With his fake documentary purporting to show serving President George W. Bush's assassination, director Gabriel Range has made this year's most controversial movie
What is real? There was a time when a photograph or a reel of film was a record of an event. Fiction was obviously staged, whereas newscasts or documentaries had the pretense of representing something true. Orson Welles most famously exposed the fallacy of that proposition with his 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," in which his fake news bulletins announcing a Martian invasion triggered public panic.
Film caught on later to such chicanery; perhaps the first one to really employ this style was 1966's "The War Game," a faux-doc by director Peter Watkins set in England after a nuclear attack, done in a contemporary newsreel style and commissioned — then shelved — by a paranoid BBC. The faux-doc style was further revolutionized by a pair of mid-'80s films, Woody Allen's "Zelig," in which Allen's film splices his character into old 1930s footage, and Rob Reiner's "mockumentary" of a hair-metal band, "This Is Spinal Tap."