Taurog acted onstage when he was a child and broke into films as a teenager. In 1920 he became a director of two-reel silent comedies, and he eventually helmed more than 100 shorts; early in his career, he often codirected with Larry Semon, a comedian who also starred in the films. Taurog finally broke into features with Lucky Boy (1928), which he codirected with Charles C. Wilson. Taurog made several more movies before he signed with Paramount in 1930. His first film for the studio was Follow the Leader (1930), a gangster comedy with Ed Wynn, Ginger Rogers, and Ethel Merman.

Taurog codirected (with Norman Z. McLeod) the Leon Errol–ZaSu Pitts family comedy Finn and Hattie (1931) before making Skippy (1931), an adaptation of a then-popular comic strip. Jackie Cooper, Taurog’s nephew, starred as a resourceful boy who tries to raise $3 so that his friend Sooky (Robert Coogan) can get his dog out of the pound. A surprise hit, Skippy earned several Academy Award nominations, including outstanding production, and Taurog won for best director over Josef von Sternberg, Lewis Milestone, Wesley Ruggles, and Clarence Brown—one of the great Oscar upsets of the century. The film also demonstrated that Taurog was especially adept at directing children, and his next films centred on child actors.

After Newly Rich, a minor comedy about stage mothers who push their children to become stars, Taurog directed Huckleberry Finn (both 1931), a clunky version of Mark Twain’s classic novel; Junior Durkin and Jackie Coogan, who had played Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, respectively, in John Cromwell’s Tom Sawyer (1930), reprised their roles here. Sooky, Taurog’s fifth feature film of 1931, was a sequel to Skippy; among the issues facing the boys is the death of Sooky’s mother.

Taurog turned to more adult fare with Hold ’Em Jail (1932), a Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey comedy. The musical The Phantom President (1932), which was George M. Cohan’s first sound feature, was a box-office failure, in spite of the work of Claudette