Frederick Liedtke (1874-1948) was a vaudeville performer and actor, and worked in theatrical management before directing his first film in 1916. A successful collaboration with Douglas Fairbanks, combined with directing Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand (1922), gave MGM the confidence to choose Niblo as a safe, if uninspired, replacement for Charles Brabin, who had allowed Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ to spend its $1.25 million budget in two months on unusable footage.
Fred Niblo never directed a musical, but he did act in one. In Hollywood-set Free and Easy he played himself, a director struggling to get Buster Keaton’s character to memorize, and say correctly, his one line of dialogue.
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