The Spinward Marches

Move over James Frey...You got nothin! So James Frey wrote that book, A Million Little Pieces,

and several of those pieces were trumped up, embellished and not worth the paper they were written on...AND he hoodwinked Oprah, the most effective place to sell books to women today. Oprah caught on and nailed him on her show and it was a big chapter in pop culture.

Ah, but Clifford Irving had Frey beat by at least a million different pieces, More, than thirty years ago, he wrote the autobiograpy of the then most reknowned, reclusive celebrity in the world...the mysterious and extremely weird Howard Hughes, a man so isolated that no one could get to him except the writer Irving who gained unprecedented, one on one, access to the hermit Hughes.

Except that he didn't....He made it all up. There were no interviews, he never met Hughes, Hughes never heard of him. There was also no Oprah, but(if my memory is correct) he went on 60 minutes with none other than Mike Wallace and Wallace questioned him about the truth of the book, I remember Irving looking straight into the camera and asking Howard to go public and tell the world that it's all true.

James Frey=small fry fibber It was a big deal then; now with celebrity obseesion, E, Extra, Access, ET, all the celeb driven tabloids, not to mention the internet and talk radio etc..this would be a Hugh, Gigantic story! Maybe as big as Paris Hilton,,Okay that's probably going too far..but you get the point. It seems the movie, The Hoax, directed by Lasse Hellstrom isn't playing in a lot of theaters and that's too bad. Starring Richard Gere in one of his best performances as Irving, a man on the edge of panic, but always quick to come up with a lie, The Hoax is really a lot of fun, a little bit of a hoax itself. It tells the story, ( with a few extra added embellishments of it own), could have been a little shorter, but kept me involved all the way through. you've got to see Alfred Molina as Irving's sidekick and suffering co-conspiritor. Catch it while you can and let me know what you think.

Another movie I really liked was The Lookout with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This was another good one that just slipped through and deserved more attention. Anybody see that? Finally, what happened to Grindhouse? I didn't see it....what did you think?