Sex, Drugs & Hoaxes

If you haven't yet heard of it, Hoax the latest Richard Gere movie is the film Howard Hughes never made, but wanted to, about author Clifford Irving's brazen hoax of an autobiography of Hughes.

Here's a 1972 Time article on the whole thing as it broke.

We also have Irving to thank for Watergate. Nixon, paranoid about what Irving's book might reveal, ordered the second Watergate break-in to discover what Irving might have told the Democrats about Nixon's financial and political dealings with the reclusive billionaire.

Oooooooh scary and fun. The 70's were so.... what's the word? Wacked?

Irving himself gave an interview in the Village Voice in which he said, "I was talking to Richard Gere the other day and we kind of honed in on something that not many people have talked about thus far, which is that the climate of the late 1960s and early '70s was a climate of happening and events. And where I lived, on the island of Ibiza, that was a community of anything goes. It was sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. It wasn't the real world. And that was a very important part of what happened that, unfortunately, is not included at all in the movie."

Does that mean there's no sex in the movie -- not even a fade-to-black thingy? I find that hard to believe.

Well, even if Gere isn't acting out Irving's adultery here, we know lots of folks were screwed in 'the great literary fib.'

(Hughes shows up a lot in sex history, doesn't he? He's even been here at this blog with Billie Dove.)