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 to operate generators, no current was available to shoot scenes on prepared sets.” Disney, Monogram, and some independents were unaffected by the strike because they had bargained with Local 1421.72 Columbia, RKO, Universal, Warner Bros., and Fox were affected most severely, with MGM and Paramount right behind.

The Communists were no less displeased with the strike. Sorrell and CSU had “fallen into a trap” they contended. Hutcheson, the “reactionary Republican labor boss of the Carpenters Union and close ally of John L. Lewis,” was a culprit, along with the moguls, they argued; Sorrell’s actions were deemed “highly individualistic and irresponsible.” The Communists claimed that “production” was “virtually unimpaired” by the strike.73 The strike was antidemocratic, they claimed, since CSU as a whole never voted. It simply had backed the “unilateral action” of six hundred Local 1421 members who walked out: “that is the total number of workers in the movie industry who have officially voted to strike.”74