Fake Event Movies

FWIW, Capricorn One was a very good film. The cast was perfect, and we still have the respectable O.J. Massive conspiracy such as that is unlikely to happen, but it doesn't mean it is not possible. Even less likely in the information and digital age. Makes you wonder, how much of the past history was made up or exaggerated or twisted.

As for fake event movies, the one that comes to mind is on fake death, such as Gone Girl. Probably there are others.

In Wag the Dog (1997) dir: Barry Levinson, the US President's spin-doctor, played by Robert De Niro, hires a celebrated Hollywood director, played by Dustin Hoffman, to create television coverage of a fake war with Albania, to foment patriotic support for the President and cover up an imminently breaking under-age sex scandal, just before the latter's bid for re-election.

Coincidentally, the film appeared just before the Lewinsky scandal and US bombing of Iraq, which made it seem more prescient than it was.

Well worth a watch. Some clever ideas but it wobbles between being an ominous satire and a good-natured farce.

It pays homage to the ingenuity of Hollywood, and director Stanley Mots (Hoffman) in creating an alternative reality. Mots in an arrogant, god-like figure reminiscent of Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole) in The Stunt Man (1980) but his vanity will be the death of him.

Probably Capricorn One was an influence, together with real-life events such as the Falklands War.

Not a movie but television, the classic series “Mission:Impossible” (1966-1973) staged fake events every week. They would trick the evildoers with fake killings, ghostly reappearances, earthquakes, and a nuclear holocaust. They convinced neo-Nazis that Hitler was still alive. They even convince an elderly gangster that he has gone back in time and is young again. It was an amazing show. As I said on the Classic TV board, I don’t care that the producers of the modern franchise used the title, the movies are just NOT Mission:Impossible. They could have named it anything else and not made a single change in their movies.

YES! Should have come up with this myself as I have seen it within this year. Actually, the "fake news" part IS about an hour long before the movie goes into a lengthy escape/chase sequence which I was starting to get a bit tired of by the end. Overall, a pretty good flick and an important hit for James Garner who was trying to beat the odds of transitioning from the little screen to the big one.

Perhaps, then, it feels more significant than it is in actual screen time because our sympathies are intended to lie with the hoaxed rather than the hoaxers. 

Two of the most fondly remembered* don't begin as events, but quickly snowball into major ones when their subjects become media sensations:


Nothing Sacred - Just after learning she's completely healthy, rather than dying of radium poisoning as she believed, small-town girl Carole Lombard is approached by disgraced, big-city reporter Fredric March, eager to rehabilitate himself by taking her tragic story national. He becomes her unwitting aide when she opportunistically decides to escalate what was originally an innocent mistake into a major charade and public spectacle.


Meet John Doe - When disgruntled reporter Barbara Stanwyck prints a fictitious letter from 'John Doe' announcing his public suicide as a protest of social injustice, the story captures the national imagination, and she must produce the non-existent Doe to keep the story alive, recruiting homeless drifter Gary Cooper to play the part, and giving birth to a new political movement. 


*Unfortunately, neither is "fondly remembered" by me. I've simply never been able to get into either one. But they're both bona fide, well-loved classics.   

EDIT: lune7000, I was typing while you were last posting, and you may not consider these as befitting your specific criteria.    

Giving your first question some consideration:

If you'd asked back when Capricorn One was made, I'd have said not. It would certainly have been technically possible to produce convincing images for mass consumption but, as you suggest, the number of those involved would likely result in the secret getting out.

But we now live in an age when people by the tens of millions can be convinced of anything, no matter how absurd and credulity-straining it may seem on its face to others of us. Even if the inevitable whistleblowers came forth by the dozens to reveal the hoax, they'd be easily discredited as conspiracy theorists for the benefit of those preferring to subscribe to their own "truths" (or "alternative facts," as one formerly prominent public figure put it). 

   

I haven't seen that many spaghetti westerns, but have consumed my share of sword-and-sandal "epics" and the like, intended for worldwide distribution, that were shot abroad with ofttimes international casts not speaking the same languages. The most common practice would be to record a "production track" - capturing the dialogue on-set in whatever language(s) - only as a guide for actors (like the original ones as in Fonda's case or hired voice performers) "looping" it on an ADR stage.

Although it's equally common practice to replace individual lines or even dialogue for entire scenes in this manner for any given film due to inadequacies in the production track (wind noise, barking dogs, planes overhead, etc.), I suspect that producers of such pictures judged it more efficient and economical to ADR all the dialogue for an entire film - which might also be redone in the appropriate language for each market in which the film is distributed - rather than deal with the cumbersome sound editing challenges of balancing and mixing something like Fonda's production-track dialogue with that of other performers who'd need to be rerecorded by others in English on the ADR stage.

I don't know how well I stated any of that. In my efforts to be thorough and accurate, brevity and elegant syntax are often casualties.