Still, Hollywood did have to make serious adjustments as a result of the war; these changes favored the conservative bent of MPAPAI. Box-office returns from the European and South American markets contributed heavily to Hollywood’s gross income in 1938, and provided almost all of the actual profit. This lucre from overseas was a partial result of Hollywood’s unscrupulous tactics against foreign, particularly European, moviemakers, including the manipulation of tariff barriers and the Production Code on “morality to ‘show’ people that foreign films were simply not American.” In search of capital during the war, many of the studios were driven further to deepen their relationship with “large investment banks.”1

As the war approached, Hollywood had discovered that its overseas market was disappearing. The mogul Samuel Goldwyn recommended reducing annual output from 500 films to 150, an idea New Masses castigated as akin to “crop limitation” or “plowing under every second and third row of B pictures.”129 What would a reduction in output mean for the jobs of CSU members, and would the studios simply be willing to absorb a strike since they wanted to reduce output anyway?