DGA Monthly

2 2 I D G A M O N T H L Y CELEBRATING OUR HISTORY The Directors Guild of America, according to most accounts, was born out of a December 1935 meeting at King Vidor's house, where more than a dozen Directors got together, chipped in $100 each, and formed an organization that was initially called the Screen Directors Guild. But that's not when things really started. To understand where those Directors were coming from, how they formed a guild—and, even more important, why they formed a guild— it's necessary to back up a couple of decades. The seeds were sown in the weeks and months leading up to that 1935 meeting, but also in the years and decades before that, and in the labor struggles sweeping the United States during and before the Great Depression. Back then, two decades before the guild was born, the job of Director was still being defined. J. Searle Dawley, who called himself the first motion picture Director because he was hired by the Edison Manufacturing Company to helm The Nine Lives of a Cat in 1907, said, "the cameraman was in full charge" before that. The auteur theory was decades off—and while some Directors may have acquired power and exercised creative control in those early days, many others were employees who worked at the whim of producers and studio chiefs. At times, the studios would give a Director his next assignment only a few days before a movie would start shooting, excluding him (or, in rare cases, her) from virtually the entirety of preproduction. Often, a second unit would shoot simultaneously, with another Director handling those chores and reporting not to the first Director, but to the studio. Sometimes, the job simply entailed getting the shots that the studio wanted, with little or no room for creative input. And the editing process, often as not, would be handled by the studio, not the Director. "In the eyes of the public, as well as of their co-workers, they were associated with management and, like the stars, they were relatively highly paid," wrote Louis B. Perry and Richard S. Perry in A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement, 1911- 1941. "But…they had little [creative] control and, though they worked closely with producers, in the final analysis they were subject to the latter's dictates." Even as late as 1939, producer David O. Selznick summed up the prevailing vision that seemed to be handed down since the early days of the industry: "The Director, nine times out of ten, is…purely a cog in the machine." In 1915, the cogs decided to get together. But when the Motion Picture Directors Association was founded that June, the creative rights of Directors were barely addressed in the organization's charter. It was a time of growth for unions across the country, but Los Angeles, the home of the movie business, was a tougher market for organized labor. Anti-labor sentiment grew markedly after the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, an action widely blamed on labor activists. So when the American Federation of Labor (AFL) set its sights on Hollywood craftspeople, the studios responded by creating several organizations that united producers and studios to work against the AFL's push to create closed shops: The Motion Picture Producers Association was the first, with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (an MPAA precursor) and the Association of Motion Picture Producers following. In this climate, a group of Directors met quietly in 1915 and formed the Motion Picture Directors Association. It wasn't a guild or union, and directly lobbying the studios for more control wasn't on the agenda. Though early records Before the Guild by Steve Pond As the industry grew, the Motion Picture Directors Association brought filmmakers together. But by the early '30s, with the studios resistant to the labor movement, the stage was set for the founding of the Guild. In 2026, the DGA turns 90 years old. In celebrating our nearly century long existence, we look back on how it all began. But before telling the story of the founding of the Guild, this reprint of a DGA article relays what came before. — continued on page 25

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