DGA Monthly

2 6 I D G A M O N T H L Y DGA History: Before the Guild — continued from page 25 more colorfully: "Looking to the Academy for representation was like trying to get laid i n y o u r m o t h e r 's h o u s e . Somebody was always in the parlor, watching." At the dawn of the 1930s, sound had taken over the movie industry, and some Directors found that the power they had worked to acquire was waning. "The concept of authorial freedom as it is understood today did not exist in Hollywood during the '30s," wrote Tino Balio in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise. With the growth of the power of the studio system, even Directors who had been given artistic freedom found the purse strings tightening and the restrictions increasing. "A lot of Directors were underpaid," Rouben Mamoulian said in an interview conducted for the DGA's 50th anniversary, "and being underpaid also meant that they lacked authority in many fields [where] the Director should have authority." King Vidor, for example, had to personally finance Our Daily Bread in 1934—because, he wrote in his autobiography A Tree Is a Tree, "all the major companies were afraid to make a film without glamour." (The film, somewhat prophetically, was about a group of struggling workers who form a collective.) picture] business was watching every move we made," Dawley wrote. "We were a very strong organization if we really wanted to use the power for we had nearly every Director in the business that amounted to anything as a member…." When the AFL rep spoke to the MPDA, he wrote, the Directors thought his pitch was oriented too much toward the financial side, and not enough toward the creative. "We were not joined together to fight the M P business," Dawley insisted. "Our idea was to be of some service to the MP art." The MPDA turned down the AFL's offer. The MPDA, which grew to between 100 and 200 members, also published a journal called The Director (later The Motion Picture Director) from 1924 to 1927. One of the articles in that publication indicated just how far the image of the Director had come: "Of the many artists who help to make up the finished film none is more important than the Director," wrote Louis B. Mayer. "When a picture is screened it is largely a reflection of the mind that directed it." But if Mayer was generous with flattery, he was also instrumental in the creation of an organization that hastened the decline of the MPDA: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Mayer and other studio chiefs formed the Academy in 1927, in part because of the threat of more widespread unionization; as Directors, writers and actors joined those branches of AMPAS, the power of their individual organizations waned. In addition, part of the Academy's goal was to mediate in labor disputes—but not surprisingly, given the men at the top, it generally came down on whatever side the studios wanted. By the time most of the members of the MPDA joined the Directors branch of the Academy in the late '20s, the MPDA had essentially become defunct—aided, Dawley said, by studio resistance that killed a proposed filmmakers collective with which the Directors would finance their own films outside the studio system. The Academy, wrote The Hollywood Reporter in a 2005 article, "contributed to an unprecedented era of management-labor cooperation—but it also kept actors, writers and Directors from forming unions." A remark attributed to Dorothy Parker, and quoted by Nancy Lynn Schwartz in The Hollywood Writers' Wars, summed it up ANTI-LABOR: Louis B. Mayer, along with the other studio heads, was instrumental in forming the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, an organization that by design help hasten the decline of the MPDA. To understand how Directors formed a guild — and why they formed a guild — it's necessary to back up to the labor struggles sweeping the country during and before the Great Depression. — continued on page 29 CELEBRATING OUR HISTORY

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