“Summer of ’42” out Hoaxes “The War of the Worlds”: A Multimedia Fairy-Tale out-Barnum Orson Welles
“Summer of ’42” out Hoaxes “The War of the Worlds”: A Multimedia Fairy-Tale out-Barnum Orson Welles
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Abstract
The film Summer of ’42, produced from Herman Raucher’s screenplay, and his novel created from it both won wild popularity. The debate arose about their Raucher-alleged autobiographical content. Elements such as (1) imaginable vulnerability of principals to pay civil damages to an actual widow portrayed as fornicatrix-statutory rapist; (2) misrepresenting World War II battleground Kiska, Alaska; (3) numerous, conspicuous anachronisms; plus (4) delivery following profitable filming of adult-on-minor sexual plots of Robert Anderson’s play Tea and Sympathy and Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, combine to suggest the 1971 pure fiction followed by authorial “autobiography-hoax”. Elizabeth Kolbert invokes Robert Wilson’s August 2019 biography Barnum: An American Life to recall Americans traditionally welcome hoaxer-entertainers, e.g., nineteenth-century empresario-legend Phineas T. Barnum.
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