John Waters (1934 Academy Award winner)

For other people with the same name, see John Waters.

John Waters (October 31, 1893—May 5, 1965) was an American filmmaker whose career began in the early days of silent film and culminated in two consecutive Academy Award nominations in the newly-instituted category of Best Assistant Director with the second nomination for MGM's Viva Villa!. Waters won the award at the 7th Academy Awards on February 27, 1935.

Assistant director and director during 1910s and 1920s

A native of New York City, John Waters entered the motion picture industry in its formative years. Only a few of his assistant director credits from the 1910s have been recorded, with vehicles for Carlyle Blackwell (The Shadow of a Doubt, 1916) and Harold Lockwood (The Avenging Trail, 1917) listed among the earliest titles. During this initial phase of his career, he was billed on at least two occasions as John S. Waters and on at least one occasion as Johnnie Waters.

In 1926 he was offered a position as director with Famous Players-Lasky and, over a two-year period, turned out ten films, seven of which were based on the series of popular western fiction novels by Zane Grey. An eighth western, 1927's Arizona Bound, Waters' sole sagebrush saga not based on Zane Grey, starred Gary Cooper in his first leading role. Although he did not direct Cooper's second starring western, The Last Outlaw, the new star's third lead western, Nevada, was again assigned to Waters, along with another Cooper vehicle, the French Foreign Legion saga, Beau Sabreur, a sequel to Famous Players' biggest hit of 1926, Beau Geste, which starred Ronald Colman. Rounding out Waters' ten assignments was a single comedy, the W. C. Fields-Chester Conklin vehicle, Two Flaming Youths, which he also produced. In 1928, a few months after Famous Players-Lasky's September 1927 reorganization under the name Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, Waters left the studio to begin a lengthy sojourn with MGM, where his initial directorial assignments consisted of two Tim McCoy series westerns, The Overland Telegraph and Sioux Blood which, when released in March and April 1929, respectively, were among MGM's last silent features.

Assistant director at MGM

At this point, as the talkie revolution transformed Hollywood, Waters, now an MGM contractee, returned to his former profession as assistant director, an industry job title which, during a brief period covering five Academy Award cycles (1932–33 to 1937), became eligible for an Oscar. On March 16, 1934, at the first Awards ceremony featuring the new category, John Waters was among eighteen nominees who were singled out for the totality of their achievement at the studio which employed them, rather than for a single feature. Each studio had two or three nominees, with Charles Dorian and Orville O. Dull rounding out, along with Waters, the MGM contingent. Ultimately, there were seven winners that year, one of them Dorian. The following year, after considerable streamlining, the nominations were pared down to three and categorized according to each nominee's work on a specific film. Only John Waters, among the previous year's eighteen nominees, was renominated, as his work with Wallace Beery's Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa won against two Claudette Colbert-Warren William titles represented by assistant directors Scott Beal (Imitation of Life) and Cullen Tate (Cleopatra).

Although known in the industry, Waters, along with other studio-employed assistant directors and second unit directors did not have his name listed in the credits of Viva Villa! or any of the other titles. Other than a one-reel Pete Smith Specialty, Donkey Baseball in 1935, his sole "talkie" directorial assignment was The Mighty McGurk, MGM's 1946 vehicle for his old Viva Villa! compatriot, Wallace Beery.

Twelve years later, after working as second unit director on two big-budget 1958 releases, Warner's The Deep Six and independently-produced The Big Country, John Waters retired and, after another seven years, died in Hollywood at the age of 71.

External links

• John Waters at the Internet Movie Database
• The Oscar Site: Who's Who