Orson Welles's F for Fake

1973

Welles's essay film premiered at the San Sebastian festival, weaving together the art forger Elmyr de Hory, the Howard Hughes biography hoaxer Clifford Irving, and Welles's own history of deception including the War of the Worlds broadcast. He opens by promising that everything in the next hour will be true, then admits after the hour has elapsed that the final passage, a story about Oja Kodar and Picasso, was invented. It is the definitive film about the mechanics of the hoax, and was not released in the United States until 1976.