From fabricated books to faked news stories, the media hoax has become a staple of modern American culture -- one of the fastest and most irresistible routes to fame, fortune and adoration in a world that loves a good story, sometimes at any cost. But our current era of constantly erupting scandals was kicked off by perhaps the most spectacular swindle of them all: the Clifford Irving/Howard Hughes hoax of the early 1970s.

Richard Gere as Clifford Irving

The true story of Clifford Irving was so outrageous that when THE HOAX’s screenwriter William Wheeler first heard it, he thought it was made up – and things only got more complicated from there, as he and director Lasse Hallström decided to fictionalize this truth-inspired tale built on a series of deceptions and lies.

“When producer Josh Maurer and Mark Gordon first told me the concept for THE HOAX, I thought it was too absurd to be believed. Then they told me it was based on something true which made it even more incredible!” recalls Wheeler.

The basic facts of the story were these:

In1971, McGraw-Hill announced it had acquired for the then-immense sum of nearly a million dollars the rights to publish Howard Hughes’ memoir. This would have been the publishing coup of the century. At the time, Hughes was the richest, most powerful man in the world, yet this prevailing icon was so reclusive that just about everybody wanted to know more about his mysterious, secretive and alluring personal life.

The fact that the purported author wasn’t one of the country’s leading journalists but a littleknown writer named Clifford Irving did raise some eyebrows. Irving, in fact, had previously written a book entitled FAKE!, all about the inner workings of art forger Elmyr de Hory, which could have tipped someone off. But no. Instead, McGraw-Hill claimed that it was satisfied that Irving had obtained not only Hughes’ blessing but extensive intimate interviews with the man who would allow no one else near him. After all, Irving had produced documents from Hughes that even passed the snuff of the publisher’s so-called handwriting experts. But just as the Howard Hughes biography was about to hit the stands, Hughes made his first public statement in over a decade – holding an eerie, disembodied telephone press conference from the Bahamas to declare Clifford Irving and his book a giant fraud.

Zeljko Ivanek as Ralph Graves, John Carter as Harold McGraw, Richard Gere as Clifford Irving, and Hope Davis as Andrea Tate

It turned out the Irving had fabricated the entire volume – in part from his own imagination and in part from a stolen, unpublished manuscript written by Noah Deitrich, Hughes’ former right-hand man, as well as peppered with historically accurate facts obtained through legitimate research by Irving and Suskind. Indeed, Irving had never so much as spoken a word to Howard Hughes.

Ultimately, Irving would be named Con Man of the Year by Time Magazine and would spend more than 2 years in jail, as would his researcher and collaborator Dick Suskind and his Swiss wife, who became his financial accomplice. When he got out, Irving wrote a different memoir – his own this time, and one purportedly more factual, recounting the behind-the-scenes details of creating the bogus autobiography -- and called it The Hoax.

Irving’s book wound up in the hands of producer Josh Maurer, who found himself drawn not only to the story of one of the first earth-shaking media scandals of our recent times, but to the idea of Irving as an wonderfully funny, unpredictable and irreverent movie character. He could, Maurer, realized be the ultimate “unreliable protagonist,” a man so brilliant at lying, he started to buy his own falsehoods. He also provided an intriguing path into a period in American history when both personal trust and the national trust were being shattered by changing lifestyles and political corruption.

“I loved all the elements of the story – the connection to Howard Hughes, the way this scandal impacted the world press – but most of all it was the characters that really got me,” says Maurer. “Clifford Irving got under my skin. He was a very charismatic man who found himself in a kind of mid-life crisis. He saw his youth passing away and he found a way to use his imagination to try to stop that – only he didn’t see the ramifications of what he was doing, for himself, his wife or his best friend. Since his success as a writer did not bring him the critical recognition he desired, he created the extraordinary tale of the Howard Hughes autobiography but made himself the center of the story – and in the end he became his own greatest creation as the author of this hoax.”

Maurer saw right away that Irving’s hoax would be rich material for the right screenwriter to mine. “On the one hand, the story is hysterically funny, it’s great black comedy, but it also has elements of a very suspenseful thriller. It’s very much about the nature of obsession – obsession for storytelling, obsession for passion, obsession for money and obsession for fame and recognition,” he says. “Then there is the whole interesting dynamic between reality and illusion, another major layer in the tale.”

Maurer brought the project to producer Mark Gordon, who was equally intrigued by the bevy of comical characters and complex themes the story presented. “There have always been con men and hoaxsters in America and there’s something about human beings that I think will always be fascinated by those who dare to pull the wool over other people’s eye,” Gordon says.

He continues: “Clifford Irving was just so incredibly audacious. Each thing he did was more outrageous than the next. The fact that he was willing to go to the lengths he did to pull this off, going deeper and deeper into deception and duplicity, plays like fiction, but it’s true.”

4 Producers Maurer, Gordon and Betsy Beers then approached rising screenwriter William Wheeler, who – after getting over his shock that the story of Clifford Irving was based in reality – couldn’t wait to explore the story deeper. Having been a telemarketer himself (his first film, THE PRIME GIG, starred Vince Vaughn as a shady telephone salesman), understood the slippery nature of the sophisticated con.

Wheeler and Maurer began with intensive research into the story’s many layers, from delving into Howard Hughes’ strange exiled existence to probing the ties between Howard Hughes, Clifford Irving and another historical person famed for unfortunate lies: Richard Nixon. Next the team brought the project to Bob Yari. Together, they decided to make the picture independently through Gordon’s partnership at the Stratus Film Company.

Best of all, the writer had the chance to meet the real Clifford Irving, whose slippery psychology was Wheeler’s main interest. “He was very hospitable, very warm and completely unreadable,” Wheeler confesses. “He’s a true operator, and I say that being a bit of an operator myself.”

Wheeler posed the essential question to Irving, but didn’t necessarily buy his response. “I asked him, why did you do it?’” Wheeler recalls. “And Clifford said, ‘it was my Everest. I did it because it was there.’ But I think that’s a little too easy. I think he was a middle-aged man who wanted a sense of accomplishment, of meaning something and I think this hoax was his way of expressing that,” he says.

Yet Wheeler was also completely won over by Irving and his unsinkable irreverent spirit. “The thing that most fascinated me about Clifford as a film character is that every time he gets in trouble he doubles down – he further increases the stakes, which keeps even the most skeptical people distracted. I was really drawn to that,” he says. “It was a chance to really dig through all the layers of these cons and lies and try to figure out what happened and why people did what they did.”

Wheeler himself didn’t want to be beholden only to the facts and spun a few yarns of his own in writing the screenplay (See THE HOAX: FACT AND FICTION later in these production notes). He comments: “I don’t think you could do this story justice without bringing a bit a mischief to it. We each added our own creative touches to the tale – starting with Howard Hughes to Clifford Irving to me to Lasse Hallström to Richard Gere.”

But the one thing that always stayed real for Wheeler was his sense of Clifford Irving as a human being, especially when it came to his friendship with his faithful, if faint-hearted, writing partner and fellow fraudster Dick Suskind. Their relationship becomes one of increasingly tight reliance on each other as their web of lies grows thicker and thicker – and the engine which drives Wheeler’s story.

“I thought audiences would really be able to relate to the idea of these two friends whose incredible lie bound them together,” he says. “Their friendship is the foundation of the story.” The film’s producers were completely behind Wheeler’s adventurous, multi-layered approach to the story – after all, how else could you get to the heart of why a man would risk everything on one outrageous lie and why everyone around him would hungrily buy it? “The story as William Wheeler re-created it makes for a wild ride,” Josh Maurer summarizes of their reaction. “It’s an incredible experience that these two friends go through, and I think it’s an experience that audiences haven’t really had before.”

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PROBING THE HOAX: LASSE HALLSTRÖM COMES ON BOARD
For Academy Award® nominated director Lasse Hallström, THE HOAX marks an edgy departure back to his roots, a foray back into the darkly comic labyrinths of irreverence, obsession and deception. Having gained renown for his deft storytelling skills and sensitivity in working with actors, Hallström’s recent body of work – including the award-winning CIDER HOUSE RULES and CHOCOLAT – has veered towards moving dramas.