Dan Mirvish has asked if I saw last Thursday’s N.Y.Times story about the Martin Eisenstadt hoax that he and Spirit Award nominee Eitan Gorlin (’02’s The Holy Land, which won Slamdance that year) perpetrated upon the mainstream media by persuading several news orgs that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent. The answer is that I read the story as well as various reactions to same, but I didn’t get to it quickly enough so I moved on.

“It’s become something of a media firestorm in the last few days,” Dan writes. “It was also on CNN this morning, and I think it’ll be in the Variety weekly that comes out tomorrow. We’ve already gotten one book offer, and two agencies are meeting with us tomorrow. As you can see from the articles, we were using the media/political world to incubate our character Eisenstadt and develop a TV show around him — that, and just poke fun at the punditocracy. (Our faux BBC doc, The Last Republican is essentially a spec pilot).”

Dan suggests I might want to take a look at Eisenstadt’s response to the BBC doc or an episode of the doc where M.E. denies being a hoaxer.