Tora! Tora! Tora!

Richard O. Fleischer was an American film director. Fleischer was born in Brooklyn, the son of Essie and animator/producer Max Fleischer. He started in motion pictures as director of animated shorts produced by his father including entries in the Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman series. His... live-action film career began in 1942 at the RKO studio, directing shorts, documentaries, and compilations of forgotten silent features, which he called Flicker Flashbacks. He won an Academy Award as producer of the 1947 documentary Design for Death, co-written by Theodor Geisel , which examined the cultural forces that led to Japan's imperial expansion through World War II. Fleischer directed his first feature in 1946. His early films were taut film noir thrillers such as Bodyguard , The Clay Pigeon , Follow Me Quietly , Armored Car Robbery , and The Narrow Margin . In 1948, Fleischer also directed So This Is New York, a cynically sophisticated comedy starring acerbic humorist Henry Morgan based upon a Ring Lardner novel.
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Kinji Fukasaku was a Japanese film actor, screenwriter, and best known as a celebrated and innovative filmmaker. He was born in Mito, Ibaraki, Japan, and died in Tokyo, from prostate cancer. He is known for directing samurai period and yakuza films such as Battles Without Honor and Humanity , the... Japanese portion of the Hollywood film Tora! Tora! Tora! , and his final film Battle Royale . He is also known for his trademark shaky camera technique, which he used extensively in many of his films since the early 1970s. When he was 15 years old, Fukasaku's class was drafted, and he worked as a munitions worker during World War II. In July 1945, the class was caught in artillery fire. Since the children could not escape artillery fire, they had to dive under each other in order to survive. The surviving members of the class had to dispose of the corpses. Fukasaku realized that the Japanese government lied about World War II at that point; Fukasaku had a burning hatred of adults in general for a long time.
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Toshio Masuda is a Japanese film director. He developed a reputation as a consistent box office hit-maker. Over the course of five decades, 16 of his films made the yearly top ten lists at the Japanese box office—a second place record in the industry. Between 1958 and 1968 he directed 52... films for the Nikkatsu Company. He was their top director of action films and worked with the company's top stars, including Yujiro Ishihara with whom he made 25 films. After the breakdown of the studio system, he moved on to a succession of big-budget movies including the American-Japanese co-production Tora! Tora! Tora! and the science fiction epic Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradamus . He worked on such anime productions as the Space Battleship Yamato series. His corporate drama Company Funeral earned him a Japanese Academy Award nomination and wins at the Blue Ribbon Awards and Mainichi Film Awards. In Japan, his films are well remembered by fans and called genre landmarks by critics. He remains little known abroad save for rare exceptions of his post-Nikkatsu work such as Tora! Tora! Tora!.
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