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Creative Writing Project: The Hoax

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Trailer for "The Hoax"

By the advent of the 1970s, Howard Hughes, the legendary aircraft and electronics magnate and former movie producer (Hell’s Angels, The Outlaw), had withdrawn into heavily guarded seclusion, even as he continued to run his industrial and resorts empire. Very few had even seen him in years and journalists had been without access to him for a decade and a half. Around this time, Bing Crosby started a television special that was built on the idea of killing time with a song which included the line, “Something to do ’til they find Howard Hughes.”

It was an intriguing vacuum, particularly for those who had pecuniary ambitions to breach the protective circle. It was a situation into which Clifford Irving stumbled one day in 1971, when he suddenly identified what he believed was a fabulous opportunity. Lasse Hallstrom’s The Hoax is about what happened as a result, more or less, anyway.

Irving (Richard Gere) was a middle-aging fiction and nonfiction author of indifferent-to-middling success, but with an artistically heroic self-image and grand social aspirations. (He’d lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza and tried to ingratiate himself with international café-society types.) But he was back in Connecticut and up against it because McGraw Hill had just rejected his new novel and he’d been spending profligately.

As Hallstrom and scripter William Wheeler have it (adapting Irving’s memoir), the angry and distressed writer picked up a copy of Newsweek with a feature on the mysterious and possibly dotty megamillionaire, and saw his main chance. And it was a doozy.

He would sell his sometime editor (Hope Davis) and McGraw Hill on the startling idea that he’d been authorized by Hughes to edit the weird tycoon’s autobiography, something Hughes supposedly wanted published to set the record straight for history. That editor asks one of the very most obvious questions: Why Irving? The movie has him answer, “Best guess? He likes me.”

On the basis of little more than this, Irving winds up with a multimillion-dollar contract—most of which is supposed to be for Hughes, of course. And this conversational exchange underscores one of the more important problems with The Hoax: It’s hard to understand how so many information-media worthies (Life magazine soon signed up for serialization rights) got sucked in by this extraordinary confidence game. Greed certainly must have been a prime motivation, along with well entrenched pride, but The Hoax tells the tale from Irving’s side, and we get little independent examination of the gullible executives’ behavior. Even when Hughes issued a mildly worded protest against the announcement of the upcoming book, the deal went forward, for a while, anyway.

The movie wants us to believe that it was the brilliant improvisatory ingenuity and creative genius for fraud that kept all the balls in the air for so long. But Gere’s somewhat manic portrayal of the literary flim-flammer is often unconvincing. The way Irving is depicted performing at publishing meetings, particularly when he encounters some dangerous skepticism, seems to show anxious bluffing and flop-sweat. The behavior of his co-conspirator, Richard Suskind (Alfred Molina), is sometimes comically nervous and abrupt.

The Hoax does treat their scheme as a comic crime caper much of the time, but it also wants to stake a claim to seriousness. The social rancor and political disruptions of the early 1970s are referenced in strobe-like glimpses (although none of the principals seems to be interested in the era’s momentous events). Eventually, the movie pulls in Watergate via Irving’s alleged possession of information about Hughes’ illicit financial relationship with Nixon. (The money transfers were actual; the importance of Irving and Hughes’ “autobiography” is dubious.)

The filmmakers haven’t succeeded in achieving a workably consistent tone. They eventually descend to a confused, surreal subplot which has the unsettling effect of calling into question the mental stability of the guy whose story they’re relying on. The movie tries an infusion of Parallax View paranoia to put some badly needed tension into the proceedings. By this time, however, Hallstrom seems to be flogging the material to keep things moving, which is unlike him. A sense of distracted desperation seems to be taking over.

Gere has noted that most Americans are too young to know much about 1971-72, let alone the Irving affair, but he has suggested that the movie has “resonance” with both the Vietnam and Iraq war generations because the periods are linked by their deception in high places to the Irving scam. That’s a really strained topicality.

The Hoax is neither entertaining nor coherent enough to arouse audiences’ amusement, or their historical imagination.