Julien Temple, the British music video director who’s probably best known for his rock ‘n’ roll films, such as Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, The Filth and the Fury and The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, has signed on to helm the long-gestating movie Fake!, about notorious forger Elmryr de Hory.
The film is based on a biography of the ‘artist’ by Clifford Irving, which traces the career of de Hory, who claimed to have sold over a thousand forgeries to reputable art galleries all over the world. While he initially tried to make it as an artist in his own right, de Hory realised he had an uncanny knack for copying other people’s style and began selling fake Picassos, before moving on to forging works by Modigliani, Renoir, and Matisse, with his paintings even ending in respected museums, such as the Fogg Art Gallery at Harvard University.
His rather extraordinary life also included being arrested for murder in Mexico, attempted sucide, being jailed in Spain for homosexuality and becoming the subject of Orson Welles final film, the documentary F For Fake. He also always maintained that he never did anything wrong, saying he never signed his works with the names of the artists he was copying.
In case you’re wondering where you’ve heard the name of biographer Clifford Irving before, he’s the guy who, after writing the real biography of de Hory (which the forger was involved in), created a fake of his own, selling a Howard Hughes ‘autobiography’ to a publisher, but which the reclusive Hughes had no knowledge of. Irving was jailed for two and a half years when the fraud came to light. The story became the 2007 film, The Hoax, starring Richard Gere.
Screen International reports that Julien Temple is hoping to film Fake! in the spring, in Spain, France and Croatia.