Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America

6. Ain't No Peace in the Family Now: The Actors' Equity Association and the Movies, 1919-1929

chapter six Ain’t No Peace in the Family Now The Actors’ Equity Association and the Movies, 1919–1929 In the family of Thespis, fickle Deity, There is much ado and many hearts are broken; For with the most astounding spontaneity, Little baby Cinema has spoken. Oh, there ain’t no peace in the family now, Since the baby learned to talk. And the older one, The legitimate one, Is much too weak to walk. —From “Ballad of Thespis’ Sons” by Florida Friebus, 1929 In the view of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, the social significance of film“is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspects, that is, the liquidation of the traditional cultural heritage.”1 For the American acting community, the advent of moving pictures brought destruction and catharsis in equal measure. The new technology transformed patterns of employment among actors in the United States, opening up vast new areas of opportunity in what rapidly emerged as a centralized, capital-intensive, and highly mechanized new industry. In the process it destroyed the foundations of the old theatrical hierarchy, tearing the stars of the so-called legitimate stage down from their cultural pedestal and precipitating a thoroughgoing reappraisal of what it meant to be an actor. By the early 1920s the movie theater had replaced the playhouse as the principle arena for the consumption of commercial entertainment, drawing vast audiences from across the social spectrum; Los Angeles had supplanted New York City as the showbusiness capital of the United States; and screen acting had emerged as a Holmes_Weavers text.indd 141 12/7/12 8:29 AM discrete area of artistic endeavor that owed less and less to the performance conventions of the American stage. Disdainful of the new medium, the leaders of the Actors’ Equity Association failed to grasp the significance of this upheaval. Even as the legitimate theater drifted toward the periphery of the cultural life of the United States, they began to claim the right, by virtue of their status as practitioners of what they at least regarded as the highest expression of the actor’s art, to speak for the entire acting community.Viewing motion pictures as little more than the illegitimate offspring of more elevated cultural forms, they were eager to impose their authority on the men and women who sold their labor in the film studios. Accordingly, in the early 1920s they resolved to extend the so-called Equity shop rule to the film industry. The Equity campaign to organize the motion picture studios reveals much not only about the relationship between actors and their employers but also about social relations within the acting community and how the tensions between different groups of performers played themselves out in the radically reconfigured entertainment industry of the 1920s. The movies, as historian Robert Sklar has reminded us,“rose to the surface of cultural consciousness from the bottom up, receiving their support from the lowest and most invisible classes in American society.”2 Conscious of the deep-seated class prejudices of the old theatrical elite, historians have tended to assume that the stars of the legitimate stage distanced themselves from the nascent American film industry primarily because they did not wish to associate themselves with the cheap amusements of the urban poor.3 Though not entirely without foundation, this is an argument that oversimplifies the complex relationship between stage and screen. During its formative years, cinema failed to make much of an impact upon the collective consciousness of the theatrical aristocracy, because, as Richard deCordova has demonstrated , before about 1907 appearing in motion pictures was simply not equated with the art of stage acting. Even after the balance of production in the industry shifted decisively in favor of the fictional narrative, producers made little or no effort to draw upon the talents of stage luminaries, preferring to rely on the rather less costly services of the men and women who labored in theatrical obscurity.4 Toward the end of 1909, however, the Edison Company precipitated a revolution in employment practices by signing up the French pantomimist Pilar-Morin as a member of its resident stock company and using her formidable reputation as a theatrical performer to promote its films. Recognizing a strategy that would enable them to both invest their products with a degree of artistic legitimacy and differentiate 142 chapter six Holmes_Weavers text.indd 142 12/7/12 8:29 AM them from those of their...