Not too long ago, former Paramount head Barry Diller recommended that film moguls—and Hollywood’s highest paid actors—take 25% pay cuts. The goodwill gesture, by Diller’s reasoning, simply would possibly assist bridge the hole between the putting writers and actors and the massive studios and streamers. After I first heard Diller’s proposal I believed, It’s déjà vu over again. Few do not forget that in 1933, the studios really joined collectively to mandate that directors and creators making over $50 every week take a 50% pay minimize.
It didn’t work then and it in all probability gained’t work now.
There are numerous causes the transfer failed 90 years in the past. However the bottom-line distinction was that in 1933 writers and actors weren’t but unionized. And looking back, it’s clear that the studios, by imposing these steep cuts, made the writers—adopted by the actors and administrators—understand that their contracts had been nugatory with out unions. (Screenwriters shaped a guild that April; actors did so in July.)
Sure, there have been already cinema organizations aplenty. For years, writers had belonged to golf equipment and associations. In 1922, a consortium of movie firms had created the Movement Image Producers and Distributors Affiliation (MPPDA), in any other case often called the Hays Workplace, to foyer for the trade’s pursuits and to attempt to decrease censorship. Then, 5 years later, the Academy of Movement Footage Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was shaped, largely to stop the unionization of the still-burgeoning, if silent, movie enterprise. Introduced collectively below one umbrella, the Academy’s 5 branches—writers, actors, administrators, producers, and technicians—served to hurry alongside the method of creating sound photos. (There are 18 branches in the present day.) However by early 1933, an ideal monetary storm had swept throughout Southern California, one which threatened the trade that, together with agriculture, tourism, and oil, was the spine of the Los Angeles economic system.
The Melancholy, which started in 1929, had circled the globe and hit Hollywood with a wallop. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in early March of 1933 and closed the nation’s banks for every week to get a deal with on the economic system. Out of the blue, fewer and fewer People had money for requirements, not to mention motion pictures. (By 1933, viewers numbers had dropped to 60 million every week—from a sky-high 110 million in 1929.)
Filmmaking was a cash-on-the-barrelhead enterprise, so studios turned to Wall Avenue for financing, ultimately welcoming new moneymen and risk-takers who actually hadn’t a clue concerning the motion pictures. It obtained to the purpose that by the tip of the 12 months, there was not one individual on the board of Paramount Footage with earlier expertise making movies.
It was the MPPDA, in any case, that had give you the thought to push the wage minimize. And Warner Bros., Paramount, and Columbia complied: All three had been among the many studios that, on March 9, 1933, instituted wage reductions. On the time, MGM alone was working within the black, thanks largely to the success of the favored comedies of Canadian actor Marie Dressler. However MGM’s boss, Louis B. Mayer, apparently, solely had sufficient cash available to cowl his staffers’ salaries for a few weeks.
As MGM story editor Samuel Marx later wrote in his guide Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Imagine Saints, Mayer, along with his beard “stubbled and his eyes crimson,” entered the most important auditorium on the lot at a pivotal second in March to handle his assembled workers. Mayer promised to maintain the wage reductions short-lived and, if essential, to repay all of them out of his personal pocket. He feigned tears. His voice caught. Lionel Barrymore and others cheered him on, expressing their help. When Mayer left the room, feeling triumphant, Marx heard him ask the casting chief, Benny Thau, “How did I do?” (Mayer’s crocodile tears second was recreated in a scene in David Fincher’s 2020 function, Mank, concerning the tortured delivery of Citizen Kane.)
Phrase of Mayer’s cynical feedback quickly unfold. And the movie group obtained mightily riled. They held conferences. They appeared to different industries throughout America by which organized labor was turning into a significant power. In brief order, the screenwriter Albert Hackett would credit score Mayer with creating, in a single fell swoop, “extra communists than Karl Marx.” And one lengthy, laborious take a look at their “contracts” proved to the writers, administrators, and actors that these items of paper supplied them no safety. Their solely possibility was to unionize.
On March 28, 1933, film scribes Anita Loos, Frances Marion, Jane Murfin, and Bess Meredyth had been among the many 100 ladies and men who gathered to signal $100 membership checks made out to the Display Writers Guild (SWG). Per week later, on April 6, these 100, together with scores of compatriots who joined their ranks “by invitation or software,” comprised the newly shaped SWG. John Howard Lawson, who had few movie credit to his identify (however who, 14 years later, would develop into one of many blacklisted Hollywood 10, was elected the guild’s first president. Frances Marion, the city’s highest paid screenwriter, male or feminine—and considered one of its most prolific—was named vice chairman; producer-screenwriter Ralph Block, treasurer; and Joe Mankiewicz, nonetheless in his early 20s, secretary. (When his older brother, Herman, was requested why he didn’t help the guild, he claimed, along with his cynical wit, “All of the $250-a-week writers I do know are making $2,500 every week.”)
