John Logan

He is the great-great-grandson of a samurai warrior named Wakaji. His own name is a derivation of Saigo Takamori, a famous 19th century samurai who is considered a tragic hero in Japan. So does Moritaka Yoshida see it as providence that he was cast as a samurai in the new Tom Cruise epic, "The Last Samurai"? "Nothing is an accident," Yoshida replies. "My great-great-grandfather was a samurai leader," he explains. "He actually fought a lot of battles.

  This post has been corrected. For details, see below. L.A. Theatre Works, the radio play series recorded in UCLA's James Bridges Theater, announced a 2012-13 season Tuesday that offers recent Broadway offerings, classics with distinctive casting and less-well known works that will receive new attention. On the schedule are "Red" by John Logan with Alfred Molina as artist Mark Rothko (which is opening at the Mark Taper Forum in August); "The Nightwatcher," written and performed by Charlayne Woodard (seen at the Kirk Douglas Theatre last fall)

"You Can Count on Me" and "Traffic" were the feature film winners Sunday night at the 53rd Annual Writers Guild of America Awards. Episodes of NBC's "The West Wing" and "Frasier" received honors for TV series writing. Kenneth Lonergan won for best screenplay written directly for the screen for his intimate family drama, "You Can Count on Me." Lonergan has already received several honors from critics' organizations and is nominated for an Oscar.

The Long Beach Blues Festival pays homage to Chicago blues this year, and from the looks of a stellar Labor Day weekend lineup at Cal State Long Beach, it landed everyone short of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Luther Allison, James Cotton, Junior Wells, Sun Seals and Otis Clay play Aug. 30; John Lee Hooker, Snooky Pryor, Koko Taylor, Otis Rush and the Soul Stirrers perform Aug. 31.

They called it basketball, but the final four minutes were more like hockey. A bench-clearing brawl and subsequent penalties gave John A. Logan College of Carterville a kind of power-play advantage in the junior college game. Logan started the final four minutes, down 86-75, with four players on the court; Mineral Area College of Flat River, Mo., had three. The rest of the starters and subs had been kicked out.

Though you wouldn't know it from "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas," the original Sinbad was a merchant from Baghdad, a truth-stretching, tale-spinning protagonist of the celebrated Arabian Nights. If he appeared on the scene today, he might be detained by John Ashcroft rather than appear as the hero of a new animated feature. The latest version of "Sinbad" is a pleasure to look at.

Given how troublesome regular travel is, time travel, especially over a span of 800,000 years, has got to be even more disorienting. Which perhaps explains why "The Time Machine" has ended up such an odd, haphazard concoction. Based on the celebrated 1895 H.G. Wells novella, "Time Machine" was previously filmed by George Pal in 1960 in a much-loved Rod Taylor-Yvette Mimieux version that the new one makes several references to.

For the second year in a row, character-driven independent films dominated the Writers Guild of America award nominations announced Thursday morning. Commercial aspirations aside, there's not a blockbuster among the bunch. "The Aviator," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Garden State," "Hotel Rwanda" and "Kinsey" are the original screenplay nominees, and "Before Sunset," "Mean Girls," "Million Dollar Baby," "The Motorcycle Diaries" and "Sideways" are the nominees for adapted screenplay.

TIM BURTON had already traipsed through China, scouting locations for his next big cinematic event, "Ripley's Believe It or Not!," starring Jim Carrey, when Paramount halted pre-production on the film. Burton describes himself as "pretty devastated" by the development. Robert Ripley was a California-born cartoonist, newspaper columnist and worldwide seeker of curiosities; he once aspired to a career as a pro baseball player.

The art of adaptation, as the rash of movies derived from plays this season attests, is never easy. The best artistic looters of all time — Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians — recognized that independent vision is everything. Borrowing didn't inhibit them in least. Their goal, of course, wasn't to duplicate but to create something autonomous. Heck, Shakespeare wasn't beyond taking a freehand with history itself. Contemporary purloiners tend to be less independent. They struggle under a self-imposed obligation of faithfulness.