Activity

By mid-March 1945 the studios had a weekly payroll of $2.5 million and 130 films on the shelves—a nine-month supply. This was not necessarily the most fortuitous moment for a studio strike.

Still, shortly after the strike was launched, “business offices were in a snarl” and “without electricians…

Selznick’s company also complained about IATSE and collected literature about the alliance’s gangster connections and its attempts to cover them up.58 Yet Selznick had other problems similar to those of the majors. He worried about the “odd chance that one of the girls in [the] stenographic has an …

Seeking to slow the flow of revenue to the studios, CSU also picketed theaters, which the studios had acknowledged more than once as their ne plus ultra. These pickets at theaters became a favored CSU tactic—they were described as the “‘atom bomb’ of the present struggle”; this strategy allowed CSU…

image An estimated 10,500 CSU workers went on strike in March 1945—and the conflict lasted until October.34 The painter Hans Burkhardt—who once studied with Arshile Gorky and created a painting, Protest, depicting the conflict—recalled it as a “bloody fight, it was terrible.”35 Cecil B. DeMille spo…

Though “detailed studies of long-term trends of strike activity are surprisingly rare,” it is evident that in the United States “the rate of strike activity has always been high compared with that in other countries”: “strikes [here] have at times involved massive, bitter, and violent struggles bet…