F For Fake

F For Fake is a most unusual film with Wells as director, screenwriter and acting host as he takes the viewer into the world of duplicity and trickery. Profiled in this unique pseudo-documentary are two of the most notorious “practioners” in the art of fakery: art forger Elmyr de Hory and biographer Clifford Irving, who mastermind an unsavory literary hoaz through a purported biography of How-ard Hughes. Wells also gives us a passing allusion to his War Of The Wars radio hoax that terrified America, one of the first of his essay documentaries and presents a story about Citizen Kane. Wells spent reportedly a year in Paris editing this film, which shows as much as a work of spontaneous improvisation as a thought-out project. Wells originally thought that the film’s title would be Hoax and that the film was “not a documentary,” but “a new kind of film.”