The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 292

CALENDAR ented with a 3-by-5-foot check for $100,000 by Stuart Karl, president of Karl Home Video and executive producer of "Money Hunt," and Chris Pye, the puzzle's creator, in a ceremony at i FOLLOW-UP Ace mystery solver Newt "still walking on air." testants to answer "in 50 words or less" a creative question: "When Cash Hunt finally opens the safe deposit box, the money is gone, but something is left in its place. What does Cash find?" A retired psychotherapist, Deiter grew up on Ellery Queen radio serials and novels. "I've always enjoyed figuring out the whys and wherefores and solving problems that's what I do for a living now." Even so, Deiter said that he studied the tape "intensely" before phoning in his proposed answers on Aug. 20. Deiter used such reference books as the Encyclopaedia Bri-tannica, Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, the World Almanac, along with atlases and even political directories to figure out the clues.

"I can't even count the number of times I watched the tape," he said. "A conservative estimate of the hours I put into it would be 150, but that does not include the time I spent without the tape the time spent transcribing the audio track, thinking, researching, and reading. It consumed every bit of my free time for seven weeks," he added. VIDEO GAME PAYS $100,000 TO 'SLEUTH' By SALLEY RAYL When Newt Deiter, 53, went into the Where-house Entertainment store on Sunset and Western July 9 and bought a copy of "Money Hunt," the first home videocassette mystery with a cash payoff of $100,000, he had no plans to enter the contest Can Pay Off for Armchair Sleuths," Aug. 26).

"I bought it because I'm a great appreciator of direc-torcinematographer David Hemmings, and I was curious," Deiter, field deputy for L.A. Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson, said. "I had planned to watch it, then give it to a young friend of mine, but I got absolutely hooked on it. It was the first time I've ever entered a contest," he laughed. "Money Hunt: The Case of the Missing Link," which stars John the Wherehouse Entertainment store in Encino.

"When Chris Pye first confirmed that I'd won, my jaw dropped," Deiter recalled. "Now, I'm still walking on air over all this." While the winner was originally scheduled to be announced Sept. 12, Deiter had out-of-town commitments that prevented the announcement and ceremony from being scheduled earlier. Karl Home Video is extending "Money Hunt: The Case of the Missing Link" to Jan. 31, 1985, by presenting a run-off contest with additional cash prizes totaling $15,000.

People who buy the $29.95 videocassette now will have the advantage of a supplemental tip sheet, which contains the phone number and hints on how to look for the solutions to the remaining three undisclosed elements. This second phase also requires con Hillerman as host, John Aston as Cash Hunt and Zane Buzby as the sexy House of Liver waitress, was released June 27. From clues woven into the 30-minute video, sleuths had to identify the region, city, safe deposit number and puzzle-solution phone number. Deiter out of 200 entrants who figured out the first clue, the phone number with which to call in the solutions was the only one who correctly figured out the other three mystery elements leading to the "hidden" $100,000. On Oct.

11, Deiter was pres the emperor touches the sensitivities of many Japanese. The older generation still suffers from hidden war guilt and. the fear that militarism could emerge again. Although Mishima's death transformed him into an overnight hero with a segment of the country's small bands of rightists, it made him anathema to leftist scholars and to the mass media, which sees itself as the protector of Japan's postwar constitution. For most politicians, it made Mishima virtually an untouchable.

Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who throughout his career has befriended artists, was an acquaintance of Mishima and had met the author a number of times. But as director of the Defense Agency on the day Mishima committed seppuku, he issued a statement saying that the author had "departed from the bounds of rationality" and condemned him for raising fears that militarism might rise again. To both the Schraders and Shiragi, Mishima's call for scrapping the constitution was not a political appeal but rather an aesthetic plea to restore the value of Japanese tradition. "By committing this very anachronistic act, Mishima tried to shock the Japanese people, who are so Americanized and industrialized, into an awareness of their tradition," Shiragi said. The setting Mishima chose for the "final drama" headquarters of the Eastern Army of the Self-Defense Forces, the euphemistic term applied to the postwar armed forces added a permanent political dimension to whatever aesthetic appeal Mishima may have wanted to make that day and to his reputation as an author.

Even today, the grisly image of seppuku and the political nature of Mishima's final statement touch a raw nerve in Japanese society. The movie, director Schrader said, is likely to touch the same nerve. "The subject material is so rich that there is something in it to make almost every Japanese feel ill at ease," he said. Director-screenwriter Schrader said he was attracted to Mishima because "he was the type of man whom, if he had not lived, I might have created. He had conflicts in his life I could identify with.

He lived them out. If I had written this as fiction, it probably wouldn't be credible." Schrader said the film makes no attempt to present itself as a biography. "It is an interpretation, not a biography," he said. Leonard Schrader, who said he spent more than five years on research for the film, said that no one among dozens of Mishima's friends and acquaintances he interviewed seemed to know more than one aspect of the author's personality. "It seemed like each of them were talking about different people," he said.

The film, Leonard Schrader said, arranges the many "masks" of the real-life Mishima into "the shape of a doughnut and lets the viewer draw his own interpretation." Paul Schrader added "I have plenty of evidence to defend myself from attacks on the movie for stressing Mishima's lifelong striving for blood and death. He hammered away at it all his life from at least age 16 or 17." Sales of Mishima's works here spurted in the years after his death, reaching a peak after his collected works were published in 1976. Sales are not spectacular today, al- LOS ANGELES TIMES CALENDAR in what Schrader called "bleached-out col-or. Excerpts from three novels House," "Runaway Horses" and "The Temple of the Golden are in video, each color-coded, according to Schrader, "to help the audience know where they are." For example, pink dominates excerpts from "Kyoko's House," so much so that even noodles eaten by one of the actors are colored pink. Coppola and Lucas will be listed as executive producers.

Coppola's Zoetrope Studios and Filmlink, headed by Mataichiro Yamamoto, are jointly producing the film. Philip Glass is composing the music. It is not likely that many Americans or Europeans are familiar with any of the Japanese stars, but the cast includes some of the best-known names in Japan. Kenji Sawada, a singer-actor, appears with noted actress Hidari Sachiko in interludes from Mishima's novel, "Kyoko's House," which features a double suicide. Yasuaki Kurata, Toshiyuki Nagashima and Kabuki actor Yasosuke Bando are also familiar to Japanese moviegoers.

Ken Ogata, one of four actors playing Mishima at various stages in the author's life, is noted as one of Japan's more versatile serious actors, an actor who has not been typecast. Ogata said no movie about Mishima had been made in Japan because Japanese producers "lacked the courage" to do it, because Mishima was considered a rightist. Paul Schrader said he felt that many Japanese would like to see him produce a film that is so bad that they can dismiss it without serious consideration, but added: "I'm going to give them a film they have to take seriously." Jameson is The Times' Tokyo bureau chief. where the encounter actually took place. During filming, some extras had trouble comprehending the social backdrop to Mishima's suicide.

When a scene of Mishima confronting radical students of Tokyo University was filmed, director Schrader said he was amazed to discover that the stand-ins, who were students themselves, had to be given a lecture about the student protests of the 1960s in order to comprehend what they were supposed to do in the scene. Schrader acknowledged that the movie was not likely to have much commercial appeal in the United States because of its subject (an aesthetic Japanese author), its cast (all-Japanese) and language (Japanese, with subtitles, except for a narration in English). "It's strictly an art theater film," he said. As a work of art, the film appears to stand a good chance of winning critical praise. But as a biography of Mishima it offers the "aberrations, not the charm; the strong innuendo of homosexuality, not the emotions that also made Mishima a family man; the sordid associations in Mishima's life, not the intellectuals, foreigners, newsmen and politicians, such as the present prime minister.

Shiragi, unlike Yoko Mishima, said he has no objections to the movie's focus on aberrations. "Serious literature thrives on abnormal instincts of human beings. It's not in normal human beings that humanity manifests itself," he said. He cited Dostoevski and Proust as examples of writers whose works focus on abnormal or "extreme" characters, and added: "All of the characters that make up the world's great literature are aberrations." The movie was filmed in three formats-color, black and white, and video transformed to color film. Mishima's memories as he goes through his last day are in black and white.

The live action of the last day is filmed though higher than for the works of other dead authors. A collection of essays published last December sold 60,000 copies in the first four months, according to the publishing firm, Shincho. Critically, Mishima is highly regarded as a master of the language, although the evaluation does not spread across the entirety of his works. In the United States, where Mishima was the best-received and most-translated Japanese author when he was alive, nothing has been published since the last book of his final tetralogy was translated in 1974, Shiragi said. In Western Europe, particularly in France and Italy, where the resistance to his way of thinking and the manner of his death is far less strong than in Anglo-Saxon countries, Mishima's works are enjoying a renaissance, Shiragi said.

"Many of his plays are being staged all over Europe," he said. Two major Mishima biographies have been published in English one by Henry Scott-Stokes, now Fortune's correspondent in Tokyo, the other by John Nathan, a former Princeton professor but there has been no Japanese biography, and no Japanese film. (In 1976 Lewis John Carlino made "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea," based on one of Mishima's novels. The disturbing love story starred Sarah Miles and Kris Kristofferson. Nakasone's 1970 political embarrassment, Paul Schrader said, ensured that the present government would not cooperate with the filming.

To find a setting for Mishima's appeal to Self-Defense Force troops, the crew had to travel to Koriyama, 125 miles north of Tokyo, where a subprefectural office building was used during a holiday. Similarly, the crew was forced to shoot a scene in which Mishima confronts radical leftist students 15 miles away from the University of Tokyo, Calendar Movies, Page 17 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1984 PAGE 5.