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J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 6 I 2 9 DGA History: Before the Guild — continued from page 26 The Academy supported the plan, further angering both above and below-the-line workers—and in a subsequent meeting at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, King Vidor wrote, studio bosses made it clear that "anyone who got up and objected to…taking this cut was fired." Although the pay cut would be watered down and only lasted for eight weeks, it also set in motion a wave of unionization. The Writers Guild was formed in April 1933, followed two months later by the Screen Actors Guild. The Directors were slower to organize, but their intention was clear from that night at the Roosevelt— when, said Vidor, an impromptu meeting of several Directors on the sidewalk outside the hotel made the course of action clear: "It was just bluntly stated, 'We must have a guild to speak, and not the individual that can be hurt by standing up for his rights.'" And this time, Congress was strengthening the hand of workers who wanted to organize, even as the studios refused to negotiate with the new guilds. In June 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act granted unions the right to collective bargaining. Under the Code of Fair Competition for the Motion Picture Industry, the studios finally agreed to allow unions later that year, but those same studios then refused to recognize or negotiate with the unions. Their resistance would last for a few more years, but it was doomed. Teamsters, farmers, mine workers and autoworkers went on strike all across the country in the ensuing years, while the formation of the National Labor Relations Board in 1935 dealt another blow to industries that wanted to ignore unions. The studios acquiesced as thousands of crew members joined IATSE, though anti-union activists made much hay out of charges that Hollywood's union labor was rife with Communists. And then, at the end of 1935, on the heels of a Paramount edict that its contract Directors would be fired if they didn't accept the pictures that were assigned to them, 13 Directors met at Vidor's house. The Screen Directors Guild was born, and that's where the next chapter of this story begins. Even the most powerful Directors began to have their authority questioned. Lewis Milestone was sued by Warner Bros. when he left the studio over its practice of loaning him out to other studios and pocketing most of the money themselves. John Ford was challenged over casting and rejected by five studios when he tried to get a political film, The Informer, off the ground in 1934. Fo r d , w h o h a d l o n g a d v o c a t e d that Directors organize, was blunt: "Changes are due in the motion picture industry from the Director's standpoint," he declared. But every attempted change met with resistance. Cecil B. DeMille had tried to make a move three years earlier, enlisting Vidor, Milestone and Frank Borzage to set up an organization he planned to call the Directors Guild. According to Robert S. Birchard's book Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood, he approached the head of sales for Paramount to get support for the plan, in which the Directors would make independent films and distribute them to independent movie theaters. In the rocky economic climate of the times, it proved impossible for DeMille to secure financing; the company never got off the ground and its manifesto, a "Directors Declaration of Independence," never adopted. As some Directors lobbied for collective action and others dared not buck the studios, other industry workers found progress tough as well. In 1931, the Assistant Directors Union tried to gain recognition from the studios, institute collective bargaining and improve conditions; its efforts were rebuffed. When electricians called a strike two years later, the studios hired scabs. Those who worked for the studios, a Warner Bros. executive said in an oral history at UCLA, were "exploited en masse," with long hours, low pay and no job security. Wrote Gerald Horne, "creative types who had to dig deep into their psyches to tap their muse were driven further into psychological turmoil by the instability of the industry in which they toiled." The studios, meanwhile, faced bigger problems than striking stagehands. Paramount and RKO both went into receivership in January 1933, driven to bankruptcy by over- aggressive expansion in turbulent financial times. On the heels of President Roosevelt's enforced bank holiday in 1933, MGM, Paramount, Columbia and Warner Bros. used that drastic measure as an inspiration for their own dramatic step, announcing across-the-board salary cuts of as much as 50 percent for anyone making more than $50 a week. For the next part of this story, see A Guild is Born on the following pages. CELEBRATING OUR HISTORY

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