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Tom Kummer outdid his rivals with fabricated exclusives – now documentary tells how he fooled German media The Hollywood press pack just couldn’t understand it. How was a Swiss young buck persuading the world’s biggest stars to lay bare their lives while the rest of them tried to cook up something even vaguely interesting from the dull scraps they were thrown every time a celebrity had something to promote? And Tom Kummer really did scoop them all. He got Mike Tyson to pontificate on Nietzsche, discussed Kierkegaard with Sean Penn and listened to Courtney Love intellectualise her breast-baring habit and talk of how she thrived on “disillusionment … joyless sex, reincarnation”. He discovered hidden depths in Bruce Willis, who revealed a particularly bleak philosophy when he said: “I understood pretty early on that we do not advance through morality, but immorality, vices, cynicism.” In one of Kummer’s early hits, Pamela Anderson shared her thoughts on William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a radical and difficult work which has become the set text of the cyberpunk sci-fi genre. There was only one problem with Kummer’s exclusives. He had made them all up. When he was eventually caught in 2000 after delivering a particularly eye-opening interview with Christina Ricci and a rival blew the whistle, he refused to say sorry, insisting that he specialised in what he called “borderline journalism”. Now a controversial film tells the story of how Germany’s most respected publications gobbled up his inventions without ever asking to hear the tapes. The documentary, Bad Boy Kummer, has ruffled feathers in the highest echelons of the German-language media by issuing an uncomfortable reminder that some of their top names, including Ulf Poschardt, now a senior executive at the Axel Springer publishing house, happily printed Kummer’s fabrications for years. The film was made by Miklós Gimes, another of Kummer’s victims – or, to use Kummer’s preferred term, “Kummer junkies”. In the 1990s, Gimes was one of Kummer’s most faithful customers when he was deputy editor of the Tages-Anzeiger magazine, a supplement of the Swiss national newspaper. Gimes says his desire is to “crack” Kummer, to understand why someone with such literary and intellectual talents ended up passing off fiction as truth to He travels to Los Angeles, where Kummer now teaches paddle tennis, an aptly fraudulent sort of sport that uses smaller courts and less bouncy balls than the original. He watches as Kummer rummages through his archives and reads, with clear delight, from his most notorious interviews. Acting out his Tyson interview, when the disgraced boxer apparently reveals that he ate cockroaches in jail “for the protein”, he smiles with no sense of guilt. “I must say I’m impressed. I still think that it was a great interview,” he says. Britain’s GQ magazine agreed, and syndicated the article. “It wasn’t difficult to make Tom take part,” says Gimes in a voiceover. “He doesn’t want to be forgotten.” the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit and other highbrow European publications. Many people have criticised Gimes for feeding Kummer’s desire for fame, which began in the 1980s when he was photographed by Nan Goldin in West Berlin nightclubs as a preposterously handsome youth who looked like a cross between Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless and Zinedine Zidane in his prime. At the Berlin premiere last week, one man angrily chastised the director for giving Kummer the oxygen of publicity. But Gimes insists it was not his intention to “heroise or rehabilitate” his subject, but to “tell a story”. He admits he paid Kummer to take part, “but just for his time – he had no creative control over the film”. In an interview with the Guardian, Kummer said the film had “nice moments” but he was disappointed that the most important of his former editors, including Poschardt, refused to take part. Poschardt, who with another Süddeutsche executive was forced to resign after Kummer’s deception was unearthed, refused to comment when contacted by the Guardian. Kummer insists he has nothing to say sorry for. “I wrote impressionistic, creative, literary descriptions of the life of stars in the form of so-called interviews. “Any professional editor, unless he or his organisation are completely incompetent, would have recognised this.” He says that in the mid-80s he saw himself as more of an artist than a common or garden journalist. “I believed that journalism can only touch part of the so-called truth, not truth itself. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we have art because we don’t have truth,” he said in an email interview, coming out with exactly the sort of highfalutin language he used to attribute to Kim Basinger and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Kummer insists his fake subjects played along because he made them look good. “For the last eight years I’ve played tennis with Jim Wiatt, former CEO of William Morris Agency, and he told me for example that his former clients Sharon Stone, Tom Hanks and Quentin Tarantino loved my interviews.” But why did he get away with it for so long? “Everybody loved my stuff and I guess they were addicted to some kind of illusion that stars should talk like I made them talk. “They all loved it and wanted more: readers, movie distribution people in Germany, advertisers and editors. “I was convinced that the editors knew everything – nobody asked for tapes, nobody asked for any kind of proof for more than six years – but they refused to admit it. I was playing the violin for them.” Other journalistic frauds Jayson Blair New York Times rising star Jayson Blair resigned from the paper in 2003 after admitting plagiarism and fraud. He faked the datelines on his stories, claiming to be in various far-flung corners of the US when really he was sitting at home in front of his laptop. When his deception was uncovered, the NYT ran a 7,239-word front-page mea culpa, which called the affair “a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper”. Stephen Glass While a cub reporter working for the American magazine New Republic in the 90s, Stephen Glass fabricated quotations, sources, and even entire events in articles. His fall from grace was detailed in the Hollywood film Shattered Glass. Janet Cooke In 1980, Washington Post writer Janet Cooke had to return her Pulitzer prize after she was found to have faked a much-praised interview with an eight-year-old heroin addict. Documentary Germany Europe Helen Pidd guardian.co.uk