Ryo Kawasaki was a Japanese jazz fusion guitarist, composer and band leader of international acclaim.
His best known compositions are “Bamboo Child” (1976), “Trinkets and Things” (1978) and “Hawaiian Caravan” (1982).
Stanislaw Fernandes did the artwork for the album Juice (1976).
Stuart Gordon is a film director is best-known for his Re-Animator (1985), based on H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922).
The story starts with these lines ominous lines, in keeping with Lovecraft’s sinister oeuvre:
“Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.”
H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922)
The television documentary series Incredibly Strange Film Show did a special on Gordon in 1989 where they interviewed him in the La Brea Tar Pits
Flavio Bucci was an Italian actor known in my canon for his tiny part in the metafilm Closed Circuit (1978).
I wrote about that film here.
In that film Flavio Bucci sports thick glasses and plays the part of a nerdy sociologist who takes notes of the audience’s reactions during the screening of the film.
Afterwards he is interrogated by the police. Has he seen anything which can solve the murder of a man in the audience by a gun man IN the film?
You can see Mr. Bucci from 27:20 onwards.
Mr. Bucci also played in the sex comedy Gegè Bellavita (1978) which can be found in full on YouTube.
Allee Willis was an American eccentric best-known as a songwriter, writing or co-writing “I’ll Be There For You” (1994, Friends theme song); “September” (1978) and “Boogie Wonderland” (1979) by Earth, Wind & Fire; and “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” (1987) by Pet Shop Boys.
There are plenty of short portraits of her on YouTube, most of them filmed in her house which, she says, was the MGM partyhouse built in 1937.
There is also her 1974 album Child Star.
She also recorded the song “Big Adventure” (1985) with Pee-Wee Herman.