"The Hoax" DVD - is this a hoax?

Cafe Society
1

Last weekend my wife and I rented “The Hoax”, the Richard Gere movie based on Clifford Irving’s biography of Howard Hughes. Right off the bat, I had trouble getting the DVD to play – I couldn’t get the menu to load when I put the disc in the player. It spun and spun for a while and then the player stopped. When I hit “Play” the movie started right up so I didn’t think much about it.

A couple of times during the movie, the picture paused and then continued, as if the player was having trouble reading the disc. Then during the scene where

they are preparing for Howard Hughes’ arrival at the McGraw-Hill offices, and Irving is passing out copies of the manuscript

the DVD froze. And where it froze is right where the title of the Irving’s manuscript is perfectly centered on the screen. From that point, I couldn’t get the DVD to go forward, backward, next chapter, nothing.

Normally when something like this happens, I expect the DVD to be covered with scratches and/or fingerprints. I took the disc out of the player and looked at it – it was spotless. I put it back in, went to the chapter where it froze up, and it played just fine until it got to the exact same spot, then froze up again.

So I’m thinking there’s just something goofy with the DVD. We took it back to the store and told them what happened and they let us check out another copy. Last night we sat down to watch the rest of the movie — and it froze up in exactly the same spot! And again, I can’t get it to continue on a later chapter. It’s like the rest of the movie is completely inaccessible.

At this point, I figure that there’s just something about this particular movie that my DVD player doesn’t like, so I decide to try to watch the rest of the movie on the DVD player in the computer. I queue it up to the same scene, and again it freezes in exactly the same spot! (And again, I can’t get past the point where it freezes.)

It just seems a little too coincidental to me that no matter where I try to play the DVD, not only does it freeze in the same place, but that the place where it freezes is with the title of the manuscript front and center. I have come to the conclusion that the DVD itself is a hoax, that it has been constructed so that there is really no way to watch the entire movie.

Has anyone else had a problem like this? I told my wife “I shouldn’t have to work this hard to watch a movie.” The movie up to that point was pretty good – is it worth screwing around with this some more to see how the movie ends?

2

I don’t know, but it would be funny if it was a hoax. Something similar, long ago legendary music weirdo Kim Fowley supposedly released and album that looked in every way like a real album, but there was no sound of any kind on the disc.

3

It’s possible it’s a hoax, I haven’t seen the movie. But it’s a better bet that it’s a single dud disc, and that when you took it back to the store, the guy got them mixed up again and gave you back the one that didn’t work the first time.

4

I got the same DVD through Netflix and it played fine.

ETA: By same DVD, I mean I got The Hoax through Netflix, obviously.

5

From the evidence presented, Occam’s razor says you have a bad DVD.

6

Is your player old? It sounds like that’s the part of the DVD where the movie swaps between layers on a dual-layer DVD, and maybe your player is unable to make the change for some reason…

7

I also rented The Hoax through Netflix and watched it without any problems, although I have had occasional problems playing rented dicsc. (Usually cleaning them cleared up the problem, but sometimes they were damaged.)

And to answer your question, yes, the movie is worth seeing through to the end.

[SPOILER]I wasn’t aware of the connection between Clifford Irving and the whole Watergate scandal, which is fascinating, if it’s true. According to the movie, the unreleased book contained information about bribes given by Hughes to Nixon and his brother. Nixon wanted to know if the Democratic National Committee had an advance copy of the book or at least this information. So the White House sent the “plumbers” to search the DNC headquarters for it and to bug the offices. This of course precipitated the downfall of the Nixon administration. So if not for Clifford Irving, Nixon might not have resigned?

And I was thinking while seeing the movie that given the amount of real research Clifford Irving did, he could have written a pretty good legitimate biography of Hughes.[/SPOILER]

8

My girlfriend and I just watched this a couple of weeks ago. We got it from Netflix and it played fine.

9

Definitely not the same disc. My wife went to the shelf and picked a new one.

Maybe… it’s one of those cheap crappy-ass DVD/VCR combos, and that would definitely explain why it bogged down in the exact same spot. I would have expected it to work better in the computer’s DVD drive though…

Dewey, I’m not going to read the spoiler! I’ll take your word for it. Maybe I’ll try to rent it from a different store, or maybe get a new DVD player for Christmas.

10

Come back after you’ve seen the movie, read the spoiler and we’ll talk. (And the spoiler isn’t really much of one, but I was being careful.)

11

By all accounts his book was excellent. You can read the first few chapters on Irving’s website, where he also talks about the Watergate connection.

12

Several years ago, I had much the same problem with the Daredevil DVD. The copy I bought froze at a particular point… and the replacement DVD froze at almost exactly the same spot as well. I figured it was a bad batch of DVDs… until I did a bit of research. It turned out that was a symptom of the laser going bad on my DVD player, and that was just a chapter point that triggered it.

I replaced my DVD player and never had the problem again.