Abel - A journalist's "occuptational hazard."

It's a trendy Hollywood marketing ploy. Scenerios, from inspirational-coach/inner-city teacher dramas to haunted-house shockers, are "inspired by actual events." The documentary Abel Raises Cain certainly is based on a true story. It's just a pack of lies, that's all.

Abel Raises Cain is an affectionate portrait of Alan Abel, a Coshocton, Ohio native and veteran media prankster. Abel is considered so dangerous in press circles that his picture was supposedly tacked up in offices of Gannett to warn reporters not to fall for his stunts. Over five decades he's been giving journalists and interviewers on both coasts exactly what they want - weird stories, quirky people, a soupçon of sex - based on hired imposters, fictitious organizations, official-looking letterheads and phony assertions.

Perhaps Abel's best-known hoax was a nonexistent group, SINA, the Society for Indecency of Naked Animals, aiming to clothe otherwise immodest dogs, cats, horses, etc. With screenwriter Buck Henry as spokesman, SINA gained such a high profile that chapters sprang up across the country, until Abel, like a master magician at the end of a turn, revealed the whole thing as a put-on.

Other hoaxes that drew TV coverage and articles included Abel's posing as a bandage-swathed Howard Hughes, a KKK orchestra (specializing in jazz) to show off a kinder, gentler face of the white supremacist group; a marriage of exiled dictator Idi Amin to an all-American girl to get US citizenship; and a school for aspiring panhandlers to sharpen their begging skills. His ongoing project, a SINA-like group that seeks to ban breast-feeding as an illicit vice, may well be getting an airing somewhere right now.

"Although I've remained an occupational hazard to the media, I have many journalistic friends," says Abel (or someone claiming to be him) in an e-mail exchange.

"One reporter from Reuters, who fell for the Howard Hughes hoax, stopped me on the street and asked, "Aren't you ever going to quit?' Walter Cronkite is still angry with me after he presented the campaign to clothe all naked animals seriously over the full CBS-TV network in the '60s and later learned of the hoax. That was over 40 years ago and the chip is still on his shoulder! I learned this several months ago from Buck Henry when a friend of his had dinner with Cronkite. He's not mad at Hitler, Senator Joe McCarthy or Saddam Hussein. Only me and my SINA campaign."

Abel is perhaps the closest thing to Guy Grand, the trickster of Terry Southern's cult comic novel The Magic Christian, repeatedly monkey-wrenching the system with no clearer motive than to, in Southern's words, "make it hot for them." Except Grand was a tycoon whose vast fortune bankrolled his pranks. In Abel Raises Cain, we see Alan and Jeanne Abel living out of hotels and house-sitting for friends, their items in storage. Abel is described as having rarely if ever profited off his hoaxes. He brings in an income as a consultant (earlier in life the OSU graduate and musician toured with a one-man show about the history of the drum).

How do we know what's in Abel Raises Cain isn't phony either? The film's best claim to verisimilitude is that it's co-directed by an insider - Abel's daughter Jenny. She describes being raised in a wacky but loving household, with an actual train caboose in the back yard and an unfinished replica of the Loch Ness Monster, ready for action. Even if she did once have to pose with Alan on TV as a little girl who had been raised on a diet of human hair.

"I've had flirtations with people who wanted to document my assorted and sordid adventures on film," says Abel. "Woody Allen was first in the '60s, then Cary Grant in the '70s, Sidney Glazier [The Producers] in the '80s and Dustin Hoffman in the '90s. They all gave up after meetings because they couldn't find the hook. Jenny and Jeff [Hockett, the other co-director] seem to have found it, even after Universal gave up on the project too."

Now he's touring with the documentary. Alan and Jeanne will appear in person at 7 p.m. Sunday, July 29 for the screening of Abel Raises Cain, followed by a 9:15 p.m. revival of Abel's ribald mockumentary Is There Sex After Death?

Abel calls reality television a "loose cannon" but he's still got game for it. Literally. "A VH1 TV producer called me to develop a show, and I came up with Naked Basketball. This is a half-hour weekly show of former NBA basketball players playing a game in the nude, except for athletic shoes. Up and down the court, only names and numbers stenciled on backs and chests. Everything hanging out, perhaps dangerously."

"The show is still under consideration," he says. "I hope they don't chicken out."

Lebron was not reached for comment.