The son of American novelist Grace Duffie Boylan, Malcolm Stuart Boylan was an actor and newspaper columnist before entering films in the early '20s as a director of publicity for Universal and First National. He began writing titles as a lark but became highly proficient in this soon-to-be extinguished art, earning the credit of "title designer" on Tom Mix's The Great K & A Train Robbery (1926). Mostly a "script doctor" after the changeover to sound, Stuart contributed dialogue to a host of B-movies through the early '50s, first at Fox and later at Columbia. More often than not, his contributions were unbilled. Later in the decade, he wrote for the Walt Disney television series Zorro.