Film Hoaxes

Just today by pure serendipity I came across a name 'Yuri Gadyukin'. It turned out that this character is a great hoax who never existed. His 'Home Page' on the Internet gives his biographical sketch as follows :

"Yuri Ivanovich Gadyukin was born in Leningrad in 1932.  He fought in the siege of the city in 1944 and shortly thereafter may have been an extra in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, becoming inspired by the great filmmaker.  He directed one feature film in his native Russia before defecting to the UK in 1955.  In England he directed two films and had started on his third when he was murdered by his lead actor, Harry Weathers in 1960."

Quite an impressive life-sketch for a man who never existed!!

Confusedcoyote writing in his blog 'Under the small umbrella' is generous in his praise about Yuri Gadyukin. His blog says:

If you've never heard of the Russian director, Yuri Gadyukin, you should try and find out more about his films. With a mix of satire and the new social realism that was coming into cinema in the late 1950s. Yuri is best know for his last, unfinished, film, The Graven Idol.

With the upcoming film that shows a filmmakers efforts to finish his unfinished [some may say unfinishable] film. It seems that the director was ahead of his time if you watch the below footage. It was found when George Lewis was in London looking through archival material. It seems to be part of an un-broadcast interview that Yuri gave in either 1959 or 1960 (the date is unknown).

“When George Lewis, a hip young movie director, visits the Chipperfield archive he discovers the rushes of the last movie by his personal hero, the Russian filmmaker Yuri Gadyukin. Gadyukin, a charismatic dictator of a director, came to London in the late 1950s. His film “The Graven Idol” was abandoned when Gadyukin was murdered by lead actor Harry Weathers. George gets the support of a Hollywood studio and, with the help of a crew lead by Producer Emily and Editor Kate, starts to reconstruct Gadyukin’s film.

Through the eyes of a “making of” documentary we see George and his crew sift through the hundreds of hours of improvised material that Gadyukin shot. Meanwhile Emily investigates the circumstances of Gadyukin’s death. But neither project proves to be all that it seems.

Gadyukin’s film is either the work of a genius or a madman. Kate and George struggle with the myriad plots and subplots that seem to spiral out of control. In doing so, closeness develops between them, threatening Kate’s marriage. Meanwhile, the crew of “The Graven Idol” prove tightlipped about a project that ended most of their careers. Even investigation into the circumstances of Gadyukin’s death raises more questions than it answers.

With the studio putting on pressure for results, George and his team find themselves being drawn into a web of madness that takes over their lives. Can they unravel the mystery of “The Graven Idol” before history repeats itself?”

Kevin Morris writes with a tinge of irony in 'The Daily Dot':

"Long before the autopsy, London police could guess what killed Yuri Gadyukin. When they pulled his body from the river beneath the Hammersmith Bridge on July 26, 1960, they saw a bullet-sized hole that had ripped apart his skull.

Authorities had been searching for the Russian director for weeks. By the time they yanked him from the Thames, they'd surely heard rumors percolating down through country's film community of catastrophic arguments on the set of his latest film, The Graven Idol, between Gadyukin and the film's star, Harry Weathers. Others whispered that Gadyukin owed money to a local gangster—cash he'd used to finance the film.

Perhaps you've heard of Gadyukin? He was a star of early Soviet cinema before fleeing to England. You can read about his life on a fansite and a Facebook group. You can watch him melt down in a British television interview, storming off stage in spittle-spewing rage. For nearly four years, there were Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database articles about him, brimming with citations from authoritative Russian sources.

Those entries are now gone. Yuri Gadyukin did not owe money to a gangster. His final film was not swirling out of control. Weathers did not kill him. His body was not found beneath the Hammersmith Bridge.

Gadyukin never died, in fact, because he never existed."

Morris adds : "It was not a hoax for hoax's sake, born of boredom and a passing interest in wrecking things up on the Internet. Yuri Gadyukin had purpose. He had so much potential. He was born of exhaustion, beers, and Jorge Luis Borges. He could have (and still might) make two British filmmakers famous."

Further he adds:

"It was not a hoax for hoax's sake, born of boredom and a passing interest in wrecking things up on the Internet. Yuri Gadyukin had purpose. He had so much potential. He was born of exhaustion, beers, and Jorge Luis Borges. He could have (and still might) make two British filmmakers famous.

he hoax that fooled the largest encyclopedia and Internet movie database on the planet for nearly four years began when Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker stumbled into a Belgian restaurant in London in 2002. They were tired. Boyter was an inexperienced director who would sometimes shoot reams of footage in a single day. Along with Ducker—who has editing credits on more than 20 films—he'd just passed the whole day cutting down footage for his first film, Anniversary.

The drinks and exhaustion sparked their imagination. They tossed out fantastic hypotheticals, wondering what kind of director would "shoot an insane amount of material, more material than anyone could ever watch," as Ducker later recalled. "What kind of person would shoot an endless film, just never stop shooting?"

The two friends were forging a fascinating character—a fictional marriage of legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and control-freak geniuses like Stanley Kubrick, an archetypal director slowly creeping into madness. Or as Ducker described him, "a slightly psychotic person. And a slightly manipulative person."

They were creating Yuri Gadyukin."

People being what they are, and the past Russian government being what it was who really knows the truth about a film like Bezhin Meadow - whether such a film was really commissioned and if commissioned was it destroyed, or whether the entire story is a grand hoax like Yuri Gadyukin! Well, anything is possible.