Lassie’s face was perfect for close-ups, according to Orson Welles. Somehow, as I listen to Trey Anastasio call out to the old pup on David Bowie from Providence, Rhode Island on December 29, 1994, that makes a lot of sense. Lassie got his close-up, alright, before Phish slammed the hook home and then whipped out a beaut duo of Halley’s Comet>Lizards for shaggy dog-storied measure. Alas, Phish did indeed get their due—ahhh…the Jammys—but did Lassie? Of course, she did. She is flealessly hailed as a Screen Canine Legend. Welles? Citizen Kane, yes. Everything else? Maybe not.

The Orson Welles vintage has been woefully underappreciated for far too long. To many cinenewbs, the artistic bottle was dusty and so was the liquor. Then again…the man didn’t make it easy on himself, burning through cash like a dreamer on a weekend bender in Atlantic City. He never had complete creative control over his projects after Citizen Kane—a film he made when he was 25, and the equivalent of hitting 80 home runs as a rookie. He would either lose final cut, or the celluloid would languish in a vault somewhere, growing a third chin, a gray beard, and earning a poisonous critical rep, OR—the mightiest cut of all—he’d make a masterpiece [insert several titles here] and some studio clown would slice the thing into unwatchable oblivion—dubio blackholeish. READ ON for more…

Yessss…but such is not the case with our little Hidden Flick gem this week, F for Fake. This was a completed essay-documentary that was filmed in France, Ibiza, and the States, but was shelved and darn near abandoned until the late ’90s when, suddenly, yet another lost Welles treasure was unearthed by film buffs. And this one has a link with a recent Richard Gere film, The Hoax, in which an author—Clifford Irving—uncovers an artist, Elmyr de Hory, who re-creates paintings, thereby promulgating a huge hoax in the process. Problem is that Irving, a real life shady character portrayed by dyed-haired and 1970esed Gere in the film, is ALSO a hoax of a different sort all together. Irving penned a so-called ‘authorized’ biography of the aging eccentric gazillionaire Howard Hughes. And yet…it was all a complete scam predicated on the fact that, perhaps, Irving felt that absolutely no one was going to give good ole long-nailed Hughes a jingle in his Vegas penthouse suite/tomb to see if the story was accurate because Hughes was just too crazy to even worry about and why the hell would anyone make this shit up? Why, indeed. $$$.

And this is where the story gets really interesting—told well in Gere’s film, as well—in Welles’ tongue-in-cheek look at his own charlatan ways over the span of his sometimes sordid and screwed-up career. Weird alliteration aside…and wacky segues, too…this week’s column sort of resembles F for Fake in its uncanny knack of jumping from topic to topic with strange sleight of hand—the real hoax hook in Orson’s line from the script-to-the screen is about his true passion: MAGIC. He consistently pokes fun at the old craft by showing the ways in which almost all art is in some ways a fraudulent mirror—a lion’s den of smoke, illusions, ancient hocus pocus and a nod and a wink while laughing at the fact that you can’t figure out how he performed his latest magic trick. This was an almost direct nod to his former greatness as Citizen Kane was a classic of cinematic challenges met by an upstart who knew more about uber-showmanship than film history.

That’s heavy stuff, too—that whole idea about “What is Art?” and “Are we all fooling each other with our little magic tricks to force someone to pay us for something that, in the end, is just a wankified delusion?” Those are my twin head-scratch questions, but they are at the root of F For Fake—a fine experience, more than a film, and a piece of celluloid that is, still, truly hidden amongst the morass that are the leftovers in the Welles vault of uncompleted films, near misses, and forgotten stories.

In F for Fake, floating upon Welles’ waves of the magic wand via weighty artistic hands, he playfully flirts with real-life girlfriend/mistress/seductress/actress/eye-candy cane, Oja Kodar, while spinning yarns about the forger—the painter, Elmyr de Hory—and the hoaxer/ee—the faked-Hughes-bio cad, Clifford Irving.

Confused? You needn’t be. I’ve purposely masked the real treasure of this flick by being elusive, which was Orson Welles’ greatest asset—much like finding that dog in the fog in the midst of a truly rich and magical David Bowie back on the Island of 12/29/94.

To be continued next week…