Then he baited the first hook -- more than a year ago -- with a little ad on the back page of the Village Voice and 19 other alternative weeklies. The advertisement read:

DEATH GOT YOU DOWN?

At last an alternative!

www.finalcurtain.com

Later, when reporters questioned him -- or, rather, his invented personas -- he would point to those advertisements as evidence that the Final Curtain had not gone up overnight. The fact that Final Curtain was already spending money gave the project an air of legitimacy. The next step was a simple press release. "Until now, the handling of death has been regimented and boring," it explained. "At the Final Curtain we are throwing away all the rules."

The press release was picked up almost immediately on Oct. 7, by Wireless Flash News Service, a daily wire that "provides daily feature and entertainment content to more than 800 broadcast outlets, newspapers and Web sites world wide." The dummy phone in New Jersey started ringing almost immediately. Calls were mostly fielded by "marketing director" Stuart MacLelland or "spokesman" Paul Corey -- personas cooked up by Skaggs. Some reporters didn't even bother to call.

On Oct. 11 the L.A. Times published a column called "Off-Kilter" by Roy Rivenburg. The headline was "Go out with a bang: Cutting-edge tombstones in a theme-park setting." Rivenburg wrote the story straight. He spent about 200 words introducing the idea and cut straight to the grave markers: "A giant Etch-a-Sketch filled with cremated remains mingled with iron particles"; "A massive ant farm tombstone made from a combination of soil and cremated remains"; "a coffin containing a video camera -- so visitors could watch the corpse decay live or via time-lapse recording."

Rivenburg was one of the writers who didn't call anyone at Final Curtain, although he did exchange an email or two. He was skittish enough about the concept to write a sort of disclaimer into his copy: "Although much of it sounds tongue-in-cheek, Final Curtain officials insist the proposal is real." Those Final Curtain officials, of course, were Skaggs.

Amazingly enough, two days later Skaggs received a letter from an attorney representing Uncle Milton Industries Inc., the maker of Uncle Milton's Ant Farms. The letter was also sent to Rivenburg at the Times. Turns out that "Ant Farm" is a registered trademark. "We believe that you and Final Curtain meant an 'ant vivarium' or an 'ant habitat' to describe the concept. 'Ant Farm' is not a descriptive phrase but is an incontestable trademark that identifies Uncle Milton Industries."

Skaggs had a new line. He fired off another press dispatch about Final Curtain and the Uncle Milton letter. Now he had something far better than a silly idea: a controversy. The only thing the press likes more than a gimmick is a controversy.

"Sometimes you have to nurse things along," said Skaggs last week from his studio. "Controversy is a smokescreen. This is what politicians do to us all the time. They take you away from important issues by creating stupid issues. Then the media focuses on the stupid issues and you never question the premise."

From that point, the Final Curtain took on a life of its own. All Skaggs had to do was sit back and watch the press clippings pile up. On Oct. 22, Rivenburg at the L.A. Times kicked off the coverage with yet another column that made fun of Uncle Milton for going after Final Curtain. By this point, the site was drawing tens of thousands of hits per day, according to Skaggs.

By mid May, 39 newspapers in Europe and the States, some of which ran AP stories that originated with a story in the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier, at least 19 radio stations, 10 magazines, 20 Web sites and six television stations that had all fallen for his hoax. "It was a snowflake into a snowball into an avalanche," Skaggs says.

Two European TV crews inquired about shooting documentaries. A student at the University of Chicago asked to use Final Curtain as the basis of her graduate thesis. And then there were the online businesses and Web rings, which were only slightly more plausible than the Final Curtain. One site, selling itself as "the No. 1-visited cremation site online" offered advertising banner space. A letter from the founder of NetKin, which sells "virtual memorials," invited Final Curtain to become an "associate" site and place "Netkin Memorials" on its site. Final Curtain would take in a chunk of blood money from anyone who bought a memorial. Progressive-minded infidels from Funeral Industry made a few calls, too.

Then a pair of state agencies became intrigued.

In December, New Jersey and Colorado sent letters to the Final Curtain demanding that the site produce financial information or quit soliciting online. A Colorado officer refused to comment on the case, which is apparently ongoing. New Jersey did not return phone calls. Skaggs dismissed both with a polite letter pointing out that he wasn't soliciting any money.

A few months later, he sent out another press release, explaining that the whole thing was a hoax.

Next page | Mea culpa
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