Denis Sanders

Filmmaker Denis Sanders was born on January 21, 1929, in New York City. Denis studied film at the University of California. In 1954 he won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject for his masters' thesis student project A Time Out of War (1954). He and his brother Terry Sanders collaborated on the script for the 1958 film adaptation of Norman Mailer's novel "The Naked and the Dead" (The Naked and the Dead (1958). In 1969 Sanders won a second Oscar for the documentary Czechoslovakia 1918-1968 (1969). He also directed a handful of fictional features. George Hamilton made his first credited appearance in Crime & Punishment, USA (1959), while the powerful anti-war knockout War Hunt (1962) boasted the acting debuts of future stars Robert Redford and Tom Skerritt. Sanders' other directorial credits include the unjustly neglected drama Shock Treatment (1964), the nifty rock concert documentaries Elvis: That's the Way It Is (1970) and Soul to Soul (1971), and the gloriously sexy and outrageous drive-in exploitation cult favorite Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973). In addition to his film work, he also directed episodes of such TV series as Naked City (1958), The Defenders (1961). The Great Adventure (1963), Route 66 (1960) and Mannix (1967). Outside of his movie and television work, he was also a professor at San Diego State University (he started teaching there in 1980). He had three children: son Peter and daughters Julie and Victoria. Denis Sanders died at age 58 from a heart attack at his home in San Diego, CA, on December 10, 1987.