Starting out as an extra in Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops series, Lederman worked his way through the ranks of film production, and first made his mark as a second-unit director.
He directed several B-Western serials in the early 1930s, such as Two-Fisted Law and Texas Cyclone both 1932, in which he worked with Tim McCoy and a young John Wayne.
By most accounts Lederman was regarded as a somewhat brusque man with an aversion to retakes and prima donna behavior and he clashed with McCoy on more than one occasion.
Lederman's films have been described as having a "dystopian view of life" and a "relentless, inexorable narrative drive".
[1] In the 1950s Lederman, like many of his "B" picture colleagues, concentrated on series television, and directed 31 episodes of the Captain Midnight television series as well as many episodes of Annie Oakley (1954), Buffalo Bill, Jr. and Range Rider, among others.