A neighborhood on the eastern edge of the L.A. basin and shorthand for the movie and television industries, Hollywood had its own city charter for fewer than ten years before being annexed by Los Angeles in 1910. By joining L.A., it gained access to the water supply then beginning to flow by aqueduct from the Owens Valley 233 miles to the north.
D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and Charlie Chaplan filmed there but now, in fact, studios and related businesses are situated throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area with particular concentrations in Culver City, Burbank, the San Fernando Valley and – of course – the part of town known as Hollywood.
Incidentally, West Hollywood is a recently-formed municipality (adjacent to Beverly Hills), which became a separate city with 35,000 residents in 1984. This happened largely though the organizing efforts of an active gay community – including some from the movie business – which gravitated to this “unincorporated area” in the 1930s to 1970s to escape the violently homophobic LAPD.
I wouldn’t appreciate these distinctions if I didn’t live in this region. But there’s a singularly important feature about Hollywood – the industry – that is also usually overlooked. With large-scale domestic manufacturing off-shored and de-unionized, film and television production may now be the most heavily unionized sector in the American economy.
Much of the stuff (content) you watch when you go to the movies, turn on your TV, and – increasingly – access through the internet and your cell phone is union-made.
In my work in the Southern California Labor Movement, I got a look at the complicated web of unions and guilds which represent a mostly freelance workforce of actors, camera operators, make-up artists, writers, prop masters, grips, truck drivers, directors, script supervisors, stunt men and women, studio teachers and nurses.
Though the goal – to represent as many workers in the industry as possible – can be diverted by the ongoing fractious battles within and among the various labor organizations, I believe that the Hollywood guilds and unions do an admirable job of promoting and protecting the material needs of its members while containing and channeling their aspirations and frustrations.
Just consider what they’re up against.
The global corporations which control information, news, media and entertainment are among the most powerful and influential entities on the planet: Disney (ABC), Viacom (Paramount), Time Warner (Warner Bros.), Sony (Columbia Pictures) CBS (Showtime), NBC Universal (A & E) and Murdock’s News Corp. (Fox).
Why don’t these conglomerates follow the path of the rest of the corporate world and simply do away with their pesky American unions? Maybe the arcane jurisdictional structure of the Hollywood guilds are just too entrenched to untangle and discard. Or that the status quo serves another important strata of the Hollywood “elite” – the directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors and others – who belong to, and help govern, these unions and guilds.
Some would argue that the global capital and technological strategies of these employers will eventually disable the unions anyway. But the fact is that film and television producers continue – at least for now – to cut deals with the collective representatives of their employees. These includes the so called “above the line” unions: The Directors Guild, The Writers Guild and the newly-merged Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists); and the “below the line” unions: The IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employee – the “IA”) the Teamsters and others.
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