Tomoyuki Tanaka

One of the most prolific of all Japanese feature film producers, Tomoyuki Tanaka enjoyed a career spanning six decades and virtually every genre. All told, he produced over 200 titles, ranging from a gaggle of "Godzilla" movies to a number of Kurosawa epics. In 1998, he was finally honored by the Japanese Academy for his voluminous body of work. In '62, Tanaka's Kurosawa drama "Yojimbo" garnered an Oscar nomination but not in the usual category. Rather than Foreign Language Feature, it was honored in the costume category, despite the fact that the film was in black and white. Even though Tanaka made his name as the creator of the famous Godzilla film monster, he always liked to cite a '23 silent, "The Covered Wagon," as his personal favorite film. Fittingly, his final six credits in the '90s (before his 1997 death) were another half-dozen scare-fests starring the giant lizard.