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Poster for The Hoax
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Released
2006 · FILM

The Hoax

A desperate writer pulls off a daring literary hoax by selling a fake Howard Hughes biography to a major publisher, but as the media frenzy grows, he must decide how far to take the deception before it unravels.

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

Directed by
Lasse Hallstrom
Written by
William Wheeler, Clifford Irving
Runtime
116 min
BiographyComedyDrama

Synopsis

In the early 1970s, Clifford Irving sells a fraudulent biography of Howard Hughes to a major publishing house, an act that would generate a significant media frenzy.

Credits

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Editor
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Director of Photography
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Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 24

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Andrew MondsheinShot by Oliver StapletonScored by Carter BurwellDesigned by Mark Ricker

Box Office

2006 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.5× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$11.8M

Budget$25.0M
Worldwide gross$11.8M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Der große Bluffde
  • Der grosse Bluff - Das Howard Hughes Komplottde
  • Der große Bluff - Das Howard-Hughes-Komplottde
  • Faussairefr

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