DGA Monthly

J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 6 I 2 5 DGA History: Before the Guild — continued from page 22 Around the country, though, the labor movement heated up at the conclusion of World War I. In 1919, according to Robert Zieger in American Workers, American Unions, approximately 3,000 strikes took place involving 4 million workers, more than 20 percent of the American workforce. And in Hollywood, some unions were growing more militant. In 1918, according to Gerald Horne's Class Struggle in Hollywood, a strike by 500 workers forced several productions to shut down. The studios finally cracked down in 1921 and locked out the craft unions, although five years later the AFL had a breakthrough of sorts, negotiating a basic agreement with the studios on behalf of st agehands and other craftsmen. But the writers stayed out of the fray: Although they formed the Screen Writers Guild in 1921, that organization was initially fraternal and wasn't incorporated as a union for a dozen years. The M PDA, meanwhile, continued on its own path. "Meetings…are a clearinghouse for discussion of new methods, of business and art problems, of ways and means and for sifting the wheat of value from the chaff of 'bunk' in production," wrote MPDA secretary Ashley Miller in 1919. Part gentleman's club, part think tank and part quiet l o b b y i n g o r g a n i z a t i o n , t h e M P DA added a New York branch, fought "blue laws," argued for a stop to overseas production, and got involved in the discussion over the regulation of movie content in the wake of a series of high- profile Hollywood scandals. One of those scandals involved MPDA president and founding member William Desmond Taylor, who was shot and killed in his Los Angeles home in 1922, in a still-unsolved case that stirred up whispers of salacious behavior. The organization was aware of its potential as a bargaining agent for Directors, but according to other notes made by Dawley at the time, it opted not to join the labor movement when an AFL representative came calling. "The [motion of the MPDA are scarce, the notes of its secretary, Dawley, describe it as a "secret society" whose "rules and rituals were formulated, often somewhat the rules of the Mason." Of course there was more to it than that. The four stated goals of the MPDA were to "maintain the honor and dignity of motion picture Directors," "to…exert every influence to improve the moral, social and intellectual stand of all persons concerned with the motion picture producing business," "to cultivate social intercourse among its members," and "to aid and assist all worthy distressed members…their wives, widows and orphans." M o r e s p e c i f i c a l l y, t h e MPDA set out to curb the producers' casting couch. A key aim, wrote Dawley, was "to try helping each other and to endeavor to clean up the [motion picture] business from the habit of exporting girls who are weak on the side of resisting flattering offers by certain executives of the…business…. Directors were often forced to use girls in their art whose only qualifications was that of being a friend of so-and-so." The moral outrage went further than that too: Another founding member, Charles Giblyn, described the initial meeting as "indignant" and said the general public thought of studios as "habitats of criminals and vagrants." In a 1918 article in The Exhibitor's Trade Review, he also said that Directors needed to organize in order to stop one another from trying to sabotage rival productions. "The MPDA became the first vehicle to present Directors as a single power," wrote Lisa Mitchell in DGA Magazine in 2001. "By their formal unification, members established the importance of their new profession and could speak with one voice within the film industry and beyond." Still, the organization did not appear to have used that single voice for bargaining. In an interview conducted for the DGA's oral history series in 1980, MPDA co-founder King Vidor said the group "seemed to be more social, it didn't suggest labor or group bargaining in any way." ROOTS OF THE GUILD: The MPDA was founded in 1915 and was the first attempt to give Directors a single voice. It published a popular journal, The Director, from 1924 -1927 about issues of the day. — continued on page 26 CELEBRATING OUR HISTORY

• Cover