Martin Scorsese ‘Confirms’ He Made Tumblr’s Fake Mafia Movie

You might have heard of Martin Scorsese’s obscure 1973 masterpiece “Goncharov,” starring Robert De Niro as a Russian hitman who moves to Naples, Italy, to escape his violent past; the film has recently exploded into the spotlight after cultivating a dedicated fanbase on Tumblr.

Tumblr’s official Twitter account recently acknowledged the film’s importance, tweeting:

“Goncharov” was ahead of its time and it’s contribution to cinema is remarkable. Rarely does a film tell as many diverse-yet-interconnected stories. Hard to imagine so few ppl have seen it.”

The reason that “so few ppl” have seen the film is because it was never made; “Goncharov” was memed into existence by Tumblr, a site with a long history of engaging in quirky pranks and collaborative storytelling.

It all started several years ago, when an unknown Tumblr user posted a photo of “knock-off” shoes they ordered online, which arrived with a mysterious tag on the tongue that declared: “The greatest mafia movie ever made. Martin Scorsese presents GONCHAROV. Domenico Proccacci production. A film by Matteo JWHJ0715. About the Naples Mafia.”

It has been speculated that the bizarre tag might have been a misspelling of Gomorrah, a 2008 Italian film about the Naples mafia that was directed by Matteo Garrone, but had a presentation credit from Martin Scorsese when it first arrived in the U.S.

Regardless, the fateful picture lay dormant on Tumblr for several years, until it suddenly exploded into a meme, after being reblogged in 2020 with a caption that read: “this idiot hasn’t seen Goncharov.”

For whatever reason, the site’s users were inspired to create a dense lore around the fictional film, collaborating until the details became surprisingly convincing. Screenshots and GIFs from other mafia films and TV shows were posted as iconic scenes from “Goncharov,” the film becoming a dreamlike amalgamation of Italian gangster films, like an intoxicated midnight marathon of Goodfellas and Casino, melded into one vague memory.

“Goncharov” now has a detailed plot, a poster, a theme song, a tie-in video game and a tagline, “the greatest mafia movie (n)ever made.” The film’s cast has grown to include Al Pacino, Cybill Shepherd, Gene Hackman and Harvey Keitel, alongside De Niro.

The original Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter, did her part to manifest the film into existence, posting two photos of herself and Henry Winkler from the 1977 Golden Globe awards, captioned, “Me and ‘The Fonz’ at premiere of Goncharov (1973).”

The fake film has even inspired erotic fan art on Tumblr, and hundreds of works of fan fiction, based on the simmering homoerotic undertones between De Niro and Keitel’s characters.

The meme has proved so persistent that TikTokers started to speculate if Martin Scorsese was aware of how popular his non-existent creation had become.

Scorsese’s daughter, Francesca, soon answered the question by posting a video showing a text exchange with her father, in which she sends him a NYTimes article explaining the phenomenon; Scorsese responds, “Yes. I made that film years ago.”

Of course, Scorsese was joking; as the tag on the knockoff shoes clearly states, the film was actually directed by “Matteo JWHJ0715.”