Lewis Seiler went to Hollywood in 1919 and worked as a gag man and assistant director before directing a number of two-reel comedies. He was closely associated with Tom Mix Westerns during the 1920s. He spent much of the 1930s at Warner Brothers, turning out some of that studio's grittier gangster pictures and "social drama" films--Crime School (1938), King of the Underworld (1939), Hell's Kitchen (1939), to name a few--and he was responsible for what is generally considered to be one of the finest war pictures to come out of Hollywood, Guadalcanal Diary (1943). Retiring from motion pictures in 1958, he turned to television where he kept busy up to the time of his death.