Strike in a Ghost Town

Actor Clifton Webb walked across the 20th Century-Fox lot one day last week and wept real tears. "It's so awful," said he, "everything has stopped. In the barbershop, no one talked."

Things have been pretty quiet in all the barbershops and all the studios for years, but after the Screen Actors Guild followed the screen writers and went on strike last week, Hollywood looked more than ever like a ghost town. It was the first time in Hollywood history that actors had walked out, although in the '30s and '40s there had been plenty of strikes by other movie unions. This time there were no pickets, no soup kitchens, no sheriffs' deputies. Big shots from both sides of the barricades simply drove home in their Cadillacs and snarled at each other from their swimming pools.

But the strike was on, just the same, and whether or not it would be settled quickly, it told a lot about the present state of the movie industry.

Recognizing Relatives. Eight pictures under way at major studios were stopped dead by the strike. At Fox, Marilyn Monroe, Yves Montand and Tony Randall walked off the set of Let's Make Love. At Paramount, Fred Astaire, Debbie Reynolds and Lilli Palmer reluctantly gave up The Pleasure of His Company.

Both at home and abroad, independent operators signed with the guilds and kept cameras grinding. But Hollywood skeptics suggested that the big studio bosses would bear up under the strike, make it an occasion for dumping movie production, and settle for the larger payoff that can be had from renting out facilities and distributing movies made by independent companies. The struck studios pared their payrolls with wondrous promptness. Flacks, grips, makeup artists and story analysts found themselves suddenly on "vacation." Counting off the remaining jobholders, one studio guard cracked: "Now we can recognize the relatives."

A Way of Life. The issues had a strangely artificial ring. After twelve years of temporizing, both the Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild had hardened their demands for a cut from any sale to TV of movies made after 1948. The studio heads replied that 1) they had no notion of selling those movies to TV anyway, but 2) if they did, the actors and writers were not entitled to a cut for jobs already paid for.

"This is no longer a matter of money or terms, but a question of principle," proclaimed an ad signed by Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, James Cagney, Bing Crosby, Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine, Bob Hope, Edward G. Robinson, Spencer Tracy et al.

But there was also plenty of opposition to the walkout. Said John Wayne, apparently forgetting that he too had signed the ad: "I don't know what the hell they're striking about." Since anyone who appears on screen, no matter how briefly, becomes a guild member, complaints were heard that the strike vote had been carried by thousands who are not really screen actors. (Guild President Ronald Reagan has not appeared in a movie for three years.)

Columnist Hedda Hopper, who has seldom acted for a decade, hinted of stuffed ballot boxes (she got two ballots, voted against the strike on both) and of Red influence. "This is the greatest industry ever put in the hands of man," she said. "I don't want our way of life thrown in the discard."

The Exodus. Others besides Hedda were worried. The spectacle of millionaire movie actors lined up with extras against the men who once ran the town suggested to Hollywood oldtimers the end of an era. In fact, that era had ended long ago. "I'm not going to start another picture," said M-G-M Producer Joe Pasternak, "until the actors decide to give the business back to the bosses." But there are virtually no bosses around to take it back.

The businessmen who followed the sun westward generations ago to build their dream world on the Hollywood lots are dead, dying or dispersed. Harassed by taxes, producers and actors have split Hollywood into countless independent corporations that make more and more of their movies abroad. The strike has only hastened the exodus of hangers-on, the hard-up hopefuls who could never make it unless the whole town was working; even if the strike is settled, many of them will never be back in movies.

At week's end, negotiators on both sides were suggesting that the guilds would allow the eight suspended pictures to resume work, and that studio heads would agree to a discussion of TV "residuals." But some 2,200 studio employees have already applied for unemployment compensation.

"I gotta live," cracked one out-of-work actor, "so I signed on as a salesman for a new dentifrice--Strike Toothpaste, guaranteed to remove film."

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