Arthur Jones was a prominent American film director and producer. He was born in Los Angeles, California in 1904 and was raised in Hollywood.
In the early 1920s, Jones began his career in entertainment as a vaudeville performer, and soon after he began working as a stage manager and eventually a director. He spent a lot of time at the studios of Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers, and eventually made his way to Universal Pictures. It was at Universal that he directed his first feature film, the silent comedy “The Honeymoon Express” in 1925.
Jones went on to direct several more silent films, such as “The Campus Vamp” (1926), “The Flying Fleet” (1929), and “The Girl from Everywhere” (1929). He was also well known for his contributions to the early horror genre, directing such films as “The Cat and the Canary” (1927) and “The Invisible Ray” (1936).
In the late 1930s, Jones began to move away from directing and more into producing. He was one of the original founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and was involved with many of the major motion pictures of the era, such as “Gone with the Wind” (1939) and “The Wizard of Oz” (1939).
In 1944, Jones was hired as a producer for MGM, and he went on to produce some of the biggest films of the 1940s and 1950s, including “Anchors Aweigh” (1945), “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950), and “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952).
Throughout his career, Jones was nominated for five Academy Awards and won one for Best Picture for “The Bad and the Beautiful”. He was also the recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1957.
Jones passed away in 1959 at the age of 55, leaving behind a legacy of some of the most iconic films of the 20th century. He was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1962, and his contributions to the entertainment industry have been remembered for decades.
