Submitted by Mark Borkowski:

Starsuckers celebrity hoax dupes tabloids
by Paul Lewis
Guardian.co.uk
14 October 2009

From ‘flamey’ Amy Winehouse to Russell Brand the banker, documentary team’s fake celebrity stories fooled editors

Watch interview with filmmaker Chris Atkins here.
Visit Starsuckers Website here.

The plan to subvert the pages of some of Fleet Street’s bestselling newspapers was hatched in a windowless office in east London. For months, a team of documentary makers had sat in the Brick Lane film studio they called “the cell”, trawling through tabloid clippings in search of stories they could prove were untrue.

They decided to concoct an experiment to test their theory that tabloid editors sometimes publish celebrity stories with scant regard for the truth.

“We consumed a lot of coffee thinking about it,” said Chris Atkins, the director of the forthcoming film Starsuckers. “How can we do this intelligently? How can we prove our point? But how can we make it funny?” (more…)

Here’s the eighth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #8: Categorizing Castaneda
By W.J. Elvin III
April 3, 2009

This column was going to be a subjective list of the top twenty false memoirs of the modern era, but I got sidetracked thinking about that man of mystery and mischief, Carlos Castaneda.

Literary detectives tend to lump Castaneda in with fakers like James Frey, J.T. Leroy, Norma Khouri and various other fraudsters and hoaxers. Some have been “featured artists” in this column and others are backstage awaiting their cue.

The slippery standard they are judged by is “authenticity.” The way the critics see it is that if you say your book is true, well, then it shouldn’t be a big stinking heap of bullshit.

On the other hand, you have those appalled by “radical individualism,” their contention being that if there is cultural truth in the book then it’s not a con. Those waters get awfully deep and theoretical.

At a depth I can handle, the debate is about whether to judge Castaneda as a scholarly anthropologist obliged to operate within certain narrow professional standards. (more…)