina Van Pallandt (Julie Delpy), the whole enterprise begins to totter.

But Irving plunges on, and bouyed by his manic and desperate enthusiasm, McGraw Hill management bets the farm on the project, bringing in Ralph Graves (Zeliko Ivanek) of Life Magazine, and Hughes expert Frank McCullough (John Bedford LLoyd), who authenticates Irving's vocal impersonations of Hughes. How might such canny people have been taken in?

Apparently, they believed the hoax . . . BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO BELIEVE.

Just like ourselves when we are taken in by hoaxes and lies in our personal lives, or as we observe events in the life of the Republic.

Critics' other complaint involves the allegation, bolstered by THE HOAX's Newsreel and TV Video footage, or by shadowy figures plotting in corners, that Howard Hughes -- known to some as a racist, right-wing mover behind the scenes -- was at the bottom of Watergate; that somehow, Hughes had laundered money through Nixon's ne'r-do-well brother, Donald. In return for the favor, he gained influence on the Supreme Court, which made a surprise decision in favor of Hughes in a conflict over the merger of Trans World Airlines with Pan American. That gave him hundreds of millions additional dollars, and blackmail power over the President, to make him impede Civil Rights or further Nazi-type eugenics experiments the billionaire dabbled in. Nixon thought that evidence of the bribe had been placed in the safe of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel. Hence, a good chunk of "The Watergate Scandal."

Or, so is implied in THE HOAX.

These critics find this conspiracy unconvincing. And indeed, after the breezy, funny first hour of this 115 minute movie, some of the dramaturgy around this point, using Cinematographer Oliver Stapleton's filters and Editor Andrew Monshein's trick, is a little bumpy going. But an excellent cast and Hallstrom's direction weathers any doubts, and brings THE HOAX to a believable conclusion. Carter Burwell's use of "Who Am I?" by The Who, and David C. Robinson's period styles add to the subtle verasimilitude.

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Looking like a slightly younger Tony Soprano (with more hair but the same Roman nose), Richard Gere carries the film, and Alfred Molina is a grand foil. Together, they make a credible literary Laurel and Hardy act, always one mistake away from disaster.

Better than THE AVIATOR, though not on a par with MELVIN AND HOWARD or F FOR FAKE, Director Hallstrom, returning to the form of WHO'S EATING GILBERT GRAPE and CIDER HOUSE RULES, sees to it that THE HOAX makes most of its points entertainingly.

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"Does it say something for this age of ours," Orson Welles intoned bemusedly in F FOR FAKE, "that [Clifford Irving] could only make it big by fakery?"

Welles was speaking fondly of a shifty, defiant, youthful Clifford Irving, a subject of his pioneer 1973-1975 mockumentary, along with Irving's bunny-blonde wife, Edith. [She was played actually in F FOR FAKE by Irving's mistress Nina Van Pallandt, who would go on to essay a young Richard Gere's madam in AMERICAN GIGILO, and a Hemingwayesque wife to Sterling Hayden in Altman's THE LONG GOOD-BYE]. The picture's major subject was Elmyr De Hory, a master art forger, who fooled art experts, museum curators and the rich of the World out of a lot of money by the amazingly affordable, "previously undiscovered or lost" Braque's, Dufy's, Matisse's, Modigliani's, Van Gogh's, Picasso's, etc,, he created. It is conservatively estimated that 2% of all paintings in modern museums are the work of de Hory.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, you see, de Hory, trying to evade the law, lay low and lived high on the Spanish island of Ibiza, in the Mediterranean, where both Welles and the Irvings were sojourning. The intrigued Irving, who was on his fourth wife (Edith), helped write F FOR FAKE for his biographical subject and friend, the master forger de Hory. Welles, in turn, bought a TV documentary on De Hory by Francoise Reichenbach, to which, among other current interests and old obsessions, he added footage of "the Irvings," etc., following the script he and Irving had fashioned. About a third of it . . . fanciful.

Irving was a struggling novelist, but successful enough a writer to maintain a salon on Ibiza, where he entertained de Hory. He embraced the old crook's philosophy, declaring in F FOR FAKE . . . like a young Richard Gere, or a pirate with a monkey perched on his shoulder . . . that: "If you did not have an Art Market, then fakers could not exist."

Ergo, if there were no publishers, plagiarism laws could not be upheld. McGraw Hill's Sidney Fisher of THE HOAX might have ruefully agreed. The former great publishing house now "deals in services."

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Let's look at some of the great hoaxes of the last hundred years:

The forged Zimmerman Telegram, 1917, suggesting Germany will offer Mexico our Southwest for invading, seems instrumental in bringing the United States into World War I, and on to the World stage . . . Orson to Mexico Welles' "The War of the World's Hoax" of 1938 panics nation . . . Knowledge of the Pearl Harbor Attack, 1941 . . . "The Tonkin Gulf Incident," 1964, precipitates the Vietnam War . . . Clfford Irving's "Howard Hughes' Autobiography Hoax," 1971 may connect to Watergate, 1972 . . . Iran-Contra, 1986, exchanges arms and cash to finance "secret war" in Central America . . . Allegations of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq, 2003 draws America int "the long war against terrorism" . . . Some pretext for Naval Battle Groups in the Persian Gulf to attack Iran, [projected] 2007 . . . .

Hoaxes all, big and small, in some eyes. None has ever been fully explained (including the extraordinary concentration of offensive power in the Gulf, as I write].

If the lie is big enough, and it is said often enough, people will begin to believe it. Who said that? I can't remember. But we have had much fresh evidence of its truth in recent years.

But then, we misjudge, we let the culprits escape, we forget. The hoaxes keep becoming greater and greater.

"This," said Welles, speaking of F FOR FAKE, "is a film about trickery, fraud . . . about lies."

So is THE HOAX.

Enjoy . . . but remember.

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*JEAN LE MALCHANCEUX -- Who is this guru of chancy epistemology? Damned if I know. Sounds like BS to me. His name means "John the Unlucky Fellow" in French, and Clifford Irving quotes him as the epigraph for his newly re-issued book on his caper, Hoax (or The Hoax). Irving is now said to live in Mexico . . . or Colorado.

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**Hallstrom and Wheeler claim that Irving, who was evidently a paid advisor on THE HOAX but has disavowed any responsibility, told them about the helicopter incident, but later said that it never happened.

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THE AVIATOR: Martin Scorsese's pretty but chopped up, mostly embalmed epic based on the life of Howard Hughes, into middle age. Still, it's a motion picture which does give a couple of insights into why the devil-may-care boy aviator and movie maker became a paranoid, old, racist, fascist, reclusive drug addict, with ten-inch fingernails, and "The Richest Man in the World." --

http://www.epinions.com/content_173092212356

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F FOR FAKE --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-3DA1-E636480-39AB1581-prod6





Recommended: Yes

Movie Mood: Funny Movie
Viewing Method: Press Screening
Film Completeness: A few glitches, but mostly complete.
Worst Part of this Film: Pacing