His father, Mack Andrew Mann, moved to California from Cassopolis, Michigan, in the late 1800s and worked as a construction superintendent of railroad bridges.

George Mann grew up in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, moving to Santa Monica as a teenager with his parents.

As vaudeville faded, Barto & Mann joined the Broadway cast of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson's Hellzapoppin, with featured billing from 1938 through 1942.

[7][8] Following World War II, George acted in small roles in several movies,[9] on the stage,[10] and with Jack Carson's stage revue[11] but primarily devoted himself to making a living with photography, an activity he had pursued actively while in vaudeville when he took about 12,000 black and white photographs,[12][13][14][15] many of them demonstrating an extraordinary skill and aesthetic sensibility.

[17][18] In the late 1940s, George began a period of invention, first designing and obtaining a patent[19] for an endless magnetic loop recording and playback device, elements of which were later incorporated into the Lear Jet Stereo 8 track cartridge player.

George next turned his inventive and mechanical skills to designing a 3-D viewer that would display the 3-D photographs he was taking with his 35mm Stereo Realist cameras, mostly around Southern California.

Every couple of weeks, George would swap out the 3-D photographs of such places as Calico Ghost Town, Catalina Island, Descanso Gardens, Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Pacific Ocean Park, Watts Towers, Palm Springs, Salton Sea[20] or Las Vegas.