John Waters (director, born 1893)
American film director (1893-1965)
John Waters (October 31, 1893 – May 6, 1965) was an American film director, second unit director and, initially, an assistant director. His career began in the early days of silent film and culminated in two consecutive Academy Award nominations in the newly instituted (but short-lived) category of Best Assistant Director. He won on his second nomination, for MGM's Viva Villa!, and received a certificate of merit; the certificate was replaced with an Oscar statuette in 1965.
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, five of which (Born to the West, Forlorn River, Man of the Forest, The Mysterious Rider and The Vanishing Pioneer) were based on the series of popular western fiction novels by Zane Grey and starred Famous Players' reigning western hero, Jack Holt. There were two additional Zane Grey adaptations, Drums of the Desert (starring Warner Baxter) and Nevada, while 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 once again assigned to Waters, along with another Cooper vehicle, the French Foreign Legion epic, 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.
“John Waters (director, born 1893)” enters the record as american film director (1893-1965). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Waters and director can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q506081. VIAF identifies the subject as 58990164. The Library of Congress control number is nr97038045. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1965, 1916 and 1917.
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