Richard Fleischer picked up the phone more than half a century ago and was stunned. Walt Disney was on the line, asking him to direct "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."
"You do know who I am?" Fleischer recalled asking. His father, animation pioneer Max Fleischer, who created Betty Boop and popularized Popeye, was a bitter rival of Disney's. Even though the Disney name was not spoken in their home, Fleischer's father told him the opportunity was too important to pass up.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Monday April 03, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction
Richard Fleischer obituary: The obituary of director Richard Fleischer in the March 27 California section incorrectly gave the name of actor Charles McGraw as Charles McGray.
The lavishly produced 1954 live-action adaptation of the Jules Verne adventure would become a box office hit and the big break that lifted Fleischer's career off the B-movie treadmill.
He went on to direct such films as "The Boston Strangler" (1968), the Pearl Harbor docudrama "Tora! Tora! Tora!" (1970) and the science-fiction adventures "Fantastic Voyage" (1966) and "Soylent Green" (1973).
Fleischer, who directed almost 50 movies, died of natural causes Saturday at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, said his son Mark. He was 89.
Although Fleischer was born into a show-business family, he originally wanted to be a psychiatrist. He took pre-med courses at Brown University while dabbling in musical theater, then switched to Yale University's School of Drama.
The soft-spoken director used to joke that his background in psychology often helped him on the Hollywood set, although readers of his 1993 memoir "Just Tell Me When to Cry" might have concluded otherwise.
The candid book, which recalled his 46 years in the movie business, told tales of working with actors he considered temperamental, a list that included Robert Mitchum and Rex Harrison, whom he painted as a petulant bully on the set of the 1967 musical "Doctor Dolittle."
"I've had this great opportunity ... to work with so many famous and well-known people -- stars, moguls, monsters of all sorts," he told The Times in 1993 while sitting in the book-lined office of his Brentwood home.
In the 1958 epic "The Vikings," actor Kirk Douglas was "very, very difficult," Fleischer wrote, perhaps because he also was a producer. On the other hand, he wrote, Orson Welles, who starred as the defense lawyer in the 1959 courtroom drama "Compulsion," was easy to work with but also frightening because "he knew more about directing than you did or anybody did."
Fleischer also worked with a body builder-turned-actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1984 film "Conan the Destroyer."
