We got word over the weekend that Apple’s website was hosting a new trailer for The Hoax, the upcoming film that stars Richard Gere as Clifford Irving, who famously convinced McGraw-Hill that he’d scored a book-length interview with Howard Hughes that constituted an autobiography…which, as it turned out, wasn’t actually the case, leading to one of the biggest media circuses of the early 1970s. (That’s Alfred Molina co-starring as Irving’s collaborator in the scheme, Dick Suskind.)
On his website, Irving describes the film as “a hoax about a hoax”* and adds, “How they got Lasse Hallström to direct this is still a mystery to me.” He’s also offering the opening chapters from The Autobiography of Howard Hughes for free download; you can buy the entire PDF file for $5.95 or, if you want to wait a bit, a POD paperback edition from Lulu.com is said to be in the works. One imagines that’ll be ready by the time the film opens in April.
*In one significant divergence from reality, the film puts Irving’s home in Westchester County when he was actually living in Ibiza. Too bad; that means all Irving’s real-life connections with master forger Elmyr de Hory and Orson Welles—who recounted the Hughes hoax in his final film, F for Fake—are streamlined out of the picture.