Leonard Schrader and Weisman's experience with Brazil led them to develop "Kiss of the Spider Woman" together. Schrader's screenplay adaptation, based on the avant-garde novel by Argentinian Manuel Puig, earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1986. (It also earned William Hurt an Academy Award for Best Actor.) Schrader met renowned Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima while living in Japan. For a decade after the author's ritual suicide in 1970, Schrader pursued the rights to Mishima's life, and working with his wife Chieko and brother Paul, he co-wrote the Japanese-language bio-pic "" executive-produced in 1984 by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and
Yukio Mishima "effeminate" interest in literature and often ripped apart the boy's manuscripts. At the age of six, Mishima enrolled in the elite Gakushūin, the Peers' School in Tokyo. At twelve, Mishima began to write his first stories. He voraciously read the works of numerous classic Japanese authors as well as Raymond Radiguet, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke and other European authors, both in translation and in the original. He studied German, French, and English. After six years at school, he became the youngest member of the editorial board of its literary society. Mishima was attracted to the works of the Japanese