Tumblr wills fake 1973 Martin Scorsese movie called Goncharov into existence
A knock-off boot label has spiralled into a fan community devoted to a Scorsese movie that never existed
Film Features Tumblr
Martin Scorsese has enjoyed a long, successful career with a lot of movies to his name. He has not, however, made a film about the Neapolitan mafia starring Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, and Al Pacino called Goncharov. This fact hasn’t stopped Tumblr—one of the many sites enjoying a resurgence in the wake of Twitter’s ongoing disasters—from deciding that Goncharov should exist. Or banding together to make it so in an elaborate community joke.
The story of Goncharov, as summarized by a very recent TV Tropes entry, concerns “a former discotheque owner who comes to Naples after the fall of the Soviet Union” in order to become a mob boss. The idea that this movie was also supposed to have been released in 1973 may make its plot nonsense from the jump, but it’s still inspired a whole lot of discussion and fan art on Tumblr.
The Goncharov tag leads to a wealth of illustrations that imagine scenes from the movie as well as poster mock-ups, and, as Boing Boing rounded up, a cash-in video game with accompanying soundtrack, a 3D model of the VHS release, and a piano theme song.
Thanks to creations like these, certain “facts” about the movie have solidified into widely accepted truths. For instance, Goncharov’s cast includes De Niro in the title role, Shepherd, and Pacino, along with Gene Hackman and Harvey Keitel. It also, as Insider explains, “features a prominent clock motif” and is “full of homoerotic tension between Goncharov and a man named Andrey (fictionally portrayed by Al Pacino” as well as between “Goncharov’s apparent love interest Katya (Cybill Shepherd) and another woman named Sofia.”
The whole idea was sparked, it turns out, by an older Tumblr post that showed a photo of some knock-off boots ordered online. When the boots arrived, they featured a label that mysteriously read: “The Greatest Mafia Movie Ever Made. Martin Scorsese Presents Goncharov. A Domenico Procacci Production. A film By Matteo JWHJ 0715 About The Naples Mafia.”
After searching for the origin of the boots’ bizarre claim, a user discovered that the label likely referenced 2009's Gomorrah, which was indeed produced by Domenico Procacci, was released in the States with an endorsement from Scorsese and is also “about the Naples mafia.” (Gomorrah is based on a non-fiction Roberto Saviano book about the Camorra and has spun off a TV series of the same name.)
In the end, Goncharov is just an elaborate play off of an existing film. Not like other legitimate movies from our past, such as Seann William Scott’s memorable 2000s comedy, Vincey Masters: Born To Be A Karate Meister.
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27 Comments
This is made by the stupidest morons alive and it not cute cool or funny its incredibly annoying
Tumblr’s still going, huh?
I also heard that if the cashier can’t scan the barcode, you get the item for free.
That’s exactly what I thought.
Oh, yeah. Yahoo bought it for $1.1B and had to sell it to the WordPress guy for $3M. Their most profitable attempt at marketing to the userbase has been digital crabs that swarm your page, and a bunch of useless blue checkmarks that people can buy on your behalf and make your username unreadable. The discourse is atrocious, but easily avoided. There are few ads, none targeted, and they mostly look like shitposts. There is no alrogithimically driven timeline designed to influence your opinions, you see only what you choose to. It’s going strong, because it’s absolutely unmarketable. You are not the product, the site is. And that means even the people who hate it are loyal to it.Twitter refugees have been flocking in, including a bunch of celebrities. Lynda Carter fit in immediately. She’s been posting pictures of herself and Henry Winkler at the premiere of Goncharov in between the fanart of herself riding the Mothman cryptid. Ryan Reynolds is hanging by a thread. Neil Gaiman has been tumblring along for years and is everyone’s internet grandpa. Taylor Swift knows better than to show her face there any more. The most famous account is a guy who wants to keep humans as pets and turns every conversation into philosophical hypotheticals about his fetishes.It’s great.
Tumblr has come a long way from when it had the truly insane feature that let you edit someone else’s posts, leading to a successful YA author being cyber-bullied off the site because someone edited a post of his to be all about sucking dick.
GJ,I is struggling while they try to avoid Twitter. Now they’re just summarizing Boing Boing roundups.
This looks like fun! Now let’s do this for websites!The AV Club
So, Scorsese isn’t making a film adaptation of Oblomov then.
I read about this story today and was utterly confused. I adore Scorsese and never heard of this before. Not five minutes later I’m seeing this joke all across Twitter in various serious and not serious forms. My face was the confused math lady gif. I’m getting old…
Eh, this would have been way cooler if they’d riffed an imaginary Scorsese film along the lines of Kundun or The Age of Innocence or even one of his documentaries instead of just going to the “he just makes mob movies” well.
Except the origin of the whole meme is an advertisement that specifically calls Goncharov a “Mafia Movie.”
True, but it’s not like a label on some knock-off boots is canon carved on a marble tablet from Sinai. If people are basically making up an entire Scorsese movie out of whole cloth they might as well go wild with it, take it to strange new places.
Yeah, but if you ignore what it says on the label you’ve got nothing to base the joke on. The point isn’t to make fun of Scorsese, it’s to manufacture an internet pop culture discourse without the pop culture actually being there. Besides, the whole joke with Goncharov “discussion” is that everyone agrees that it IS the best Mafia movie ever made. It’s not throwing shade at Martin, quite the opposite.
I didn’t say the point was to throw shade of Scorsese or anything like that; I just said I’d personally find it more interesting and funnier if they took the premise of “imaginary Scorsese film” in a completely different direction instead of just sticking with the old “Martin Scorsese just makes mob films” trope. Heck, even if they started from the premise that it was a mob film but then took it in a completely wild direction after that (like, it looks like it starts as a mob movie then does a left-turn swerve into something like After Hours or The King of Comedy or something). I’m not getting defensive on anyone’s behalf, I’m just expressing mild disinterest in an internet meme that I think could have been more creative.
If it was as creative an enterprise as you’re suggesting, would we even call it a “meme”?
So the creator of the meme was an idiot (and probably like 14 years old like most unfunny meme creators). If we want better memes, let’s stop promoting the crappy ones.
You are way too emotionally invested in this Tumblr meme.
Exactly. People who know nothing about Scorsese think he just makes Mob movies because they just saw Goodfellas and Casino. That’s like thinking Kubrick was a SF director because they saw 2001. Or horror because The Shining. Like Kubrick the man is quite diverse in his efforts. 19th century social drama in the Age of Innocence, a fresh look at the Jesus myth in The Last Temptation of Christ, a darkly humorous take on NYC culture in After Hours, and so on.
“Marty, Kundun! *I* liked it.”
I’m reminded of a person I knew about a decade ago trying to create a fandom for a band that was supposedly “so obscure” no one knew about them (the joke being that they didn’t exist at all). But that was ultimately an in-joke between maybe 3-4 people. Not a giant Twitter meme.
I hate when you use header pictures like that because I instantly think it’s an R.I.P article.
Martin Scorsese has not, however, made a film about the Neapolitan mafia starring Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, and Al Pacino called Goncharov. Oh, balderdash. I remember seeing this movie during its theatrical release in ‘73 at the old Empire Theater on 42nd Street. In fact, as I recall, this movie won an Oscar for ‘Best Foreign Accents in an English-Language Film’ in its year of release. I even had a VHS copy of the film I purchased in ‘75, but it was destroyed in the Great Meteor Strike of ‘88.Next you’ll be telling me that there was no movie called ‘Shazaam’ starring Sinbad, or that Donald Trump didn’t kill Osama bin Laden with his bare hands…
“Tumblr wills fake 1973 Martin Scorsese movie called Goncharov into existence”
If they’ve willed it into existence then where is a link to the film?
Oh, did they NOT will it into existence? Weird headline, then.
When an inside joke goes outside
how about a fake Scorsese / Carlos Castañeda film?https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/08/23/swerve-your-enthusiasm-16/
I like Gomorrah because that’s when the sun’ll come out. Bet your bottom dollar.