W.S. VAN DYKE

W.S. Van Dyke was a director and a writer from the 1910s to the 1940s. He had gotten his start as an assistant on D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" in 1916, and the following year, he was a director of many movies. He directed many westerns and other movies throughout the 1920s, and in 1928, he got his second big break when he helped Robert Flaherty direct "Shadows in the South Seas", and the following year, he was signed by MGM to make "Trader Horn", but it took two years to complete due to all the complications of location filming. The following year, he directed "Tarzan the Ape Man", and the huge success of that movie made him one of the top directors of the 1930s. He passed away in 1943 at the age of 53.