Class Struggle in Hollywood: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists.

By Gerald Home. University of Texas Press, 2001.

One of the most disgusting and egregious movies of the last few years, Shallow Hal (2001), having battered its audience with a non-stop array of sophomoric "fat-person" jokes, nonetheless finishes on a surprisingly redeeming note. This takes place after the movie proper has ended, during the dosing credits. Rather than consisting of a long list of names, in descending order of glamour, the credits for Shallow Hal include live-action videos of each person being credited, down to the very end of the list. The presentation of these credits brings before the audience's eyes in an unprecedented way all the people who worked on the movie: grips and electricians and caterers and carpenters and set designers and drivers, as well as the higher-profile actors, director, and producer.

In his impeccably researched book, Gerald Home seeks to enrich our sense of how to understand film by insisting that the roles played by all parties involved in creating movies must be examined by scholars who are interested in the question of how movies wield their considerable influence in American society. Horne goes considerably further than the makers of Shallow Hal, demonstrating the impact on the film industry--and, ultimately, on films--of gangsters, politicians, reporters and political activists as well as trades people. In other words, by turning our attention back to the conditions of labor--debunking along the way the "magic" of Hollywood and the "genius" of auteurs that is so precious to the popular imagination--Horne effects a stunning shift away from a limited content-centered approach to movies and toward a more layered analysis that is global in scope, and deeply lodged in political economy.

Home's window on "class struggle in Hollywood" is the 1945 strike by the skilled trades belonging to the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) and the subsequent lockout of CSU the following year. This struggle, Home convincingly argues, left a "lasting legacy outside the film industry" (15)--perhaps most notably in the writing of the Taft-Hartley legislation, whose drafters were profoundly influenced by the events of this high-profile conflict. Home meticulously sets the scene for the strike, showing that although Los Angeles had "pioneered the crushing of labor dissidence" (40), wartime anti-fascist alliances tempered somewhat the anti-communism that had hobbled progressive unionism. Furthermore, important changes were afoot in how movies were made: shooting was being shifted to "home lots" as opposed to remote or outdoor locations. This change in procedure had the effect of bringing more workers together under one roof, and of elevating the importance of set designers, whose issues were at the heart of the CSU. Both encouraged and facilitated trade union organizing.

However, as World War II drew to a close and the Cold War got underway, red-baiting was used to crush any manifestation of progressive politics, effectively blunting the labor activism in Hollywood--this despite the fact that Herb Sorrell, CSU's President, was not a Communist (and would have opposed a strike, in keeping with the Communists' wartime "no strike" policy, if he had been). The Red Scare was effectively deployed to intimidate stars who might have been inclined to support labor, to sway public sympathy away from the unions, and to bolster the mogul's own reputations as patriotic Americans.

The strike itself was tumultuous and violent. When mass picketing practically shut down the Warner Brothers studio, strikebreakers and sheriffs attacked pickets with fire hoses, tear gas, lead pipes, night sticks, battery cables, chains and fists. The riot at Warner Brothers was only the opening act of a violent drama. Organized crime had long had close relations with Hollywood producers, Horne shows, and during the 1945 strike, the mob provided muscle to break the picket line.

Home gives resonant examples of how the strike affected the quality of the movies themselves--and it is here, especially; that film critics and historians should take note of the number of forces that shape the aesthetics of a film. One story, for instance, tells of "the beautiful screen door built by a scab carpenter for a set at Paramount. Nobody could open it because the knob and the hinges were all on the same side" (169). Producers were forced to re-vamp old sets or rely heavily on "process shots," in which footage that had been stowed away for years was brought out to serve as backgrounds for new films, became it was impossible to build new sets.

Horne also makes some important connections between labor conditions and the images that find their way into the movies. He dwells, for instance, on the relationship between the financing of the industry by organized crime, and the portrayal of mobsters in the movies produced under these conditions. Horne is absolutely right in insisting that this is a multi-faceted and consequential relationship, wherein screen gangsters are modeled on real gangsters, and real gangsters imitate screen gangsters--and, in the present-day case of the TV series the Sopranos, in which fictional gang members quote lines from The Godfather, screen gangsters imitate real gangsters imitating screen gangsters. But Horne's conclusion here--that mobsters' presence in the industry led to a glamorization of crime in the movies--is rather too literal, and privileges production over consumption, despite the book's overall move away from such an emphasis. Why, for instance, does Horne assume that the indistinguishability of movie gangsters and "legitimate" businessmen is a comment on how audiences saw gangsters--rather than a comment on how audiences saw businessmen? Furthermore, a number of left-wing writers, including Daniel Fuchs and Samuel Ornitz, both of whom worked as screenwriters in Hollywood (Ornitz going on to become one of the Hollywood Ten), created fictional gangsters as a commentary upon the fate of art in the capitalist marketplace.

Horne's scholarly turn away from the over-elevation of content and authorship in movies is paradigm-shifting; the real prize for cultural historians, in my opinion, is those moments when he shows the concrete impact of the labor struggles on the content that ultimately reached millions of Americans. I wish Horne had done even more of this, but doing so would likely result in a book longer than most publishers nowadays are willing to allow; perhaps, then, it would be most profitable for readers to use Horne's wonderful book in tandem with work by Michael Denning (Cultural Front), Eric Smoodin (Animating Culture and Disney Discourse) and others who perform more extended "readings" of movies, readings that would be greatly enriched by Horne's careful and insightful historical work.

Horne's hours in the archives have yielded some fascinating stories, and reading about the creativity of the CSU and supporters is alone worth the price of admission. Sent to staunch the flow of profits to the studios, the CSU organized pickets of theaters. One group of pickets outside a theater showing the thriller Lady on a Train revealed to potential movie-goers the end of the story, spoiling the plot to discourage attendance. Other groups sent pickets in costume. Invoking the powerful unity of the Popular Front, strikers adopted the slogan "Labor produced for victory. Now let's produce victory for labor!" (162).

The dramatic story of Hollywood's unionization is, as Home points out, a story most often not told. (The suggestive exploitation of working "toons" in Who Framed Roger Rabbit by the makers of animated movies is about as close as it comes.) The photos included in the book emphasize both the drama of the story, and how unfamiliar we are now to seeing picket signs that say things like "Put a Union Button on Mickey Mouse!" (For one thing, Disney, ever protective of its trade mark profits, would probably sue.) Horne's book not only helps to fill this gap, but also acts as a corrective to the ways movies have been studied, written about, and theorized.

RACHEL RUBIN is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature. She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Teacher.