The Most Faithful Dog You Never Heard Of.....
...and how he inspired Richard Gere to make a movie!Richard Gere sharing top billing with an Akita?
Richard Gere starring in a heart--tugging, tear-jerking family movie?
Even Gere was skeptical when his agent contacted him. “It’s not a movie
you’d expect I’d be drawn to,” he says. But then he read the script. “I
cried like a baby,” he confesses. “And I said, ‘Oh man, I’m gonna have
to do this, aren’t I?’ ”
The result is
Hachi: A Dog’s Tale,
which comes out on DVD this month, starring Gere, Joan Allen, Sarah
Roemer, Jason Alexander—and three Akita actors in the title role.
Gere passed the script on to director Lasse
Hallström, his friend and neighbor in New York City’s northern suburbs.
Hallström had directed Gere in 2006’s The Hoax, and the two were eager
to work together again. They’d both also appeared in -director Mark St.
Germain’s 2009 documentary My Dog: An Unconditional Love Story, in
which they and other celebrities (including Glenn Close, Edie Falco,
and Richard Belzer) talk about their four-footed best friends. So Hachi
seemed like a natural fit. “It was really a gift for me, because it’s
such a wonderful story,” says the Swedish-born Hallström, who made his
bones in the United States with 1985’s My Life as a Dog. “And being the
lover of dogs that I am, this was fantastic.”
Hachiis an American retelling of a true-life story that has captured hearts
in Japan for more than 70 years and has been the subject of a Japanese
hit movie (Hachiko Monogatari, which came out in 1987) and at leas two children’s books.
The movie is based on the story of Hachiko, an
Akita who was taken to Tokyo (from Akita province) by his owner,
Hidesamuro Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department of the
University of Tokyo, in 1924. For the next year Hachiko started each
day by -seeing Professor Ueno off at the front door. Then, every
evening, he was there to greet him as he got off his commuter train at
nearby Shibuya Station.
http://ow.ly/19hzP 
this looks like a good old weepie
Thu Aug 02, 2018 3:35 pm by Lorz
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