Jeanne Houston's self-directed psychotherapy initiated a full career. She and James joined with producer-director John Korty to script the TV screenplay "Farewell to Manzanar" for Universal and MCA-TV. The film version premiered as the NBC "Thursday Night at the Movies" feature on March 11,1976, the year that James earned a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing grant. Well received for its historical accuracy, the film featured the Houston twins, actor Lou Frizell in one of the few Caucasian speaking parts, and Japanese-American employees and internees of Tule Lake, Heart Mountain, Minidoka, and Topaz internment camps. Most of the Asian-American cast, including Jimmy Nakamura, Akemi Kikumura, Nobu McCarthy as Mama, and Yuki Shimoda as Ko Wakatsuki, brought to their jobs a sincere interest in an historical event which impinged on their race. Shimoda remarked, "I felt that the role of Ko was the role I have been preparing for all these years. . . . The feeling on the set is like no other picture I have worked in."
Designer Robert Kinoshita recreated Manzanar 400 miles northwest of its location at Tule Lake, California, at the only extant internment facility, where he used tarpaper and lath over pine planking to emulate temporary, substandard quarters. In the scene in which Ko enters Manzanar, Nobu McCarthy, unable to separate herself from the character she portrayed, grasped Shimoda and sobbed into his chest. He comforted her with an understanding embrace. Jeanne was so moved by the scene that she wept for "the pride of my father — the humiliation, the stubbornness, the shattered dignity."
The movie won a Humanitas Prize, a Christopher Award, and an Emmy nomination for best dramatic script adapted from another medium. Judith Crist, critic for TV Guide, lauded the movie as a "deeply moving examination of family relations under stress and of the scars that remain." Time's Richard Schickel, in his March 15, 1976, review, described the movie as "modest and touching and refreshingly free of melodrama." More philosophical was Newsweek's comment that same week: "The cruelties that men visit on one another can, at least in retrospect, help them to perceive their common humanity."
