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The Best Hollywood Hoaxes for April Fool's Day
David Moats , March 31st, 2009 11:08

In honour of April Fool's Day, The Quietus collects the best Hollywood Hoaxes: from Joaquin's beard to Marilyn's letters; from the Hollywood makeup artists who made Bigfoot to Kubrick's moon landing; from electric shocks in the cinema to faux documentaries with Herzog; it's all here.

Without a doubt, this April Fool's Day the best pranks will be taking place at the G20 summit in London - most of them at the expense of banks. No doubt we'll see the tarring and feathering of bankers, students affixing themselves to railings, the toilet-papering of offices, and soap bubbles in the corporate fountain. The biggest hoax of all will of course be when the leaders of 20 arbitrarily selected nations that actually hate each other tell us that everything's fine.

So while the throngs of hippies, faux-terrorists, enviro-nazis, and anarcho-syndicalists descend on London today to lynch bankers in effigy and loot central London dry, we at The Quietus recommend that you leave your proletarian rage at home and read our list of the top ten Hollywood hoaxes. (Speak for yourself - Green Party Membership Owning Ed.)

Hollywood is all smoke and mirrors anyway, so films are probably the perfect medium with which to perpetrate a hoax. Most often these hoaxes are PR stunts, hyping up a film for financial gain. In other cases, Hollywood technology is employed for personal gain or even political ends. But celebrities and directors, whose lives are constantly in the public eye, are also the ideal victims of a hoax - when your life is a series of images and words, who knows what you actually did and said? Clever or childish, good-natured or entirely mean-spirited, you sometime have to admire the sheer balls of those perpetrating these cinematic confidence tricks.

Click here to see our top ten gallery.

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