DGA Monthly

1 0 I D G A M O N T H L Y letter he sent to Ernst Lubitsch, he wrote, "The Screen Directors Guild was organized solely by and for the Motion Picture Director... We are not anti-anything: The Guild being formed for the purpose of assisting and improving the Director's work in the form of a collective body, rather than as an individual, as was necessary in the past." Other Directors got a harder sell. Co-founder Rouben Mamoulian recalled that he and Vidor started taking different Directors to lunch or dinner and shaming them into joining. One of the toughest sells was Frank Capra, who, as one of Hollywood's hottest young Directors, Vidor saw as essential to establishing the Guild's legitimacy and ability to negotiate a contract with the studios. To this point, Capra had been aligned with the pro- studio Academy, even serving as its president in 1935. In a 1985 interview, quoted in Joseph McBride's Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Capra recalled Vidor demanding, "Frank, what the hell are you breaking your ass about the Academy for? Why don't you want to do anything for the Directors?" With that kind of "encouragement," Capra eventually realized his heart was more with the Directors and signed up in July 1937, going on to become Guild president and spearheading its drive for studio recognition. Finally, in 1939, Capra was able to accomplish what Vidor had started and the studios signed an accord with the Guild. As he was first building the case for the Guild among other Directors, Vidor recalled in a 1977 interview with labor historian Mitch Tuchman, quoted by McBride, that "When you'd talk to somebody, they'd say, 'Well this is a Communist inspired thing.' That's what you'd hear a lot of." Vidor himself was a likely target. His film Our Daily Bread (1934) was plainly a plea for rural cooperatives to serve as a refuge for dispossessed city people. The film was made after Vidor had read a Reader's Digest article proposing collectives and the abandonment of money. He wrote a script (with his third wife, Elizabeth Hill) and King Vidor, the Guild's First President — continued from page 9 This story is an edited reprint of the DGA Quarterly Winter 2010 article, "The Man Who Would Be King" by David Thomson. took it to Thalberg, who had been his patron on the silent classics The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928) at MGM. In Vidor's account, Thalberg said "it was darned interesting, but he didn't think he could approve it for the studio." The script contained impoverished characters and a sharp attack on the banking system, but Vidor said he could not understand why that disturbed Thalberg. So acting as a producer, Vidor raised the money personally, $125,000 from the Bank of America, and released the film through United Artists thanks to the support of Charlie Chaplin. To this day, Our Daily Bread is cited as a rare example of socialism in American film in which people overcome drought, foreclosures, and isolation. "There is the story in every man's heart of human progress," Vidor wrote. "I believe every one of us knows that his major job on earth is to make some contributions, no matter how small, to this inexorable movement of human progress." It's when you put Vidor's sunny optimism together with his extraordinary early achievements in film that you can see how vital he was to the advancement of the Guild. In his remarks to a memorial gathering at the time of Vidor's death in 1982, then-Guild president Jud Taylor said, "We will always be in debt to our first president who, back in 1936, joined others who had the courage to put their personal and professional prestige and careers on the line for all of us who followed. Without the clarity of vision and deep sense of commitment that King gave to his work..., this organization that protects and provides for its members might never have become a reality." A recruitment letter Screen Directors Guild President King Vidor sent to Director Ernst Lubitsch A recruitment letter Screen Directors Guild President King Vidor The birth of the Guild was announced in the December 17, 1935 issue of Variety The birth of the Guild was announced in the December 17, 1935 Celebrating Our History

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