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Clarence Brown

Although he trained as an engineer and expected to pursue a career in the automotive industry, Clarence Brown became enamoured of the burgeoning new industry of filmmaking around 1914 and switched careers. The Massachusetts-born, Tennessee-raised Brown became an assistant to director Maurice Tourneur at Peerless Studio in New Jersey. Following WWI (during which he served as a flying instructor), he rejoined Tourneur and got his first chance to direct a film when his mentor fell ill during the shooting of "The Last of the Mohicans" (1920). Later that year, Brown made his solo directing debut with "The Great Redeemer," co-written by actor John Gilbert.