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Robert J. Horner was a prolific, if spectacularly untalented, producer/director in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He had only one eye and no legs (accounts differ as to whether he was born that way or lost them in a traffic accident in his youth), but that didn't stop him from producing quite a few low-budget--very, VERY low-budget--westerns and action pictures and even directing a few of them. Contemporary accounts of the films, and a perusal of the few that exist today, indicate that Horner would not only equal but far surpass Edward D. Wood Jr. as the absolute worst director in film history.
Horner's silent pictures in the 1920s had a reputation for being among not only the cheapest (on par with his contemporary fellow hack director-producer actor Victor Adamson, a.k.a. Denver Dixon) but also the most spectacularly inept to ever come out of Hollywood. The advent of sound films by 1930 added a new and exciting dimension to Horner's incompetence. He appeared to have only the vaguest understanding of synchronization, apparently believing that "noise" and "sound" were synonymous. Audio volume would vary wildly between scenes, literally driving the few people brave (or masochistic) enough to endure a Horner feature--invariably on the lower half of a double bill--out into the comparative quiet of the street. His films seldom took more than three days to shoot and rarely, if ever, cost more than $2,000. Even with those chump-change budgets, though, he still found it difficult to obtain financing through conventional channels--mainly because no legitimate producer in his right mind would let Horner anywhere near him--and he was forced to be "creative" in obtaining financing. This "creativity" often consisted of such tactics as soliciting donations from aspiring actors and actresses in exchange for a part in one of his upcoming films, and those naive--or stupid--enough to give him money often ended up never hearing from him again (in addition, many of these aspiring actresses also charged him with trying to solicit more than just a financial donation). This and other schemes--such as hiring actors and actresses to work in his films and once they were finished refusing to pay them--invariably landed him in hot water with the authorities, among others. He was arrested several times by Los Angeles police on fraud and racketeering charges, resulting in a string of criminal convictions and civil-court assessments against him, and he spent a good deal of time dodging creditors and tax agents looking to take him to court and lawmen looking to take him to jail. If there was one word that could describe Robert J. Horner it would probably be "sleazeball", but given all his personal and professional shortcomings, he was still able to eke out a living on the far, far, far fringes of Poverty Row, an accomplishment that many other low-buck producers down at Horner's level couldn't manage.
Horner filed for bankruptcy in February 1933, listing six silent western film negatives as his only assets. His liabilities included $29,573 owed in back taxes and a large number of unpaid-labor claims. His personal assets totaled $1,500. He attempted to make a comeback by producing a few western films for Aywon Pictures. His days as a producer ended in 1935, though, when he tried to bring silent-screen cowboy Ted Wells back as a western hero; the result was the stupefying inept The Phantom Cowboy (1935). Horner was planning an eight-film series with Wells beginning with Defying the Law (1935), which he produced for Aywon, but the "series" ended with that picture.
Robert J. Horner passed away on July 29, 1942, at the El Paso (TX) City-County Hospital from cirrhosis of the liver.
