Krakatoa

 Krakatoa, East of Java sounded like a cool name for a movie. It was a major box office hit in 1969, the year I turned fourteen. Life at fourteen was definitely a mixed bag.  My brother was off in Vietnam, my two oldest sisters were boys crazy (‘nuff said) and other older sister was booked as a babysitter around the neighborhood seven days a week. Who could blame her? Staying home was no picnic:  the family business was struggling, finances were precarious, my father was always “working late,” and my parents were, like Vietnam, in constant state of undeclared war.

Movies were a great diversion from the angst of my daily adolescent travails. There were westerns (True Grit, The Wild Bunch), costume dramas (Anne of the Thousand Days), gritty contemporary New York (Midnight Cowboy) and the irreverent romp Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But for an adolescent teenager looking for purely escapist adventure/disaster flick, the movie of that year was Krakatoa.

The name “Krakatoa” was strong, powerful, elusive, and exotic. “East of Java…” evoked the South Pacific, warm waters, palm trees, beautiful natives, the melody of foreign tongues and Polynesia rhythms. Hmmm. But was the story of an exotic island erupting in one of the biggest explosions ever known a true tale or Hollywood fiction? Fact or fantasy, I was okay either way—but I needed to know. The teaser in the Chronicle made the film sound like a Polynesian version of the Atlantis legend, so it could go either way.

I got out my encyclopedia and looked up the island. Yes, it was a true story. In 1883 the island volcano blew sky high, tsunamis killed nearly 40,000 people. The mere sound of the explosion is reputedly the loudest in recorded history, audible up to 3,000 miles from the volcano. Cool!

I got out my atlas, and searched for the island to the east of Java. It was nowhere to be found. Of course not, it blew up a hundred years ago. I went to the library to solve the riddle: Krakatoa was WEST of Java, not east. How could the studio make such an obvious mistake? My faith in Hollywood was dashed.

The first reviews of the movie pointed out the error. The simple mistake itself got a great deal of press—was this what cynical producers were looking for? Free press based upon a movie mistake right in the title? Arguably so. I saw the movie. The story was classic disaster flick material, not too different from the 1961 potboiler Atlantis, the Lost Continent. It was a satisfactory vehicle for 1969's state-of-the-art special effects. 

But Krakatoa is WEST of Java. True, the extant title sounds more romantic, but it was WRONG. Is this how the real world worked? Whether it be in politics, family matters, business or the movies—wasn’t truth what really mattered? For the first time, I suspected not.