Movie Hoaxes

On June 21, 1940, Hitler accepted the surrender of the French government at a ceremony in Compiegne, France. After Hitler accepted France's surrender, he stepped backwards slightly, as if in shock. But this isn't what audiences in the Allied countries saw who watched the movie-reel of the ceremony. Instead they saw Hitler dance a bizarre little jig after signing the documents, as if he were childishly celebrating his victory by jumping up and down. The scene was played over and over in movie theaters. Allied propagandists had manufactured the clip by looping the scene of Hitler stepping backwards. More…

Tanis Chandler was a 20-year-old woman working as a teletypist in a Hollywood brokerage office, but dreaming of becoming a movie star. However, she was having trouble getting any roles, until she realized she might have better luck as a man, due to the shortage of male actors in 1943 because of the war. She put on a pair of pants, presented herself at a casting office as "Robert Archer," and soon began appearing in films. More…

If an unknown screenwriter submits a masterpiece to a movie agent, what are the chances that the agent will actually read the screenplay and recognize its value? Freelance writer Chuck Ross designed an experiment to find out. He slightly disguised the script of Casablanca (changing its title, the name of the author, and the names of some of the characters) and submitted it to 217 agencies. The majority of these returned it unread, while 33 recognized the script, but 38 claimed to have read it and rejected it, saying the script simply wasn't good enough. More…

British film producer Ray Santilli came forward with several canisters of film that he said showed military surgeons performing an autopsy on an extraterrestrial creature in 1947. He said he had acquired the film from a former military cameraman. Skeptics mocked Santilli's claims. Nevertheless, when the FOX network aired his film in August 1995, it received extremely high nielsen ratings, and subsequent video rentals of the film were consistently popular. But eventually (in 2006) Santilli confessed the film was fake. He had filmed the footage inside a London apartment. The body of the alien had been created by sculptor John Humphreys. More…

The Blair Witch Project was a multimillion-dollar box-office sensation. Much of this success owed to a clever marketing scheme centering around the blairwitch.com website, where web surfers could view detailed historical information about the legend of the Blair Witch. It was all so convincing that many people were fooled into believing that the Blair Witch was a real historical figure. She wasn't. The entire tale was fictitious. Nevertheless, the hoax site revolutionized internet marketing and spawned many imitators. More…

No matter how bad the movies of Columbia Pictures were, there was always one reviewer sure to heap praise on them, Dave Manning of the Ridgefield Press. For instance, while other reviewers skewered the sophomoric comedy The Animal, it impressed Manning as "another winner." His rave reviews might have gone forever unnoticed, except that Newsweek reporter John Horn uncovered the curious truth about him, which was that Manning didn't exist at all. He was the fictional creation of a young marketing executive at Sony, the parent company of Columbia Pictures, used to generate fake praise for otherwise unpraiseworthy movies. More…