There are ways both official and unofficial to describe “the movies.” There’s the new releases the industry decides to push in the malls, and then there’s everything else, which we’re obliged to root out for ourselves. A schoolteacher I know in the wilds of Argentina selects and projects DVDs on a regular basis, and some of the stuff he shows—old experimental shorts, recent features by Abbas Kiarostami, Alexander Sokurov, and Gus Van Sant—is pretty specialized. But he must know his audience at least as well as any studio, because his screenings draw about 800 people a week.
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The Hoax, a quintessential mainstream doorstop deceptively marketed as an art movie, is based on a real-life scam perpetrated in the early 1970s by Clifford Irving with the help of his friend Richard Suskind. Irving claimed to have coauthored an autobiography by the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, a manuscript he and Suskind actually fabricated out of whole cloth without either having ever met Hughes. Irving sold the book to McGraw-Hill for a fortune—$765,000—but once the scheme was uncovered, he was convicted of fraud and sent to federal prison for 14 months.
Essentially the same story is recounted, far more accurately as well as meaningfully, in Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1974), where it delivers a radical lesson about both the speciousness of punditry and media expertise and the complicity of the audience in most hoaxes. The cynical postmodernist lessons of The Hoax are quite different: that shallow media types (as opposed to clear, no-bullshit thinkers like the rest of us) are dying to be fooled, that all of us are hustlers, and that none of us really knows the truth anyway.
Born in Sacramento in 1920 and an artist from an early age, Mirikitani was raised in Hiroshima until a clash with his father and the rising tide of Japanese militarism drove him to return to California at the age of 18, where he went to live with a sister. But three years later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mirikitani was incarcerated with other Japanese-Americans in a concentration camp, where he remained for the next three and a half years. He lost contact with his sister, who was sent to a different camp, and didn’t reconnect with her for six decades. Most of his family was killed when Hiroshima was decimated by the atomic bomb.
Directed by Lasse Hallstrom
Written by William Wheeler,
With Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, Stanley Tucci, and Julie Delpy.
The Cats of Mirikitani ★★★
Directed by Linda Hattendorf
