Jack Cole: Beginnings of a Hollywood Jazz Dance Legend

Larry Billman

Founder of The Academy of Dance on Film, Larry Billman, began his professional entertainment career at the age of 16 in a production of The Boy Friend at the Ivar Theatre in his hometown of Hollywood, where he studied dance with Jack Cole, Eugene Loring, and the Lester Horton Dance Theatre. After 15 years of film, television, stage and nightclub performances, he made the transition to writer/director and began a [to date] 31 year-long career with Disney live entertainment, creating hundreds of shows for their theme parks worldwide, eventually being named Director of Entertainment for the Tokyo Disneyland opening in 1983.

Billman is the author of Film Choreographers and Dance Directors (McFarland & Co. 1996), the first encyclopedia detailing the dance artists who made the movies "Move". Because of his frustrations in trying to locate information about this important American cultural art form, he founded The Academy of Dance on Film, a nonprofit research center in Hollywood which gathers and shares printed and visual material to document the history and honor the movement makers in commercial film, television and music video.