Reading the Salinger tributes in the February 8 New Yorker, you’d swear Holden Caulfield was J.D. Salinger, with his suspicion of prestige, his antipathy toward school, his allergy to “phoniness”;

Salinger: “I think I despise every school and college in the world, but the ones with the best reputation first.” . . . Salinger was generous with writers he admired, but he was unsparing about those who had what he called “disguises.” . . . “It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work. . . . Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more.”
Lillian Ross, “Bearable”

Given that apparent closeness between author and creation, Holden’s outspoken anti-movie sentiments seem almost a wry joke against the context of Salingers’ own affection for the cinema;

“Salinger loved movies, and he was more fun than anyone to discuss them with. He enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them. (He loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that he had seen Grand Illusion ten times.) Brigitte Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and he said that it was uplifting news. “I mean it,” he told me. “She’s a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I’m tempted to accommodate her pour le sport.”
Lillian Ross, “Bearable”

“After a while, Jerry came out and went to the back of the room, where he kept, on shelves, a collection of old 16-mm. films, the kind where you have to change the reel threee or four times in the course of the movie. An old-fashioned projector had been set up behind the sofa. He ran through some titles; we settled on Sergeant York. Jerry threaded the film through the projector, and then he turned the lights off and remained behind us, his face illuminated by the flickering projector. The movie was captioned, perhaps because he was going a little deaf. Toward the end, he seemed to get choked up.”
John Seabrook, “A Night At The Movies”

As if to say, “Just in case you think this Caulfield boy is me, think again.”

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/02/08/100208ta_talk_ross#ixzz0eUipX30E

Still, a nice retrospective of Salinger’s place in the movies themselves, Ron.