Art Theatre Guild (ATG) was a film production company in Japan that started in 1961 and ran through to the mid-1980s, releasing mostly Japanese New Wave films. ATG began as an independent agency which distributed foreign films in Japan. With the decline of the major Japanese film studios in the 1960s, an "art house" cinema group formed around ATG and the company moved into distributing Japanese works rejected by the major studios. By 1967 ATG was assisting with production costs for a number of new Japanese films. Some of the early films released by ATG include Shōhei Imamura's A Man Vanishes (1967), Nagisa Oshima's Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief (1968) and Death by Hanging (1968), Toshio Matsumoto's masterpiece Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), and Akio Jissoji's Mujo (1970).
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The Theatre Guild is a theatrical society founded in New York City in 1918 by Lawrence Langner, Philip Moeller, Helen Westley and Theresa Helburn. Langner's wife, Armina Marshall, then served as a co-director. It evolved out of the work of the Washington Square Players.
Its original purpose was to produce non-commercial works by American and foreign playwrights. It differed from other theaters at the time in that its board of directors shared the responsibility of choosing plays, management, and production. The Theatre Guild contributed greatly to the success of Broadway from the 1920s throughout the 1970s.
The Guild has produced a total of 228 plays on Broadway, including 18 by George Bernard Shaw and seven by Eugene O'Neill. Other major playwrights introduced to theatre-going Americans include Robert E. Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, Sidney Howard, William Saroyan, and Philip Barry. In the field of musical theatre, the Guild has promoted works by Richard Rodgers, teamed with both Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, George and Ira Gershwin, Jule Styne, and Meredith Willson, all of which have become classics. Under President John F. Kennedy, the Guild was engaged to assemble a U.S. theatre company, headed by Helen Hayes, to tour the capitals of Europe and South America with works by Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, and William Gibson.