Adele Buffington | |
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 Buffington in 1922 | |
| Born | Adele Burgdorfer February 12, 1900 |
| Died | November 23, 1973 (aged 73) Woodland Hills, California, USA |
| Occupation | Screenwriter |
| Years active | 1919–1958 |
| Spouse | Edward Vore (m. 1926) |
Adele Buffington (born Adele Burgdorfer, and sometimes billed as Jess Bowers) was an American screenwriter of the silent and sound film eras of Hollywood.
Adele was born in St. Louis to Adolph Burgdorfer and Mary Elizabeth Frederick, both of whom were immigrants from Germany. Before moving to Los Angeles at the age of 16, she worked in a movie theater, where she got to watch countless films. [1] [2] Once she arrived in Los Angeles, she got a job selling tickets at a theater in Hollywood; she worked as a treasurer for several theaters during this time period. [3] [4] [5]
Before she was out of her teens, she sold her first screenplay, 1919's L’Apache , which was produced by Thomas Ince for the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation. [1] [6] After being added to the studio's scenario department, she continued to pen silent screenplays throughout the 1920s. [7] [8]
She easily transitioned into sound films, and in 1933 would become one of the founding members of the Screen Writers Guild. [9] Over her 40-year career, she accumulated over 100 writing credits. [7] Buffington's specialty was the Western genre, with almost half of her films falling into that category. [9]
From the 1930s through the 1950s, she was one of the busiest writers in Hollywood. [10] She wrote screenplays for most of the well-known Western actors of the period, including Tom Keene in Freighters of Destiny (1931), [11] John Wayne in Haunted Gold (1932), [12] Hoot Gibson in A Man's Land, [13] Buck Jones in 1932's High Speed , [14] Whip Wilson in Range Land (1949), [15] and Tim Holt in Overland Telegraph (1951). [16] She also occasionally wrote comedies for well-known actresses like Lucille Ball ( Beauty for the Asking ). [17]
In the early 1940s, under her pseudonym, Jess Bowers, she wrote two separate Western series. The first was for Buck Jones, who appeared as his character, Buck Roberts, in eight "Rough Riders" films, beginning with Arizona Bound , [18] and finishing with Dawn on the Great Divide in 1942. [19] The second series was with Johnny Mack Brown, for his character Nevada Mackenzie, for which she authored 10 scripts between 1943 and 1945. [7] [20]
Buffington married Edward Vore in Los Angeles in 1926. [21] As Adele De Vore, she wrote Fangs of Justice (1926) and Tongues of Scandal (1927).
In the late 1950s, Buffington would also write a single episode for two different television series: Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok in 1955 and The Restless Gun in 1959. Buffington's final screenplay was for 1958's Bullwhip , which starred Guy Madison and Rhonda Fleming, [22] after which she retired from the film industry. She spent her later years living at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, in Woodland Hills, California, where she died on November 23, 1973. [10]
Tom Tyler was an American actor known for his leading roles in low-budget Western films in the silent and sound eras, and for his portrayal of superhero Captain Marvel in the 1941 serial film The Adventures of Captain Marvel. Tyler also played Kharis in 1940's The Mummy's Hand, a popular Universal Studios monster film.
Adele Jergens was an American actress.
George Sherman was an American film director and producer of low-budget Western films. One obituary said his "credits rival in number those of anyone in the entertainment industry."
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Charles Lafayette King was an American actor who appeared in more than 400 films between 1915 and 1956. King was born in Dallas, Texas, and died in Hollywood, California, from cirrhosis of the liver.
Leonard Miles "Bud" Osborne was an American film actor. He appeared in more than 600 films and television programs between 1912 and 1963.
Russell McCaskill Simpson was an American character actor.
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Clarence Oliver Drake was an American film/television director, screenwriter, producer and actor who was most active in the Western genre. Though Drake began his career as an actor, he is best known as a prolific screenwriter and director of low-budget Western films. Drake was most active in the 1930s and 1940s, although he continued writing and directing films until 1974.
Josephine Whittell was an American character actress of silent and sound films.
Charles Craft was an English-born American film and television editor. Born in the county of Hampshire in England on May 9, 1902, Craft would enter the film industry in Hollywood in 1927. The first film he edited was the Universal Pictures silent film, Painting the Town. Over the next 25 years, Craft would edit 90 feature-length films. In the early 1950s he would switch his focus to the small screen, his first show being Racket Squad, from 1951 to 1953, for which he was the main editor, editing 93 of the 98 episodes. He would work on several other series during the 1950s, including Meet Corliss Archer (1954), Science Fiction Theatre (1955–56), and Highway Patrol (1955–57). In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was one of the main editors on Sea Hunt, starring Lloyd Bridges, editing over half of the episodes. His final film work would be editing Flipper's New Adventure (1964, the sequel to 1963's Flipper. When the film was made into a television series, Craft would begin the editing duties on that show, editing the first 28 episodes before he retired in 1966. Craft died on September 19, 1968, in Los Angeles, California.
Douglas Wood was an American actor of stage and screen during the first six decades of the 20th century. During the course of his career, Wood appeared in dozens of Broadway productions, and well over 100 films. Towards the end of his career, he also made several guest appearances on television. Wood died in 1966.
Nora Cecil was an English-born American actress whose 30-year career spanned both the silent and sound film eras.
Marion Jackson was an American screenwriter of the late silent and early sound film eras. During her 15-year career she would pen the scripts for over 40 films, both original and adaptations.
Emmett Carleton King was an American actor of the stage and screen.
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Sam Nelson (1896-1963) was a director who worked from the end of the silent through the early 1960s. While most of his film work was in the assistant director role, he did direct over 20 films during the 1930s and 1940s, all of which were westerns. As an assistant director he worked on such notable films as Pennies from Heaven, And Then There Were None, All the King's Men, the original 3:10 to Yuma, Some Like It Hot, A Raisin in the Sun, and Spartacus. In addition he appeared in over a dozen films in small roles.
Riley Hill was an American actor who appeared in both film and television. Over the span of his career he appeared in 71 feature films and over a dozen television series.
The Ghost Rider is a 1943 American Western film directed by Wallace Fox and written by Adele Buffington. This is the first film in the "Marshal Nevada Jack McKenzie" series, and stars Johnny Mack Brown as Jack McKenzie and Raymond Hatton as his sidekick Sandy Hopkins, with Harry Woods, Beverly Boyd, Tom Seidel and Edmund Cobb. The film was released on April 2, 1943, by Monogram Pictures.
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