Maury Dexter first entered the business as a teenage actor in The Three Stooges short, Uncivil War Birds (1946). After a few additional movie roles, he busied himself with stage and TV work until the Korean War and military service intervened; following his discharge, he landed an acting job on TV's The Hank McCune Show (1949) and was soon working there behind the scenes as well. A clerical job at Robert L. Lippert's Regal Films eventually led to producing and directing gigs at that independent production company, where many of the movies were shot in seven days on $100,000 budgets. He directed over 20 features there, at American International Pictures and abroad before he became, for the first time in his career, an assistant director, working mostly for Michael Landon on his TV series Little House on the Prairie (1974) and Highway to Heaven (1984). Landon's 1991 death prompted Dexter to retire.