The Hollywood Film Council consisted of a group of craft unions dominated by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE, or simply “the IA”). The IA had just emerged triumphant from a bloody two-year struggle with progressive unions over job control on Hollywood movie sets. This was a more extreme version of the traditional jurisdictional divisions encouraged by studio producers for decades between AFL building trade unions and the IA. Beginning with the successful Disney studio animators’ strike of 1941, painter’s union leader Herb Sorrell built a credible democratic union federation, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), as an alternative to the corrupt IA, which had been controlled by Chicago mobsters since the early 1930s.

Although the mob’s number one enforcer in Hollywood, Willie Bioff, and the IA national president, Richard Walsh, had gone to prison in 1940 along with a producer who had colluded with their money-skimming schemes, most IA Hollywood locals remained in the hands of the old guard. IA activists who had hoped for a revival of union democracy were disappointed; the meetings mostly had no quorums, a legacy of years of intimidation and shakedowns by Bioff’s associates. Studio workers interested in improving conditions turned to the Conference of Studio Unions.