AMERICAN INFAMY by Takeo Hori

JOHNNY CRUZ interviews TAKEO HORI about his feature screenplay AMERICAN INFAMY.

Johnny Cruz: Your script AMERICAN INFAMY was very well written and researched, and it's a script that's very easy to read, but also hard to read because of the subject matter. Can you tell us a little bit about your script?

Takeo Hori: AMERICAN INFAMY tells the story of a Japanese American teenager and his family who are sent to an American concentration camp following the attack on Pearl Harbor because of their Japanese heritage. In it two brothers take radically different paths to prove that they're true Americans.

JC: What are some of the main themes?

TH: As far as theme, obviously it’s about racism. While keeping the story personal and intimate, I also wanted to show the massive scale of what happened. The US government and military basically created a vast penal system consisting of ten concentration camps across the country. They had to identify, transport, and incarcerate 120,000 people for the duration of the war. When you think of the scale that's involved in such an enterprise, I wanted to make sure to get across that a monumental and institutional act of racism took place.

JC: Yeah, this story is something that I really didn't know about until I was maybe in my late teens, so I think it's about time that there's a mainstream movie or story about it. What drew you to write the script?

TH: I'm Japanese. I say Japanese because I'm actually from Japan, so technically not Japanese- American. But I felt like, this is a story I need to tell, because I understand the culture. And this is like my people's story. But at the same time, because I'm not Japanese-American, as a dramatist I felt like I had the distance to work with the elements that I researched and could freely adapt the material to craft the best story. Especially because I do air some dirty laundry in terms of the bitter conflicts within the Japanese community, that survive to this day and divide the community.

JC: Can you tell us if there was anything specifically that inspired you to write the script?

TH: Years ago, I directed a documentary portrait for Japanese television about a Japanese American woman named Yuri Kochiyama, who was in the camps. She was quite a remarkable woman and iconic figure in the civil rights movement. After the war she moved to New York and became a civil rights activist in the 60s in Harlem, became a follower of Malcolm X and was actually there when he was assassinated and held him as he died. Hearing her story, bringing to life the traumatic experience of thousands of Japanese Americans, I thought it was a story that needed to be told and a story I wanted to tell. And as a writer I saw the dramatic potential in the cruel irony of Japanese Americans being locked up in concentration camps by the American government, but at the same time going to war and fighting for America.

JC: Every scene in the script was tight and led into the next thing very well, and it had a really good flow. I imagine it was very difficult to do that. Is there anything that surprised you while writing or that you learned that you didn't really expect to?

TH: No huge surprises in the writing process, but I was surprised with the really positive reaction. I was prepared for no one to care about it. Because I've had this idea for decades but the way I wanted to tell the story was as a large scale saga. So I felt no one's gonna be interested, so why write it. Also, I knew that it would take a ton of research. It would take a year of my life, and so I’d put it off for years. But then I decided, okay, I'm just gonna have to do it for myself. It’s the one script in me that I HAVE to write. So then when it was a Nicholl finalist and got such a positive reaction it was great. All told I got about 50 script requests from reps, producers, and execs. And the positive comments I got from contest judges and the people I met wasn’t what I was expecting. People across the board who had no knowledge of the history were very moved by it. And so that was very gratifying, and surprising actually.

JC: One of the things that I was very impressed about was how meticulously researched it was. Every scene that came up, I learned something new that I never knew. So would you say the research inspired you to write the story or the story inspired you to go and do the research.

TH: The basic story and that it would center around brothers was always there. When I finally decided to write the script, I basically dedicated myself to just doing research for about a half a year. I read everything and watched interviews. So all the details – I’d say 95% of the script is actual incidents that happened, or things that people literally said, even if it’s a fictional story with fictional characters. I took certain incidents from different people and rearranged them. I could point to any scene and tell you the source of where the incident came from, and some of the dialogue was verbatim what somebody said. There’s one line, where the main character expresses how he feels about America as “it’s like finding out your father’s a criminal. But you love him because he’s the only father you have.” That’s something that a former incarceree said about his experience as a Japanese American.

JC: Yeah, that was one of my favorite moments because it encapsulated the whole history of the Japanese interment camps so brilliantly in one single line. What was one of your favorite moments in the script?

TH: Probably the penultimate scene on the bus with the white bus driver. Because as a dramatist I needed to bring some kind of closure to the story, even though it's a tragic saga of suffering that continues on. But I didn't want to sugar coat it with a forced happy ending. So I had to thread a needle; bring closure thematically but do it in a truthful way. Because it couldn't have a conventional Hollywood happy ending; it's not a happy story ultimately.

JC: So in the script there are a lot of arguments between how characters deal with the interment amongst the Japanese. Is there any character that reacted or behaved most similarly to the way you would have acted or behaved if you were in that situation?

TH: If I looked at myself, it's like the conflict between Harry and Tom itself is like my life, in a way – as it is for a lot of immigrants or expatriates who live in America. The whole thing of conflicted loyalties – between trying to fit in to American society at large, while at the same time trying to be true to or loyal to your ethnicity, or your national origin, or your race. There's always this push and pull. That’s why I structured the script so that it's an argument that's going back and forth between the two brothers. But that is something that, on a much, usually much less intense scale, goes on with anyone who comes to this country, myself included. Because I've assimilated but I'm also Japanese – I’m going back and forth in terms of one or the other. So that conflict between the two is really closer to where I am personally.

JC: You mentioned that the script resonated especially with readers from the Black community probably because of similar oppressions that both communities went through. Is there a specific audience that you hope the script finds or relates to?

TH: The core audience would naturally be Japanese Americans, and Asian Americans, but then also all BIPOC audiences. But also I think almost everyone in this country has a background where if you go back a few generations, there's an immigrant, or you’re coming from a minority community. As an example, I had a meeting with an executive at a production company who was very moved by the script which led to her sharing that she's half Mexican, half Jewish, which I didn’t know. And so she could identify with the struggles of discrimination, and being both, or neither, or wherever you find yourself on the spectrum of race and ethnicity.

JC: So you were surprised at how much support you got and obviously a lot of people liked it, because that's why it was on The Red List, which is where the Casino Theatre found it. So I was just wondering what your experience being part of the Casino Theatre was like.

TH: It really exceeded my expectations. As for the production itself, I thought the actors and what director Matt Toronto did directing it, really brought the scene powerfully to life. As I was watching it, I found myself really emotionally moved. It was a great theatrical experience and it inspired me to think about filming the scene that was performed. I thought it would work well as a short film and sizzle reel for when I seek funding. Also after the performances, industry folks approached me and requested my script. So both artistically and in industry terms, it was a really rewarding experience.