Martin Scorsese has had a long and successful career making many movies. However, he never made a movie called Goncharov starring Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd and Al Pacino about the Naples mafia. Apparently that fact didn’t stop Tumblr, one of many sites revived in the wake of Twitter’s continued Elon Musk chaos, from deciding that this never-ending movie called Goncharov was actually real.
Goncharov’s story follows “a former discotheque owner who came to Naples to become a mob boss after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” as summarized in a very recent TV Tropes article. The idea that this movie should have been released in 1973 makes the plot absurd from the very beginning. But it still inspired a lot of discussion and fan art on Tumblr.
Under the Goncharov label can be found numerous illustrations designing mock scenes and poster mockups from the movie, a video game with its soundtrack, a 3D model of the VHS version, and a piano theme song.
Thanks to fake content like this, the non-existent movie started to be perceived as a real movie by many people. It is reported that many people have even started searching for Goncharov on Google.
How did the legend of Goncharov begin?
It seems the whole idea started with an old Tumblr post that showed a photo of some fake boots that went viral. When the drawings arrived, they had a tag on them that mysteriously read, “The Greatest Mafia Movie Ever Made. Martin Scorsese Presents Goncharov. A Domenico Procacci Production. A movie by Matteo JWHJ 0715 About the Naples Mafia.”
Searching for the source of this strange situation, a user discovered that the tag probably referred to the 2009 movie Gomorrah, produced by Domenico Procacci, released in the US with Scorsese’s support, and also “about the Naples mafia.” Gomorrah is based on Roberto Saviano’s non-fiction book about the Camorra and comes out of a TV series of the same name.
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