Word: concocted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...forger, Clifford Irving was something else: audacious and foolhardy enough to concoct the "autobiography" of a living person who could readily refute it, point by point, if he wished to do so. When Irving convinced McGraw-Hill in 1971 that Howard Hughes had asked him to help him write his autobiography, the New York City-born freelance writer was clearly counting on the reclusive Hughes to remain silent. Carrying out his elaborate hoax, Irving forged letters from Hughes to himself that persuaded McGraw-Hill to give Irving a $750,000 contract to produce a 230,000-word manuscript. Irving even...
Attaché Campione quickly agreed. Over the Christmas holiday he developed a plan to sneak Lombino out of the U.S. and into Italy so that Lombino could talk with Restelli. Since Lombino was still a fugitive with no passport, the Italian official had to concoct a new identity for him. With the Fat Man's aid, Lombino acquired the Social Security number of an unwitting high school driver's education instructor from Brooklyn, while a cooperative priest in Manhattan provided him with false baptism records...
Hard as it may be to concoct articles more bizarre than what the tabloids already run, the challenge has been taken up by Tony Hendra, 41, the editor-entrepreneur behind the 1978 parody Not the New York Times and last April's Off the Wall Street Journal. Says Hendra: "The Enquirer style is difficult. You have to keep sentences to ten words and use 'mind-boggling' and 'national survey' over and over. To get the layout right you have to unlearn everything you know about good design...
...concoct mock-academic theories about Casablanca. One can lay the sweet thing down on a stainless-steel lab table and dissect it with instruments Freudian or anthropological. A doctoral thesis might be written on the astonishing consumption of alcohol and cigarettes in the movie. At that rate, everyone would have died of cirrhosis and lung cancer...
From time to time, McClintick introduces the monotony of docudrama: Alan Hirschfield "came to regret that Friday deeply and would continue to regret it for the rest of his life." Happily, such stentorian tones do not often interfere with a drama no dream merchant could concoct. Hollywood, superb at turning its sand grains into pearls, stayed true to tradition. Far from suffering obloquy and ostracism, Begelman went on to pilot MGM. Hirschfield became head of 20th Century-Fox, where he successfully defended an executive accused of padding an expense account. By last week serious bids were being offered...