Edward Sloman

Edward Sloman (19 July 1886, London - 29 September 1972, Woodland Hills, California) was an English silent film director, actor, screenwriter and radio broadcaster. He directed over 100 films and starred in over 30 films as an actor between 1913 and 1938.

Sloman grew up in London's West End but left home at age 19 to become an actor. He spent several years in the British theater and later became a director in both legitimate theater and vaudeville. After a quarrel with a powerful booking agent which resulted in his being effectively shut out of the British theatrical circuit, Sloman took an actress friend's advice and headed for Hollywood, emigrating in 1915.

Introduced to director Wilfred Lucas at Universal Pictures, Sloman was soon employed as an actor paid $7.50 a day. To make ends meet, he wrote scenarios, which he sold for $25 apiece. Sloman wrote a script for a war film which was acknowledged by Thomas H. Ince, a major film director in Hollywood at the time, and on the basis of his work was hired by the Philadelphia-based Lubin Manufacturing Company to direct at Lubin's West Coast studio on Coronado Island near San Diego, beginning his first film in late-1915. Lubin closed its Coronado studio in 1916 due to the company's declining fortunes, which were intertwined with those of the collapsing Motion Picture Patents Company. Sloman quit Lubin altogether and went to the American Film Company ("Flying A") studio in Santa Barbara, where he assumed an important role in that company's expanding feature-length film output (especially in directing several films starring Mary Miles Minter) and also directed other prestige projects such as the serial The Sequel to the Diamond from the Sky (1916). American ceased production in early 1919, so Sloman went to independent producer Benjamin B. Hampton and was given the direction of a big-budget western of that year, The Westerners (1919). The film was quite successful and led to Sloman securing steady employment with other independent producers.

...
Wikipedia