In Media
Demara's story was recounted in the 1960 book, The Great Impostor, written by Robert Crichton and published by Random House; the book was a New York Times bestseller and adapted into a 1961 film by the same name starring Tony Curtis as Demara. A second book by Crichton, The Rascal and the Road, recounted Demara and Crichton's experiences together as Crichton conducted research for "The Great Impostor".
Other direct or indirect references to Demara include:
- The Band recorded a song called "Ferdinand the Imposter".
- The NBC drama The Pretender (1996–2000) was inspired by the life of Ferdinand Demara. Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) is a child prodigy who was abducted at a young age and raised in a think tank. In each episode, the character poses as a doctor, police officer, attorney, and various other figures in order to help those in trouble.
- The Season 1, episode of M*A*S*H, entitled "Dear Dad...Again", included a character impersonating a surgeon who was loosely based on Demara
Read more about this topic: Ferdinand Waldo Demara
Famous quotes containing the word media:
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)