Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed 30 films in a career spanning over five decades. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Kurosawa displayed a bold, dynamic style, strongly influenced by Western cinema yet distinct from it; he was involved with all aspects of film production.
Marion Robert Morrison, professionally known as John Wayne and nicknamed The Duke or Duke Wayne, was an American actor who became a popular icon through his starring roles in films which were produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, especially through his starring roles in Western and war movies. His career flourished from the silent era of the 1920s through the American New Wave, as he appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions. He was among the top box-office draws for three decades, and appeared with many other important Hollywood stars of his era. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Wayne as one of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.
Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, and manga artist. A co-founder of Studio Ghibli, he has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and creator of Japanese animated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the history of animation.
Sayonara is a 1957 American Technicolor drama film starring Marlon Brando in Technirama. It tells the story of an American Air Force fighter pilot during the Korean War who falls in love with a famous Japanese dancer. The picture won four Academy Awards, including acting honors for co-stars Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki. The supporting cast also features Patricia Owens, James Garner, Martha Scott, Ricardo Montalbán, and Miiko Taka.
Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino was a Japanese-American disc jockey and radio personality who participated in English-language radio broadcasts transmitted by Radio Tokyo to Allied troops in the South Pacific during World War II on The Zero Hour radio show.
Curtis Lee Hanson was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Born in Reno, Nevada, Hanson grew up in Los Angeles. After dropping out of high school, Hanson worked as photographer and editor for Cinema magazine. In the 1970s, Hanson got involved in filmmaking starting with participating to the writing Daniel Haller's The Dunwich Horror (1970) and his directorial debut Sweet Kill (1973), where he lacked creative control to fulfill his vision. While Hanson continued directing, he rose to prominence by being involved in the writing of critically acclaimed films. This includes Daryl Duke's The Silent Partner (1978), Samuel Fuller's White Dog and Carroll Ballard's Never Cry Wolf (1983).
David Paden Marchand, known professionally as Davey Havok, is an American singer and musician who is the lead vocalist of the rock band AFI, the synth-pop band Blaqk Audio, the hardcore punk band XTRMST, and the new wave band Dreamcar. Among various other ventures, he performed lead vocals for Son of Sam's debut album and for fictional band My Purple Agony in the animated series Harvey Girls Forever!.
Lost in Translation is a 2003 romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. Bill Murray stars as Bob Harris, a fading American movie star who is having a midlife crisis when he travels to Tokyo to promote Suntory whisky. There, he befriends another estranged American named Charlotte, a young woman and recent college graduate. Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris, and Fumihiro Hayashi are also featured. The film explores themes of alienation and disconnection against a backdrop of cultural displacement in Japan. It defies mainstream narrative conventions and is atypical in its depiction of romance.
Destination Tokyo is a 1943 black and white American submarine war film. The film was directed by Delmer Daves in his directorial debut, and the screenplay was written by Daves and Albert Maltz, based on an original story by former submariner Steve Fisher. The film stars Cary Grant and John Garfield and features Dane Clark, Robert Hutton, and Warner Anderson, along with John Ridgely, Alan Hale Sr. and William Prince.
Boston Blackie is a fictional character created by author Jack Boyle (1881–1928). Blackie, a jewel thief and safecracker in Boyle's stories, became a detective in adaptations for films, radio and television—an "enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend."
Josefina López is a Chicana playwright, perhaps best known as the author of the play Real Women Have Curves. López is also the Founding Artistic Director of the CASA 0101 theater located in Boyle Heights, California, which began in 2000.
American Me is a 1992 American independent crime drama film produced and directed by Edward James Olmos, his first film as a director, and written by Floyd Mutrux and Desmond Nakano. Olmos also stars as the film's protagonist, Montoya Santana, loosely based on mafia boss Rodolfo Cadena. Executive producers included record producer Lou Adler, screenwriter Mutrux, and Irwin Young. It depicts a fictionalized account of the founding and rise to power of the Mexican Mafia in the California prison system from the 1950s into the 1980s.
Norman Kerry was an American actor whose career in the motion picture industry spanned twenty-five years, beginning in 1916 and peaking during the silent era of the 1920s. Changing his name from the unmistakably German "Kaiser" at the onset of World War I, he rose quickly in his field, becoming "the Clark Gable of the [1920s]."
Paprika is a 2006 Japanese animated science fiction psychological thriller film directed by Satoshi Kon. The film is based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui. It is Kon's fourth and final feature film before his death in 2010. The script was co-written by Kon and Seishi Minakami, who also wrote for Kon's TV series Paranoia Agent, the character design and animation director was Masashi Ando, the music was composed by Kon's frequent collaborator Susumu Hirasawa, and the art director was Nobutaka Ike, who worked on all of Kon's works. Japanese animation studio Madhouse animated and produced the film. The Japanese voice cast featured Megumi Hayashibara, Tōru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Tōru Furuya, Akio Ōtsuka, Kōichi Yamadera and Hideyuki Tanaka.
The Daydreamer is a 1966 stop motion animated–live action musical fantasy film produced by Videocraft International. Directed by Jules Bass, it was written by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Romeo Muller, based on the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. It features seven original songs by Jules Bass and Maury Laws. The film's opening features the cast in puppet and live form plus caricatures of the cast by Al Hirschfeld. Among the cast were the American actors Paul O'Keefe, Jack Gilford, Ray Bolger and Margaret Hamilton, and the Australian actor Cyril Ritchard as the voice of the Sandman. Three of the voice actors: Burl Ives, and Canadian actors Billie Mae Richards and Larry D. Mann, were the voice suppliers for Videocraft's stop motion Christmas television special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). Some of the character voices were recorded at RCA Studios in Toronto, Ontario, under Bernard Cowan's supervision. The "Animagic" puppet sequences were staged by Don Duga at Videocraft in New York, and supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga at MOM Production in Tokyo, Japan.
Christopher Inadomi Tashima is a Japanese American actor and director. He is co-founder of the entertainment company Cedar Grove Productions and Artistic Director of its Asian American theatre company, Cedar Grove OnStage. Tashima directed, co-wrote, and starred in the 26-minute film Visas and Virtue for which he and producer Chris Donahue won the 1998 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film.
Frank Michael Howson is an Australian theatre and film director, screenwriter, and singer. He directed Flynn (1996) on the early life of Errol Flynn and Hunting (1991). Howson, with Peter Boyle, helped establish Boulevard Films which produced thirteen films from Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1988) to Flynn; besides producing for Boulevard Films, Howson often wrote scripts and directed.
Kenny Endo is an American musician and taiko master. He is the leader of several taiko ensembles and regularly tours, performing traditional and contemporary taiko music. Endo is also the first non-Japanese national to receive a natori in the field of hogaku hayashi, Japanese classical drumming. Today Endo composes his own music and plays taiko professionally as a solo artist, with his ensembles, and in collaboration with other artists.
Dave Boyle is an American director, writer, editor, and actor. He has written and directed several movies that utilize primarily Asian or Asian-American casts, including the feature films Big Dreams Little Tokyo (2006), White on Rice (2009), Surrogate Valentine (2011), Daylight Savings (2012), and Man from Reno (2014), several of which have won awards at film festivals around the world.
There is a Japanese American and a Japanese national population in Los Angeles and Greater Los Angeles. Japanese people began arriving in the United States in the late 1800s and have settled in places like Hawaii, Alaska, and California. Los Angeles has become a hub for people of Japanese descent for generations in areas like Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights. As of 2017, Los Angeles has a Japanese and Japanese American population of around 110,000 people.
