Equity v. Hollywood

For eight weeks Actors' Equity Association (actors' union) has attempted to impose its closed shop on Hollywood cinemactors (TIME, July 8 et seq.).

Last week Equity's campaign was spirited. More and more Hollywood automobiles carried blue Equity emblems. In Hollywood's American Legion arena, where filmdom sees weekly boxing bouts, 3,000 of the Equity faithful met. Cried one: "Let there be sound and fury, pickets and turmoil! This is a labor fight." Cried another, pompously: "We are not laborers, but artists. Let there be no uproar." Then arose an American Federation of Labor delegate. "Remember," he said, "until you joined labor in the 1919 strike you were gypsies. You had no dignity."

At a meeting in Los Angeles Labor Temple, was lissom, exotic cinemactress Jetta Goudal, whose vivid partisanship has won her the name, "Equity's Joan of Arc." Quivering, she shouted: "As for quitters, as for scabs, I say, God damn their souls!' "

In the studios, producers were irked by a scarcity of minor players, the lesser folk of filmdom who eagerly side with Equity: who, unlike big-salaried stars, need protective organization. Sympathetic labor unions gave Equity aid. Off San Pedro, Los Angeles seaport, a cinema was being filmed aboard a lugger. Among the cinema sailors were non-Equity actors. The real sailors cast away their marlin-spikes, refused to work. Simultaneously the Pacific Seamen's Union informed Equity President Frank Gillmore that they would work no more in cinema until the conflict was over.

Confident of success, Equity has not called upon unionized electricians, operators, cameramen. But these men have devised technical subtleties to express Equity sympathy. They drop heavy tools near apostate Equity actors, tinker with studio machinery, cause intolerable delays.

Cogent in arousing Equity support has been the oldtime rumor that certain producers keep a blacklist among themselves, wherewith to discipline actors.

With producers scornfully silent, the loudest anti-Equity voice was Cinemactor Tully Marshall's. Fortnight ago, having accepted a non-Equity Warner Brothers contract, having flayed Equity in an inter- view, he and his employers were sued by Equity for $1,000,000 damages and an injunction to prevent his acting without Equity sanction (TIME, July 29). Last week he declared: "There are some who call me 'traitor. Well, if I'm a traitor, so was George Washington, who fought against taxation without representation. I will fight to the end against being forbidden to earn my living under a rule in the making of which I had no voice."

First violence of the conflict occurred when three Equity sympathizers hissed 150 War-veteran studio workers. The veterans dragged the two younger hissers from their automobile together with hundreds of feet of film, maltreated both film and hissers. Equity denied official connection.

Local newspapers (including the Los Angeles Times and Examiner), long foes of labor unionism, continued to suppress news. Day after day visiting newsmen were astonished to see the big vital story twisted and killed.