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Walt Disney at the Pancoast Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida, 1941. P H OT O : P H OT O F E S T 70 C I N E M O N T A G E B O O K R E V I E W about getting decent money and working conditions for the lowest-paid employees. The studio's pay scale was erratic; the highest-ranking animators made as much as $300 a week, while many lower-ranking f ilm workers earned as little as $12. A mysteriously arbitrary bonus system added to the confusion. Babbitt refused to join an exclusive club on the Disney lot because it would not admit anyone who earned less than $100 a week. While working at Disney Studios was considered the prime artistic opportunity in the 1930s, anima- tion, employees there were the lowest-paid in Hollywood. Many of the crafts, including The Society of Film Editors, were already unionized, and the large national unions, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), and especially the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) were all trying to expand their influence in Hollywood. Babbitt was the acknowledged head of the 1941 strike, but an enormous number of factors led to it, and various versions of what happened when, and who did what to whom, and why, have been written and talked about for decades. Friedman seeks to uncomplicate the baffling amount of information surrounding his subject by wisely avoiding reliance on previous books and instead cites recorded interviews, legal documents, contemporary publications (especially major newspapers and the trade press) letters, and thousands of what must have been mind-numbing records from the National Labor Relations Board. He is a thorough historian, using massive numbers of primary sources in research conducted over 10 years to explain an extremely com- plicated situation. Through Friedman's efforts the roles of numerous individuals become clearer. One was Disney 's Chief Legal Counsel, Gunther Lessing, whose most famous client had been Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa for whom he negotiated a $25,000 film contract. In late 1938, Lessing and Babbitt concocted a "fake" in-house union, the Federation of Screen Cartoonists, meant to block the IATSE from gaining control at the studio. Babbitt and others soon realized that this organization was simply a management tool, and by 1941, Lessing was considered the main obstacle between Walt and a compromise with the legitimate Screen Cartoonists Guild. The other major player in the saga was Willie Bioff. Bioff was a convicted Chicago gangster who partnered with IATSE Chicago President George Brown to bilk theater owners. With the help of Al Capone's men, Brown became National President of IATSE, and because most theater projectionists were IATSE members, Bioff and Brown were able to extort huge sums of money from Hollywood studios by threatening projectionist strikes. This technique played a strategic role in the Disney strike. "The Disney Revolt" explains the machi- nations these men engaged in, as well as the shifting relationships among artists, em- ployees, management, lawyers, the federal government, and friends. It does so with an easy readability that belies the thorough- ness of Friedman's work. Photographs and cartoon drawings are scattered throughout, each of which deserves attention. While the book does not dwell on the repercussions of the successful strike, it does briefly follow up on the lives of each major player. In 1943, SEE PAGE 83