F for Fake (1973)

About F for Fake

Filmmaker Orson Welles discusses the issue of fakes purporting to be reality. He describes the range of fakes in life, which can be as relatively benign as his demonstration of having a beautiful seductively dressed woman walk down the street, her purpose, which most looking in from the outside would believe to get from point A to point B, but is in reality Welles' want to gage the reaction of primarily men to her by secretly filming them. He also discloses his own history with the issue, from his fascination with magic, to lying to get jobs, to the hoax that was his infamous radio program War of the Worlds. He focuses on three individual but somewhat interrelated and high profile cases. The first two involve Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving, the latter the former's biographer. Elmyr eventually came out as probably the most prolific art forger in the world. While Elmyr goes through his process, Irving muses on Elmyr's rationale in his work, his own reason for wanting to tell Elmyr's story, and how fake the biography is in light of Elmyr not being totally forthright in his own history. In Irving's own story, he is now most renowned as the hoaxster who purported to write Howard…

Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072962/plotsummary