Mobsters, McCarthyism and militancy: the story of Hollywood’s ‘Black Friday’ 

80 years ago, in the early hours of 5 October 1945, a pitched battle erupted at the Warner Brothers studio lot in Burbank, California. This was not a shoot for a new war movie, but an armed clash between unionised set decorators on one side; and strikebreakers, mafia goons and police, allied with the studio bosses, on the other. ‘Black Friday’ was the bloody culmination of the biggest strike in Hollywood’s history, a high watermark of labour militancy the likes of which the industry has not seen since.

Hollywood in the 1940s had a reputation as a ‘union town’. Ironically, when the founders of the big film studios fled to California from New York in the 1900s, part of their motivation was to escape the influence of powerful theatrical unions. When Louis B. Mayer (of Metro-Goldwyn Mayer) founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which awards the Oscars) in 1927, the logic was also to cut across attempts to unionise the industry: “Who needs a union, when you have the fellowship of the Academy?”

But despite the best efforts of the studio bosses, Hollywood technicians and artists rapidly organised, starting with craft workers – painters, plumbers, carpenters – who joined the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) and launched the first Hollywood strike as early as 1918. But the impact of the 1929 Wall Street Crash really burst open the floodgates.

The 1930s was a period of intense social foment across US society in general. The combined impact of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe radicalised sections of the American working class and intelligentsia. There were major class battles in this decade, including a 1934 strike by truckers organised by the Teamsters (under Trotskyist leadership), which sparked a general strike in Minneapolis. Membership of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) had also shot up to 50,000 members.

The Spanish Civil War, and the shameful non-interventionist stance of the US government, had a further radicalising effect on the American working and middle classes, with many prominent artists expressing sympathy for the Second Republic in Spain. Hollywood self-censorship under the so-called ‘Hays Code’ meant explicitly left-wing politics rarely ended up in mainstream American cinema. Nevertheless, the independently produced 1937 anti-fascist film The Spanish Earth, written by Ernest Hemingway and narrated by Orson Welles, became a critical success. It was even screened at the White House: not that it had any effect on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy of leaving the Spanish Republic to its fate.

Hollywood was not sheltered from the crisis of US capitalism. Salaries were slashed industry-wide in 1931 and a national bank moratorium in 1933 saw Universal Studios immediately suspend all its contracts. Shortly thereafter, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “recommended” that all studio workers accept a voluntary 50 percent salary reduction for eight weeks, for the ‘sake of the industry’. This forced workers and artists into an immediate defensive struggle.

Hollywood workers and artists fight back, Mafia moves in

The Screen Writers Guild (SWG) was founded in 1933 under the leadership of John Howard Lawson, a member of the CPUSA. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was founded a few months later. A long but ultimately victorious battle opened up to force the studio bosses to recognise these unions, assisted by the ‘pro-labor’ policies of FDR’s ‘New Deal’, which sought to convey labour militancy down safer, organised channels under the control of bureaucratic mass bodies like the American Federation of Labor – as opposed to allowing social tensions to erupt, as in Minneapolis.

By the 1940s, union penetration in the film industry was around 90 percent / Image: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library

By the 1940s, union penetration in the film industry was around 90 percent. This represented a potentially massive shift in the balance of power. Hollywood during its ‘Golden Age’ was a corrupt and lawless town. The big studio bosses were used to ruling like feudal lords, exploiting the talents (and sometimes the bodies) of aspiring young artists moving to LA in the hopes of making it in showbiz; and exploiting the labour of technical workers, while making millions. The new unions were the only potential obstacle to the studio bosses’ total domination. But the moguls had a trump card.

The great power commanded by the unions over the lucrative American film industry made them a tempting prospect for the mob, which was looking for a new racket after the end of prohibition. In 1934, gangster Willie Bioff ran his puppet George E. Browne unopposed for the presidency of the biggest and oldest Hollywood union, IATSE, by scaring or buying off any competition.

The studio bosses wasted no time coming to an arrangement with the mafia-controlled leadership of IATSE, giving them kickbacks in exchange for sending goons to break up strikes and crush any local chapters resisting mob control. The gangsters in turn would occasionally extort the studio bosses for money by threatening costly union action, but in general the two gangs of crooks established a fruitful working relationship.

The police were similarly paid to look the other way in an arrangement that kept the profits flowing and industry workers in check. In short, Hollywood technicians, writers and actors struggled for years to win mass organisations of class struggle, only to have them wrested away through criminal collusion at the top, and turned into instruments of the class enemy.

This mob-mogul coup in IATSE, along with the Hitler-Stalin pact, the 1936 show trials in the USSR, and Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War demoralised the politicised cadres of the Hollywood unions. The Second World War also cut across the labour struggle in American society in general, not least because the still-influential Stalinist CPUSA (which had 75,000 members after the war) declared a ‘no-strike’ policy after the USSR allied itself with the American and European imperialists. Ironically, given the anti-communist hysteria to come, the CPUSA was a brake on labour militancy rather than an engine driving it forward.

Hollywood’s biggest strike

In spite of all these obstacles, the rank-and-file in the Hollywood unions strained for real representation. As the war came to an end, a section of IATSE’s membership split away to form the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), in an attempt to escape mob domination. Set decorators organised by CSU Local 1421 demanded in March 1945 that they, rather than the rotten corpse of IATSE, be allowed to represent craft workers in the industry. The studio bosses naturally refused, and 10,500 studio painters, carpenters and other crew members walked off the job. Hollywood Reporter described the impact of the strike on 12 March 1945:

“Nearly 60% of all production was blacked out yesterday, and 12,000 film workers made idle, as members of the Screen Set Designers, Decorators and Illustrators 'hit the bricks' in front of all major studios, and, joined by cardholders in a dozen top industry crafts, precipitated Hollywood's worst labor tie-up in nearly a decade [referring to a 1937 strike by SAG that the mob helped to defeat].”

The strike remains to this day the strongest in the history of the industry and lasted for months. In addition to picketing the studio lots, CSU activists would undermine ticket sales by shouting spoilers to queues of punters outside cinemas, which in those days were owned by the studios. According to one anecdote, CSU pickets at a screening of Lady on a Train shouted:

“Save your money. We'll tell you all about it. Don't be fooled by Dan Duryea. Ralph Bellamy did it. He's the killer. And David Bruce gets the girl!”

The ranks of other Hollywood unions were sympathetic to the strike, despite their bureaucratic leaderships preventing a joint struggle. Left-leaning SAG-organised stars like Bette Davis, Jennifer Jones and Charlie Chaplin refused to cross CSU picket lines, with the latter (a socialist who sympathised with the Russian Revolution) stating to the press: “I never walk through picket lines myself, and I don't wish anybody to do so while working for me.” Many rank-and-file IATSE activists also refused to cross the picket lines, despite intimidation and encouragement by mob-controlled bureaucrats to blackleg.

A final confrontation was prepared on 5 October, when a mass picket of 1,000 CSU members attempted to stop production at the Warner Brothers studio lot, setting up barricades at the gate. Warner was one of the mightiest studios, with mobsters and police alike on its payroll.

Warner was one of the mightiest studios, with mobsters and police alike on its payroll / Image: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library

In the run up to October, the studios had also been exploiting growing anti-communist hysteria to attack the CSU strike. In fact, the CPUSA officially opposed the 1945 strike, following Moscow’s policy of maintaining a truce with the capitalists. But that didn’t prevent a B-movie hack actor named Ronald Reagan from getting a platform in the industry and national press to accuse CSU of being part of a “Soviet effort to gain control of Hollywood.”

At 5:30am on 5 October, IATSE blackleggers, backed up by mob goons, tried to force the Warner studio gate. The picket held firm and pushed them back, which opened up a brawl in which picketers were assaulted with fists, knives, clubs and nightsticks. The LAPD, who were nominally present to ‘keep the peace’, deployed teargas and watercannon against the strikers. The aspiring actress Elaine Spiro was on the CSU picket and described the events in her memoirs:

“Immobilized, I watched the scene a few feet away. Goons and replacements [scabs] smashing people's heads, faces, bodies; deputy sheriffs and cops knocking down men; a girl wearing a white hard-hat and red-cross arm band pushed down onto the pavement by a replacement, twisting her arm behind her back; the cops dragging people to the paddy wagon; three cops beating up a bleeding man lying on the ground.”

Dozens were left wounded on both sides. Despite the ferocity of the attack, the strike returned on the following Monday. Clashes continued throughout the week and the pressure of bourgeois ‘public opinion’ – which through the capitalist press decried the ‘violence’ – forced a return to negotiations a month later.

Despite the militancy of their activists, the CSU leaders were spooked by the bad press blaming them for violence, and disoriented by intensifying state attacks on ‘communism’ in Hollywood. Rather than redoubling their efforts and agitating for solidarity from the other unions, a shabby ‘compromise’ was stitched up. CSU was granted the right to organise set dressers, but IATSE retained latitude to frustrate their activities by citing jurisdiction over various studio tasks, effectively paralysing the rival union.

Still, the CSU leaders were encouraged by their ‘victory’ and the following July organised a successful strike that won its members a 25 percent pay rise. But a strike in September to determine whether IATSE grips or CSU carpenters had control over set building was met with a studio lockout and ended without resolution. These struggles also saw bloody fistfights between strikers and IATSE goons, leading to further state and public pressure on the CSU.

McCarthyism and decline

By this time, the Cold War was in full swing, and the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), founded in 1946 to root out communist activity, was focusing its attention on Hollywood. Although the postwar boom, coupled with years of Stalinist class collaboration, had demoralised the best class fighters in the ranks of the labour movement, and few actual communists were left in Hollywood.

But the McCarthyite witch hunters were assisted by Reagan, who passed the names of dozens of colleagues with supposed communist sympathies to the FBI. Thanks to studio lobbying and the exhaustion of the left, Reagan became president of SAG in 1947, bragging that he had “headed off [a] Communist takeover plot”. That year, the federal government passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which blunted legal strike tactics and forced union officials to forswear communism. Most of the union leaders complied at once.

Over 300 artists were blacklisted and prevented from working in Hollywood / Image: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library

Based on information conveyed by Reagan and other right-wing Hollywood figures (including Walt Disney and John Wayne), HUAC held nine days of hearings against supposed ‘communist sympathisers’ in Hollywood. Ten of these, the infamous ‘Hollywood Ten’, were cited for contempt of court after they refused to testify and were sentenced to fines and jail time.

In the end, over 300 artists, including immense talents like Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles and Dalton Trumbo, were blacklisted and prevented from working in Hollywood (though some continued under assumed names). These losses, combined with the new climate of paranoid hysteria against anything perceived as remotely left-wing, effectively lobotomised American film, leading to a long period of creative and commercial stagnation.

The CSU was shattered by these defeats and relentless McCarthyite harassment, and it died with a whimper in the years following the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. Meanwhile, IATSE eventually ‘cleaned up its act’ and remains one of the largest Hollywood unions to this day.

Union penetration remained high in Hollywood until the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan advanced from president of SAG to President of the USA and launched a full-on assault on the American labour movement. This, combined with the break up of the old, centralised studio system in favour of smaller, ‘mobile’ productions, massively undermined union power in the film industry.

Modern Hollywood cinema is a shadow of its former self. The seeds of its decline can be traced to the gangsterism and state censorship that heralded the end of its ‘Golden Age’ in the 1940s. But from the very beginning, capitalist interests have been nothing but a corrosive influence over film production, continually inhibiting creative experimentation and free expression in favour of bland commercialism, and bending to the political demands of the ruling class.

Despite the tragic defeat of the strike wave of 1945-6, it remains a courageous chapter of labour militancy in an industry otherwise dripping from every pore with sleaze, corruption and exploitation. The next Golden Age of American cinema will only begin when a new generation of class fighters wrest the great ‘dream factory’ of Hollywood, with its vast means of cultural production, away from the moguls, mobsters and philistine politicians once and for all.