Herman Raucher, who turned his reminiscences of a summer season as a teen on Nantucket, Mass., which included a sexual encounter with a younger battle widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 movie “Summer time of ’42,” died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, Conn. He was 95.
His daughter Jenny Raucher confirmed the loss of life, in a hospital.
Mr. Raucher spent the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s writing scripts for anthology tv collection and promoting copy for the Walt Disney Firm and varied companies.
However recollections of his personal summer season of ’42 lingered. So did the reminiscence of considered one of his shut pals, Oscar Seltzer, a medic who was killed on Mr. Raucher’s twenty fourth birthday, in 1952, whereas caring for a wounded soldier throughout the Korean Conflict.
“Summer time of ’42” tells the story of three 15-year-old pals — Hermie, Oscy and Benjie — and their early exploration of women and, tentatively, intercourse, throughout a summer season trip on a Nantucket-like island early in World Conflict II.
Hermie (performed by Gary Grimes) turns into infatuated with Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill), a lady in her early 20s. In a single scene, he visibly trembles on a ladder as she arms him packing containers for him to put in her dusty attic. Their tender lovemaking happens after she receives a telegram telling her that her husband was killed within the battle.
The scene parallels Mr. Rauch’s real-life expertise at age 14 with a lady on Nantucket.
“I used to be in love together with her earlier than the incident ever occurred,” Mr. Raucher instructed The Stuart Information of Florida in 2002.
“Summer time of ’42” received an Oscar for Michel Legrand’s authentic rating and obtained 4 different nominations, together with one for Mr. Raucher’s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing movie of 1971, taking in $32 million (or about $245 million in right now’s {dollars}) on the field workplace.
Herman Raucher was born on April 13, 1928, in Brooklyn. His Austrian-born father, Benjamin, was a touring salesman who had been a soldier, a boxer, a bouncer and, Mr. Raucher stated in an interview, probably a gun runner in Cuba. His mom, Sophie (Weinshank) Raucher, was a homemaker.
Mr. Raucher graduated in 1949 from New York College, the place he majored in advertising and created cartoons for a campus newspaper and journal. He was quickly employed by twentieth Century Fox as a $38-a-week workplace boy. He was drafted into the Military in 1950 and served two years stateside throughout the Korean Conflict.
After being discharged, he acquired a name from Disney — he didn’t know the way the corporate found him — and he labored within the firm’s promoting division. He additionally wrote for advert companies within the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s, and was employed by Gardner Promoting as a vice chairman in 1964.
He had begun writing for tv and the stage in these years, together with scripts for the anthology reveals “Studio One,” “The Alcoa Hour” and “Goodyear Playhouse,” in addition to a play, “Harold,” starring Anthony Perkins and Don Adams, that opened on Broadway in 1962 however closed after 20 performances.
Mr. Raucher tailored his unproduced play, “Candy November,” right into a romantic melodrama starring Anthony Newley and Sandy Dennis in 1968. He then collaborated with Mr. Newley on the script for “Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Neglect Mercy Humppe and Discover True Happiness?” (1968), which was a infamous failure. Mr. Newley, who was additionally the star and director, performs a singing star concurrently making and exhibiting a film about his self-indulgent life.
Mr. Raucher’s subsequent movie, “Watermelon Man” (1970), starred the comic Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white insurance coverage salesman who in a single day turns Black. Critics weren’t sort; writing in The Los Angeles Instances, Kevin Thomas stated the “script is so uninspired and the route so inept that ‘Watermelon Man’ runs out of fuel lengthy earlier than the top is in sight.”
Mr. Raucher instructed the movie web site Cinedump in 2016 that the director Melvin Van Peebles turned “Watermelon Man” into “extra of a Black energy movie than I’d needed.”
Then got here “Summer time of ’42,” his greatest cinematic success. He had written the screenplay in 1958, however film firms had rejected it, by his depend, 49 instances by the point Warner Bros. acquired it in 1970 and put it within the arms of Robert Mulligan, who had been nominated for an Oscar for guiding “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962).
“Bob fell in love with the screenplay,” Mr. Raucher instructed Cinedump. “They requested how massive a price range it was, he stated 1,000,000 {dollars},” he added, referring to Warner Bros. executives. “They stated go make it; they by no means learn the script, they left us alone.”
The studio did, nonetheless, ask that Hermie be 15, not 14 as Mr. Raucher had been.
In the course of the filming, on the coast of Mendocino in Northern California, Mr. Mulligan instructed The San Francisco Examiner, “The story offers moderately merely with the method of rising up, not in contrast to Salinger’s ‘Catcher within the Rye,’ which has a few of the identical comedian spirit.”
Within the movie, Dorothy leaves the island after her romantic interlude with Hermie and writes him a farewell observe. The identical factor occurred to Mr. Raucher.
Someday after the movie’s launch, Mr. Raucher stated, he obtained a letter, with no return tackle, from a lady in Ohio who he believed was the widow.
“She wrote that the ghosts of that point had been higher left alone,” he instructed The New York Instances in 2001 when a stage musical model of “Summer time of ’42” was being carried out in Connecticut.
Mr. Raucher wrote a number of extra screenplays, together with “Class of ’44” (1973), a sequel to “Summer time of ’42”; “Ode to Billie Joe” (1976), which was impressed by Bobbie Gentry’s music of the identical identify and directed by Max Baer Jr.; and “The Different Aspect of Midnight” (1977), primarily based on Sidney Sheldon’s novel about love and vengeance set in Washington, Paris, Athens and Hollywood.
He additionally wrote the novels “A Glimpse of Tiger” (1971), about two con artists; “There Ought to Have Been Castles” (1978), a few playwright and a dancer within the Nineteen Fifties; and “Maynard’s Home” (1980), a few troubled Vietnam veteran who’s bequeathed a home in Maine by a slain comrade.
Apart from his daughter Jenny, Mr. Raucher is survived by one other daughter, Jacqueline Raucher-Salkin, and two granddaughters. His spouse, Mary Kathryn Martinet-Raucher, a dancer, died in 2002.
After the filming of “Summer time of ’42” was accomplished, it was in postproduction for a yr. Throughout that point, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel primarily based on his screenplay.
“As destiny would have it, the ebook comes out and turns into a greatest vendor,” he instructed Cinedump. “So when the film is lastly launched, the advert line is ‘Based mostly on the nationwide greatest vendor.’ Which is absurd, as a result of the ebook was written after the film!”
