Jed Buell

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.