TORA! TORA! TORA! Trivia

 

Wikipedia, imdb, TCM, MHQ magazine, Guts and Glory

 

1.  The Japanese word “tora” means either “surprise achieved”, “attack”, or “tiger”.

 

2.  Darryl F. Zanuck wanted to recreate the success of his “The Longest Day”.  He also wanted to offer a revisionist view of the attack.  Specifically, he was interested in refuting the belief that Admiral Kimmel and Gen. Short were to blame for the debacle.

 

3. The movie was a joint Japanese-American production.  Akiro Kurosawa was the original Japanese director.  He viewed the film as an epic centered on Yamamoto.  His first script ran 6 hours.  And this was just the Japanese part.  There were 27 rewrites.   His style did not fit an American blockbuster and he chaffed at the suits looking over his shoulder.  The suits chaffed at his slow and costly production methods.  They were also skeptical about Kurosawa casting Japanese business executives with no acting experience to play parts like Yamamoto.  He claimed they would be good at playing serious.  Fox suspected he was lining up financing for future projects.  Some think he was so miserable with the situation that he purposely aggravated the studio into firing him.  He had a room repainted a different shade of white where no one could tell the difference.  He had local book stores scoured to replace books on a book shelf with ones the admiral would have actually read, even though the book shelf would not be seen in the film.  After working on the film for two years, he was fired two weeks into filming. He had shot six minutes of film.   Only about one minute of his work made it into the film.  When Williams fired him, Kurosawa said he was going to commit hari-kari.  He didn’t.

 

4.  Kurosawa was replaced by Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku.  Masuda was supposed to be a kamikaze pilot, but had been discharged for “anti-military sentiment”.Fukusaku filmed the action scenes and Masudu the rest.  Things improved, but the footage caused concerned in America.  The Japanese did not shoot different angles and the actors thought they were in a Japanese movie so they overly emoted.  They were told to tamp it down and the directors began to shoot like American directors.

 

5.  Kurosawa had a life-size replica of the battleship Nagato built.  It was 660 feet long and ten stories high.  It was the biggest set ever built In Japan.  The opening scene shot on it used college students who were paid to get military hair-cuts.  Three Texans had been transported to Japan for the fly-over.  In Hawaii, a full-size replica of the stern of the USS Arizona was built and put across three barges.

 

6.  Richard Fleischer was chosen to direct.  He was competent and known for “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Fantastic Voyage”.  Kurosawa, who was under the impression he would be working with David Lean, took an instant dislike for him.  The first time they met, with producer Elmo Williams, Fleischer put so much ketchup on his meal that Kurosawa started calling him “Ketchup Man”.

 

7.  The casting director was told to eschew big stars so the story would be the focus.  He cast character actors who looked like the characters they portrayed.

 

8.  A B-17 was forced to make a crash landing because of a jammed landing gear.  With a heads up on the situation, cameras were set up and it made it onto the screen.  Another iconic moment in the film was also unplanned.  A model of a P-40 was supposed to taxi using remote control.  It was to be strafed and blow up.  It started to take off!  It crashed into a line of models.  The special effects crew had to make a run for it.  They made it into the film.

 

9.  At one point over 30 aircraft were in the air.  The 47 pilots involved in the film were called the “Fox Air Force”.  Guy Strong crashed his Val dive-bomber while practicing formation flying.  He was killed.

 

10.  The movie won the Oscar for Best Special Effects and was nominated for Art Direction, Cinematography, Film Editing, and Sound.

 

11.  The movie was a flop at the box office in America, but a big hit in Japan.

 

12.  The main technical adviser was historian Gordon Prange who wrote “At Dawn We Slept” (entitled “Tora, Tora, Tora” in Japan).  He had a lot of say on the script.  The other book the movie was based on was Ladislas Farago’s “The Story of Operation Magi and the Pearl Harbor Disaster”.  Veteran pilot Minoru Genda, who helped plan the attack, was one of Kurosawa’s technical advisers.  This caused controversy in America, so his name was removed from the credits, but he kept working.

 

13.  The U.S. Navy allowed a lot of personnel to participate off-duty.  It also allowed the use of the USS Yorktown.  This caused some complaints from some Americans who still held a grudge over the attack.  How could taxpayers’ money be used to make a film about an American defeat?  Old hangars that still had bullet holes from the attack were blown up.

 

14.  The film credited 224 actors – 137 Americans + 87 Japanese.

 

15.  The Japanese planes were modified AT-6 Texans (of their Canadian cousins, Harvards) or the Vultee BT-13 Valiants.  All were training aircraft.  The Texans and Harvards became Zeros and the Vultees (with their fixed landing gear) became Vals.  Producer Elmo Williams and Jack Canary criss-crossed the country looking for old Texans and Harvards.  Canary was killed when a Valiant he was flying to Hollywood crashed into a mountain in bad weather.

 

16.  Giant model ships were filmed in giant tanks at the Fox Ranch in Calabasas, California.  High-speed cameras were used to make the ships look realistic.  A lot of detergent was used to create the white-caps.

 

17.  Almost every 1940s car in Oahu was purchased and restored for the film.

 

18.  The Navy allowed the use of the USS Yorktown.  Originally, it was opposed due to the possibility of a sailor getting injured or killed making a movie.  Daryl Zanuck got Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America and friend of Pres. Johnson, to contact Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford.  The Navy agreed to only take-offs.  29 planes took off without a hitch.  The hitch came when “60 Minutes” lied about doing a segment on the making of the movie with the actual intention of scandalizing the use of Navy facilities and personnel to support a movie. The segment said the studio was allowed to do this for free, when actually the Navy had presented Fox with a bill that was paid.  Still, Congress smelled blood and there was a crackdown on cooperation that ended the golden years of Pentagon aid to war movies.

 

19.  The film cost $25 million, two and a half times the projected budget.  At the time it was the second most costly Hollywood movie, after “Cleopatra”.  The fact that it was a flop helped kill Fox.  Daryl Zanuck was removed as studio head.