Ray Taylor

Biography

One of the more prolific American directors, Ray Taylor was a Midwesterner who began his show-business career as an actor and stage manager in regional theater, a career that was interrupted by army service in World War I. After his discharge he ventured to Hollywood, where he got a job with Fox Films and worked as an assistant director, often with John Ford. In the 1920s Taylor traveled crosstown to Universal Pictures, where he got the opportunity to become a director, initially of one- and two-reelers. His proficiency in that niche impressed Universal execs enough to promote him to features and serials. When talkies made their debut, Taylor--unlike many of his silent-era colleagues--had no trouble adapting to the techniques of sound films, and in fact his career went on the fast track. Universal put him in the director's chair on many of its top western series and eventually placed him at the helm of one of its most popular and fondly remembered serials, "Flash Gordon." However, due to a worsening drinking problem his work by the late 1930s and early 1940s was often erratic. Director William Witney said he got his first co-directing credit--on the Republic serial The Painted Stallion (1937)--because Taylor had gotten so drunk by lunchtime one day about halfway through filming that he had to be taken home. Witney was called upon to replace him and finish the picture. Taylor was teamed up with the equally prolific, but more reliable, Ford Beebe during his last years at Universal. When the serial genre began to die out Taylor went back to making westerns, and was eventually hired by Producers Releasing Corp. (PRC) to try to give a professional veneer to its low-grade western series starring erstwhile "cowboy" Lash La Rue. When the series and its star left low-rent PRC for Ron Ormond's even lower-rent Western Adventure Productions, Taylor went with them. However, the series' rock-bottom budgets, tenth-rate scripts and the stupefying ineptness of its star stymied whatever efforts Taylor made to breathe some life into them, and these entries can hardly be counted among his better efforts. Taylor retired from the business in 1949 and died in 1952.