Albert Nozaki

Albert Nozaki (1 January 1912 – 16 November 2003) was a Japanese American art director who worked on various films for Paramount Pictures. He is perhaps best known for his memorable design of the Martian war machines from the 1953 film The War of the Worlds and for his Academy Award-nominated art direction on the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille epic, The Ten Commandments. He retired in 1969 due to retinitis pigmentosa, which ultimately cost him his sight. Starting out at Paramount as a draftsman in the Paramount set-design department in 1934, he retired in 1969 as the studio's supervising art director for feature films.

Biography

Born in Japan, Nozaki's family moved to the United States when he was 3 and settled in Los Angeles. Nozaki earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Southern California in 1933 and a master's degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois in 1934.[1]

In 1938, and for many years thereafter, Al Nozaki lived in Echo Park, California. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Nozaki was abruptly dismissed from his job at Paramount. In the spring of 1942, during the roundup of 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese descent, he and his wife, Lorna, were sent to the Manzanar internment camp in California's Owens Valley.[1]

Among his many other credits as an art director are When Worlds Collide, The Big Clock, Sorrowful Jones, Appointment with Danger, Pony Express, Houdini, The Buccaneer, and Loving You.

Nozaki died on November 16, 2003 in Los Angeles, California from complications of pneumonia.

Documentaries

Albert Nozaki appeared in the documentary The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal (1985) (produced and directed by Arnold Leibovit).

gollark: But it's the ability to pay more money *specifically* for colleges, via loans and stuff.
gollark: The problem is that if people's ability to pay increasingly high prices is increased a lot, then the ability of colleges to charge high prices is also increased.
gollark: I think that if the price does go massively higher, people will just talk about how important it is and how everyone needs an education and stuff, and it'll be subsidized somehow and/or you'll just have to take out giant loans, instead of just not doing college.
gollark: I'm reading through the backlogs here.
gollark: It's possible to brute-force encryption in theory, but modern crypto makes this very impractical to do given constraints like the available size of the universe and stuff.

References
  1. McLellan, Dennis (November 29, 2003), "Albert Nozaki, 91; Art Director for Movie 'War of the Worlds'", Los Angeles Times
  • Albert Nozaki on IMDb
  • "War of the Worlds" page compiled by Roger Russell at roger-russell.com including information about Al [Albert] Nozaki retrieved 2 February 2012
  • Albert Nozaki papers, 1950-1956., Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Click on Production Art inventory to see examples of Nozaki's work.)


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.