Two by Barbara Schultz – Television Visionary

Momoko Iko's play, Gold Watch was born out of personal experience.  At the age of two, Iko, a Nisei from Wapato, Washington, was, along with the rest of her family, interned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, one of 10 internment camps set up for the housing of Americans of Japanese descent following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the February 19, 1942 issuance of Executive Order 9066.  Released in 1945, Iko and her family relocated to Chicago where she grew up, received a degree in English from the University of Illinois, and became a schoolteacher.  An aspiring novelist in the late 1960s, she was working on a book based on her family's wartime experiences, but after reading an announcement about a national playwriting contest for Asian-American writers sponsored by the newly formed East-West Players in Los Angeles, she adapted portions of her unpublished work into a play.  Completed in 1970, Gold Watch was named the contest winner and on March 15, 1972, it premiered at the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where it ran until the end of May.  Tapped by producer Barbara Schultz to be the fourth production of her pioneering Visions series on PBS, the drama centers on the Murakamis, a Pacific Northwest farming family much like Iko's.  As were thousands of other Issei and Nisei families in the tumultuous days preceding the Japanese internment, the Murakamis are confronted with virulent racial prejudice and pending incarceration compounded by the prospect of losing everything for which they have worked so hard.  Lovingly staged and beautifully acted, with Mako's moving performance of husband and father Masu Murakami a standout, “Gold Watch” was lauded by the Washington Post as offering a “subject, substance and a style one is hardly likely to encounter elsewhere on the tube,” and by Los Angeles Times television critic Lee Margulies as a “powerful statement about the struggle for human dignity.”  —Dan Einstein

DigiBeta, color, 90 min.  A KCET presentation.  Producer: Barbara Schultz.  Director: Lloyd Richards.  Writer: Momoko Iko.  Cast: Mako, Shizuko Hoshi, Jesse Dizon, Mariel Aragon, Philip Baker Hall.

Use of “Gold Watch” episode of Visions courtesy of KCETLink.  Preserved from the original 2” master tape.  Video transfer at DC Video.  Engineering services by David Crosthwait.