I saw "The Hoax" last night and generally enjoyed it, though I found my mind wandering. One of my friends fell asleep during the show. The problem is that writers tend to lead boring lives; when they’re working they’re sitting by themselves in a room. That’s why writers’ biopics are scarce as hensteeth. "The Hoax" tried to get around this in a bunch of ways, throwing in adultery, and Manhattan office intrigue, even making it a buddy movie, but it couldn’t get past that central problem. At some point Clifford Irving had to be in a room by himself, typing, or in this case, dictating. Ho-hum. There were too many shots of a suburban writer’s cottage.
The other problem I had was the valorization of Irving’s crackpot Watergate theory, which somehow excuses his crime: that he was the one who figured out that pursuing Howard Hughes was the reason the White House sent burglars into the DNC. There are a lot better theories about why Watergate happened. Like it was connected to the Kennedy assassination. (Now in Rolling Stone; I heard it first from Peter Voskamp of the Block Island Times.)
