The Hoax (2006)

Setting: New York, Nevada, The Bahama’s, Switzerland, (imaginary sequence in Mexico); 1971-1972, epilog 1974.

Before writing his fictisive “autobiography” of Howard Hughs, author Clifford Irving penned a book on a famous art forger entitled ‘Fake’, this book in turn served as partial inspiration for Orson Wells experimental film “F For Fake” in which Irving appeared as himself. Those who have seen Wells film know it to have been constructed as an elaborate trick on the audience, and the makers of this film about Irving’s larger claim to fame, have borrowed from former’s sensibilities.

The Hughs book was a hoax, but one that its own perpetrator came to believe in to a certain extent. It was based on an extensive mining of material on the reclusive billionaire, and systemized by the authors own channeling of his subject. Irving ‘literally’ became Hughs for the purpose of dictating the rambling reminiscences on which his book would be based. He also came to believe, quite enthaticaly, if the authors own accounts are here to be trusted, in a Hughs connection to a slightly completed, underhanded series of dealings with Richard Nixon, dealings which again if the film is to be believed, lead in an indirect way to Watergate, impeachment proceedings, and the presidents resignation. How much of this is true is open to a deserved bit of skepticism on the part of the viewer, but that in itself feeds the effectiveness of the film which is not so much about any of the specifics, as about the layers of lying and self deception that can bring potentially anyone down, the victims of their own ‘hoax’.