Jed Buell(1897-1961)
- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Producer Jed Buell began his show-business career in the early days of
the 20th century as the manager of the Orpheum Theater in Denver, Colorado.
After a few years he tired of Denver's high altitude and moved to
Hollywood to try his hand in the burgeoning film business. He was hired
as a unit publicist for comedy producer
Mack Sennett and it wasn't long before he
became publicity director for Sennett's Keystone studio. The 1929
stock-market crash left Keystone in bad financial shape, so Buell left
Sennett and eventually started his own studio, Spectrum Pictures, a
low-budget "exploitation" company that produced several all-black
westerns starring big-band singer
Herb Jeffries. Spectrum also put out a
string of "singing cowboy" westerns featuring opera-trained singer
Fred Scott (several of which were
co-produced by comic Stan Laurel, who was a
longtime fan of westerns and always wanted to make some of his own).
The film Buell is probably best known for, however, is the bizarre
The Terror of Tiny Town (1938),
a western featuring an all-midget cast (many of whom went on to play
Munchkins in
The Wizard of Oz (1939)). In the
1940s Buell produced a few films featuring black comedian
Mantan Moreland, and in the 1950s tried
his hand in the new medium of television, but that fizzled out. Buell
died in 1961.