Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here, hopefully later today or this weekend, I'll have a tasty little treat for you: an interview with one of the stars of this fine film.

If you're in a guessing mood, he/she is the person you'd probably most want to hear from considering this person's body of work. But before that, let me hip you to a film you may not be considering seeing in this weekend of the GRINDHOUSE, and that would be a huge mistake.

In this completely fascinating true story, Richard Gere plays Clifford Irving, a writer who in the early 1970s forged a totally false autobiography that he claimed was written by none other than Howard Hughes, the man the word reclusive might have been invented to describe. Irving said that the text was based on transcribed interviews he conducted (and also falsified) with Hughes in a series of one-on-one meetings the two men had. After countless experts on Hughes verified Irving's interviews and connection to Hughes, the book went on to be published by McGraw-Hill and caused them a great deal of embarrassment when the hoax was revealed through the smallest of screw ups by Irving and his associates in on the scam.

Gere hasn't been this good in years, as he invokes a man who is spinning such elaborate and detailed falsehoods that I think even he believed his book was genuine. In order for him to pulls this off, he had to. His genius in concocting the scheme was that even if Hughes and his team of lawyers denied the book's authenticity, Irving and his publisher could just say, "Isn't that just like Howard to cooperate and then deny his cooperation?" It seemed like a foolproof plan. Irving's co-writer and chief researcher Dick Susskind (the wonderful Alfred Molina) is a nervous twit who powers of improvisation and believable lying are non-existent. Irving's loving but distrustful wife (Marcia Gay Harden) is more worried about him cheating again than getting caught at this forgery (and rightfully so, when his on-again, off-again mistress is played by Julie Delpy).

McGraw-Hill types are partially to blame, since it's clear they were so desperate for this autobiography to be authentic, they didn't take the necessary precautions to make sure it was. Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci represent Irving's two main contacts at the firm, while Zeljko Ivanek plays an emissary from Time-Life, whose Life magazine planned to run excerpts from the book before its publication. Irving played these professionals like a maestro and spun incredible tales of his meetings with Hughes in exotic locations around the world. As much as they suspected something wasn't quite right, the stories were so expertly weaved that they were hypnotized, just as I was by director Lasse Hallstrom's superb filmmaking. The pace of THE HOAX never lets up, and it barely gives you a chance to really take a breath and analyze everything you've just seen, probably much like the events in the film. If someone had just stepped back for a minute and really thought about what was happening and how little proof Irving had of his claims, the book never would have made it to press.

Irving always held out hope that Hughes might simply come to his senses and let Irving do a proper interview since it was pretty clear it was getting published one way or another, but instead Hughes and his team use the book's questionable existence to their own advantage. Depending on which political enemies they wanted to put the fear of god into, they sometimes allowed the authenticity of the book to seem more plausible. It's a matter of public record that the book was part of the reason for the Watergate break-ins, but Hughes turned a negative into a devious positive in more ways than one.

I don't think I'm overstating THE HOAX's impact by calling it a work of brilliance. Probably because it starts so strong and never lets up, I kept expecting it to falter, but it never did. Some of the inferences toward the end of the story that Hughes may have had Irving kidnapped, and how these events may or may not have been all in Irving's paranoia-riddled mind seem a bit unnecessary, but they are no less interesting. The entire work is exciting and wildly intriguing. Thank goodness the media today doesn't allow itself to be so blatantly manipulated as it was in the '70s. Just go see THE HOAX, and relish in its greatness.

Capone