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Agoura Author Takes on Japan's Foremost Fantasy Director

For the first time in English print, a book has been published on Ishirō Honda, and it is by a local.

Peter H. Brothers first became hooked on fantasy film when he saw "Godzilla, King of Monsters!" on television at the age of 7. Fifty years later, the Agoura Hills resident wrote "Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men," the first English-language book entirely devoted to the film's inspired maker, Ishirō Honda. 

Brothers said he was compelled to write about the much-overlooked figure in mainstream international cinema, and about the humanity behind Honda's monster series. 

"His films are typically populated with screaming heroines and helpless heroes, village patriarchs and flamboyant villians, celebrations and sorrows, evacuations and ambivalent endings, searches and self-sacrifice," said Brothers. "Despite all the roars, the guns and the explosions; nothing is louder in a Honda monster movie than the beating of the human heart."

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Brothers grew up in Encino during what he calls "the Golden Age of science-fiction, fantasy, and monster movies."  

"I would go every Saturday to the Encino theatre and see many marvelous films during their initial theatrical runs," said Brothers, "including five of Honda's."

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In "Godzilla," the havoc caused by the monster can be seen as a representation of the American atomic bomb upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, which is an instantly recognizable character of Honda's film series.

"Mushroom Clouds" took three years to write and another two to get published, Brothers said. In writing the book, he studied the specific techniques used by Honda that have inspired other great directors, such as George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg. He also consulted filmmaker Jon Skocik about special effects and general film composition.

"Honda never fails to fill the frame with something spectacular," said Skocik. "Certainly, 'Godzilla' is an underappreciated masterpiece, elegantly and beautifully examining man's self-destructive nature with grace and power, offering us a compelling human drama with striking and nightmarish imagery."      

Brothers' interests in special effects, film scoring, Japanese culture, dinosaurs, dragons and the films themselves are the bulk of "Mushroom Clouds." Brothers used interviews from Honda's colleagues and source material to flush out the biography, including details of Honda's service in the Imperial Japanese Army, and later as a prisoner of war.

"His films touched the lives of children all over the world, breaking down cultural barriers, bringing Japanese films into the homes of youngsters who otherwise would have had no interest in learning about Japan," said Brett Homenick, a colleague of Brothers from G-Fan magazine, which is where Brothers first began to write about Honda.

"International understanding is a major part of Mr. Honda's legacy," said Homenick. "'Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men' will help you understand who Mr. Honda really was."

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