In this episode, writer Colin Dodds joins host Tobias Carroll to discuss director Lasse Hallström’s 2006 film The Hoax, inspired by the real-life case of author Clifford Irving and his entirely fictional autobiography of Howard Hughes. Discussed in this episode: fabulism on film, the absurdly good cast of this film, the way certain members of this film’s absurdly good cast are underused, the long shadow of Orson Welles’s F For Fake, and the art of false mustaches.

The real Clifford Irving died in 2017; his New York Times obituary has a good overview of his career. Ed Simon wrote about Irving’s hoax in this piece for Literary Hub. And if you haven’t yet seen Orson Welles’s F For Fake yet, I highly recommend it.

Colin Dodds is online at The Colin Dodds dot com. His latest novel, available everywhere books are sold, is The Reign of the Anti-Santas.