Working-Class Hollywood

by Steven J. Ross

This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America.


Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers.


Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.

Genres: History, Film, Nonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published December 22, 1997

Reviews

[Beth Cato · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for research needs. As a textbook, it is somewhat dry, but still readable with interesting information throughout. The emphasis is on the organized labor movement in the two two decades of the 20th century, as labor leaders attempted to utilize the new phenomenon of movies for their own ends, to mixed results. Hollywood has a reputation as a liberal bastion in our modern age, but quite the contrary a century ago. Labor organizers had trouble getting funding for studios, much less distribution.

At the same time, the very nature of society changed as the concept of the middle class emerged, with the 1920s introducing a consumerism. Many movies represented the 'common' working man in comedies such as those by Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, or played with the idea of cross-class romance. Some fantasies envisioned inheritances and respect come overnight, or reinforced the idea that one had best stay in association with their own.

[Greta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent, though somewhat repetitive, book on how labor issues were depicted in silent films, how the film industry's labor issues influenced their ideology, censorship, and the efforts of labor to bring their side of the story to the screen. Written by a labor scholar rather than a film scholar, and it's interesting to see the topic from a fresh viewpoint

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best chapters in this book focus on the rise and fall of labor-produced movies in the 10s and 20s, history that is pretty much lost. Ross does a good job of documenting the hopes of labor activists who wanted to produce independent films from the working man's viewpoint -- the efforts they made to create studios, theater chains, and a culture to counteract the pernicious propaganda lies about classless affluence spread by Edison, Ford, and Hollywood. Of course, none of the union plans work out but the story is plenty interesting, with all sides apparently aware of the stakes raised by the movies' finger on the attitudes of America.

The author's clear bias on the side of labor is one I share but it doesn't improve the book and too often in this mostly fascinating history fantasies are painted as facts, mismanagement and criminality are glossed over, and the muddy left-wing values of Stalin-era activism are excused. That said, for all the faults of the left, the political right and the capitalist establishment consistently behave far worse and one finishes this book with the usual numb sense of outrage against the common cast of American villains -- corporations, bankers, and smug Republicans.

It might have been a better world.

[China · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was an amazingly vital labor film industry during the silent era. Labor Unions and Organizations (AFL, CIO, IWW) began their own production studios and released several feature length films that aimed to represent actual labor struggles in a fair light. They were an important reaction to the anti-labor studios and films being released at the time.
His analysis of the popularity of the movie palaces during the early twenties was particularly illuminating...

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen J. Ross argued that, before the rise to dominance of Hollywood film industry in the 1920s, a widespread worker-film movement pushed pro-labor, pro-socialist, and anti-capitalist messages to mainly working class audiences who attended nickelodians in the 1910s, which spurred a reaction by government censors, moral crusaders, and film industrialists. The silent film era was an opportuninty to build a different sort of film industry of class conscious workers, which labor organizers and socialists worked hard to build. Producers, actors, and directors made this a thriving genre within silent films. The movie houses themselves were rowdy and egalitarian, meaning you could sit cheaply anywhere, which kept away middle class audiences. The production of the films was decentralized and diversified, often funded by petty immigrant entrepreneurs. By the 1920s, following the Red Scare of 1919, Hollywood centralized production of films and pushed a class-blind message that all mass consumers were middle class, and that labor agitators were cartoonish Russian agitator-traitors. Though unions continued to fund production, they had a hard time showing them at theaters, as in the 1920s construction of film palaces pushed working class people away and attracted middle class audiences. Even today, pro-labor films are comparatively rare and poorly distributed, limited to a few favorites like Matewan, Reds, Norma Rae, Salt of the Earth, etc.

Key Themes and Concepts:
-The movies that dealt with working-class culture, agitation, and class conflict (Ross termed “worker-capital films”) is divided into five categories: radical, conservative (anti-worker), liberal (proper organizers are non-violent), populist (melodramas about rise of leaders), and anti-authoritarian (comedies about absurdity of capitalism).
-The rise of working class cinema in the 1910s was followed by the crushing of it by middle-class Hollywood, which became a way of producing as much as a location.
-Five points Ross found in his research:
1) hundreds of movies dealing with strikes 2) workers made movies that challenged political values 3) censors and government fought to keep films out of theaters 4) movies had rich history before Hollywood 5) working class mainly the audience before WWI. 6) middle class audiences preferred conservative films.

[Evan Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit on the film-school scholarly side, but a well written and eye-opening book on the early social leanings of silent film *before* it became a big business. Many of these were independent films well outside of the studio system, which was nowhere near as impenetrable and stratified as it's become since the 1920's. This was an era when women, minorities and the lower class had much more access to the writing producing and exhibiting of stories that reflected their lives: labor, social mobility and real-life concerns rather than escapism and fantasy. With the current (though still underappreciated) documentary film movement, have we come full circle? An interesting question, perhaps for another book.

[Ivy Li · Rating 3 out of 5]

Learned a lot, falls pretty much smack dab in the middle in terms of reading difficulty. Slightly wordy but understandable and tolerable.
I liked how so much of early film was for the working- class and it’s hilarious that middle and upper classes feared cinema and nickelodeons, just reminds me of how they are afraid of EVERYTHING! You create a photography studio and commercialized portraiture and they’re scared, put on some movies, they’re scared. I mean this is valid though, I love how Edison Trust tried monopolize the film production and distribution industry only for filmmakers to move to Hollywood away from the New Jersey parents and for the Sherman Anti-Trust act to strike him down, this should be a Nickelodeon film.

[Erin Moonyeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare dissection of labor-films - pro union movies that prospered during the Silent Era, prior to the monopolization of the film industry by studio overlords in Hollywood. Ross analyzes how even films that have the veneer of 'pro working class' rarely fulfill that promise, only showing violent strikes and labor disputes, and never the circumstances that perpetuate the disharmony. Ross's analysis most covers the Progressive Era and the 1920s, with brief and succinct coverage of the 1930s through modern day.

[Kate Ly Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This guy was my professor I love the man