Did you know about Hollywood's Bloody Friday?
Hollywood's behind the camera workers are set to strike.
Sixty thousand craft and labor workers, members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a nationwide strike if no agreement is reached with the studios.
The last time crews staged a major strike was in 1945 in what was known as Hollywood’s Bloody Friday.
In March 1945, the 10,500-member Conference of Studio Unions went on strike.
During the 1930s, the dominant labor union in Hollywood, the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees Union (IATSE), was led by men with close ties to the mob.
Partly in reaction to IATSE’s mob ties, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a craft union, was founded in 1941 following a militant and successful strike against Walt Disney Productions by cartoonists.
During a CSU-led industry-wide strike in 1945, IATSE, supported by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Values (MPA), a right-wing anticommunist studio-backed organization, launched a campaign to brand their rival as communist.
In 1947, in cooperation of Screen Actors’ Guild president Ronald Reagan, the studio heads, MPA, and IATSE won in a jurisdictional fight over who would mainly represent Hollywood’s craft workers.
Their victory followed a 1945 CSU led strike.
In testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) Reagan and Disney portrayed themselves as waging a battle against communism.
When the CSU went on strike, IATSE did not follow suit and a labor war broke out.
After six months on strike, the CSU’s money and patience was running low.
On Friday, Oct. 5, 1945, the CSU decided to take action and block the Warner Bros. employee entrance.
Members of the militant CSU strikers and IATSE scabs confronted each other at the gate.
Old timers in Hollywood remember Friday, Oct. 5, 1945, as “Bloody Friday.”
(Andrew H. Arnott / Los Angeles Times Archive / UCLA)
The L.A. Times reported the next day:
At noon Blayney Matthews, former chief investigator for the District Attorney’s office and for years chief of police at the studio, forced his way through the picket line and entered the premises. He was punched in the face en route, but succeeded in gaining entrance.
Within a few minutes studio firemen had manned two high pressure fire-hoses and turned high velocity streams of water on the pickets.
When the pickets attempted to rush the firemen, studio police hurled tear-gas bombs, following up with the hoses. The pickets dispersed by the combined attack, retaliated with a barrage of bottles, brickbats and stones.
The studio forces built barricades of long tables against the barrage. The pickets pulled the three overturned cars together to form a defense of their own, from which vantage point they continued hurling bottles and stones. ...
Then police, armed with riot gun, tear gas and clubs, formed into two large battalions and cleared the street in front of the gates. ...
The strike ended on October 24, 1945.
But the post-war Red Scare and McCarthyism was in full bloom.
It wasn’t only communist and progressive Hollywood writers like Dalton Trumbo who faced the Blacklist.
So did those who were members of the progressive craft and labor unions like the CSU.
By 1950, anti-communism forced the CSU union out of the Hollywood studios.
It has taken a long time to climb out of that hole.