Why exit through the gift shop is fake

Is Guetta — who shot much of the footage — actually a paid actor playing a savant-like character invented for the project? Or, as some have speculated, is he Banksy himself? Banksy has insisted the film is completely true. They are also consistent with the accounts of friends, former business associates and employees over those years.

Of course, it is impossible to prove whether his latest incarnation, Mr. Brainwash, is sincere. His mother died when he was a child, and when Guetta was 15, his father moved the family to Los Angeles. Public records show his Social Security number was registered in the early s.

His father soon returned to France and passed away, leaving Guetta and his siblings to fend for themselves. He attended Fairfax High for about a year, despite speaking no English. After dropping out, he said he started organizing nightclub parties in Hollywood that became popular with the celebrity set. He also got a job at a vintage clothing store in Venice, starting out on a ladder to keep an eye out for shoplifters.

But he showed up early and stayed late, was promoted to manager and eventually bought out the owner, he said. Between and the late s, records show Guetta launched a series of businesses with names such as Vintage Supermarket and Rugsaver: The Vintage Shop, his store on La Brea. Guetta said he imported cheap used clothes from France and repackaged them as designer vintage, occasionally selling them as templates to high-end designers like Ralph Lauren. He and his brothers also began designing clothes, sewing scraps of jeans into jackets and finishing them with Looney Tunes characters cut out of beach towels.

Eventually, Warner Bros. But rather than shut them down, Guetta said, the company hired them. We glimpse him, or perhaps someone purporting to be him, in the opening frames. A hooded figure shot in low light and speaking with a rough English accent, he explains the film's subject: "It's about a guy who tried to make a documentary about me, but he's a lot more interesting than me.

That's debatable, since the guy in question is a dishevelled French expat living in California, Thierry Guetta by name, a rotund little motor-mouth whose lank, thinning hair is accessorized by a fat set of mutton chops. Apparently, he once ran a clothing shop that sewed sequins onto cut-rate duds and sold them at exorbitant designer prices to rich Hollywood philistines, thereby paving the way for his next career move.

Seems Thierry became a compulsive videographer, filming things much as he talks - obsessively, indiscriminately. Eventually, his subject matter grew to include celebrated street artists like his cousin Space Invader, and Shephard Fairey, the designer of that iconic Obama poster, and later Banksy himself.

We see footage of them making their stencils by day, then heading out at night to scale walls and climb buildings, spraying their accomplished graffiti under the cover of darkness. These shots are fascinating. Eventually allegedly , Thierry tried to edit his accumulated mountain of tapes into a documentary about street art. Alas, the result, according to Banksy or the man posing as Banksy , was an "unwatchable" mess, prompting Banksy ditto to take over the project and create the film now on view.

Soon, that film reaches its climax, when Thierry decides to stop videotaping artists and become one himself. He assumes a nom de spray-can : Mr. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system. In the summer of , I saw an article in the LA Weekly about a massive street art show mounting in L. On the outset the show seemed ambitiously cool.

The artist, Mr. Brainwash or MBW, was an up-and-comer who had already plastered the city in his likeness, as a guy holding a video camera. And the timing for such a spectacle could not have been more perfect: Artists like Shepard Fairey had illegal works dotting same blocks as their gallery-installed shows, and we were all still talking about the dusty downtown warehouse vandalized by Brit street art phenomenon Bansky two years ago.

But something here seemed off. The rip-offs. All the Warhol references. Ostensibly, Mr. Brainwash, whose real name is Thierry Guetta, was a French-born ex-pat living in L. Guetta is the biggest give-away here. His klutzy, bumbling character above is blissfully over-the-top and clearly in on the ruse.

After Guetta decides he wants to become an artist, we follow him as he stumbles all over L.