Toshio Masuda (舛ç"° 利雄, Masuda Toshio, born October 5, 1927) 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 officeâ€"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! (1970) and the
science fiction epic Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradamus
(1974). He worked on such anime productions as the Space Battleship
Yamato series. His corporate drama Company Funeral (1989) 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!. However, a number of his films were screened in a
2005 Nikkatsu Action Cinema retrospective in Italy and a few have
since made their way to the United States. In 2009, he helped produce
Space Battleship Yamato: Resurrection.Toshio Masuda was born in Kobe,
Japan. His father was a seaman. He enrolled in a technical training
school, however, his mindset did not mesh with the school's military
indoctrination and he was expelled in July 1945. He next attended the
Osaka University of Foreign Studies (now Osaka University) where he
specialized in Russian literature. There he became enamoured with
French cinema which led him away from Russian grammar and towards a
career in the film industry. He thought he would have been bored as a
salaryman and that filmmaking would better suit him but suggested he
probably would not have followed through had his friends not sought
similar careers. After graduating in 1949, he moved to Tokyo to study
screenwriting at the Shintoho Studio's Scenario Academy.In 1950, the
Shintoho Company hired Toshio Masuda. He worked as screenwriter and an
assistant director under Umetsugu Inoue, Nobuo Nakagawa and Mikio
Naruse. He served as 2nd AD on Naruse's Ginza Cosmetics (1951) and
Mother (1952). Inoue became a mentor figure to Masuda. They began
collaborating on scripts and Masuda moved in with Inoue. He also wrote
rough drafts for a number of Inuoe's scripts.
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 officeâ€"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! (1970) and the
science fiction epic Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradamus
(1974). He worked on such anime productions as the Space Battleship
Yamato series. His corporate drama Company Funeral (1989) 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!. However, a number of his films were screened in a
2005 Nikkatsu Action Cinema retrospective in Italy and a few have
since made their way to the United States. In 2009, he helped produce
Space Battleship Yamato: Resurrection.Toshio Masuda was born in Kobe,
Japan. His father was a seaman. He enrolled in a technical training
school, however, his mindset did not mesh with the school's military
indoctrination and he was expelled in July 1945. He next attended the
Osaka University of Foreign Studies (now Osaka University) where he
specialized in Russian literature. There he became enamoured with
French cinema which led him away from Russian grammar and towards a
career in the film industry. He thought he would have been bored as a
salaryman and that filmmaking would better suit him but suggested he
probably would not have followed through had his friends not sought
similar careers. After graduating in 1949, he moved to Tokyo to study
screenwriting at the Shintoho Studio's Scenario Academy.In 1950, the
Shintoho Company hired Toshio Masuda. He worked as screenwriter and an
assistant director under Umetsugu Inoue, Nobuo Nakagawa and Mikio
Naruse. He served as 2nd AD on Naruse's Ginza Cosmetics (1951) and
Mother (1952). Inoue became a mentor figure to Masuda. They began
collaborating on scripts and Masuda moved in with Inoue. He also wrote
rough drafts for a number of Inuoe's scripts.
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