Budd Boetticher

He attended Culver Military Academy, where he became friends with Hal Roach Jr.[3] He was a star athlete at Ohio State University, until an injury ended his sports career.

In 1939 he traveled to Mexico, where he learned bullfighting under Lorenzo Garza, Fermín Espinosa Saucedo and Carlos Arruza.

Some of these were Columbia's most prestigious films and Boetticher was offered the chance to join the studio's directing program.

"And I didn’t know anything about the west.”[3] His films there included The Cimarron Kid (1952) with Audie Murphy; Bronco Buster (1952); Red Ball Express (1952), a World War II film; Horizons West (1952) with Robert Ryan; City Beneath the Sea (1953), a treasure hunting film; Seminole (1953), a Western with Rock Hudson; The Man from the Alamo (1953) with Glenn Ford; Wings of the Hawk (1953) with Van Heflin; and East of Sumatra (1953) with Chandler and Quinn.

In 1955, he helmed another bullfighting drama, The Magnificent Matador, at 20th Century-Fox, which began his frequent collaboration with cinematographer Lucien Ballard.

Boetticher finally achieved his major breakthrough when he teamed up with actor Randolph Scott and screenwriter Burt Kennedy to make Seven Men from Now (1956).

Boetticher returned to television, directing episodes of Hong Kong, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre, Death Valley Days, and The Rifleman.

Boetticher spent most of the 1960s south of the border pursuing his obsession, the documentary of his friend, the bullfighter Carlos Arruza, turning down profitable Hollywood offers and suffering humiliation and despair to stay with the project, including sickness, bankruptcy and confinement in both jail and asylum (all of which is detailed in his autobiography When in Disgrace).

[6][2] Boetticher returned to Hollywood with the rarely seen A Time for Dying, a collaboration with Audie Murphy shot in 1969 and not released widely until 1982.

[7] In later years, he was known for the documentary My Kingdom For... (1985) and his appearance as a judge in Robert Towne's Tequila Sunrise (1988), and he was still actively attempting to get his screenplay "A Horse for Mr. Barnum" made, before his death in 2001.

His last public appearance, less than three months before his death, was at Cinecon, a classic film festival held in Hollywood, California.