The museum “will be a place for discourse about important social issues connected to both our cinematic history and our industry,” Bill Kramer, the museum’s director, said Thursday in a statement to The Times. He also emphasized that the exhibits will continually evolve “to allow us to keep engaging with new subjects.” Last month, Jacqueline Stewart, chief artistic and programming officer for the museum, emphasized its educational mission, saying “there is an urgency now to conversations about media representation and the power of cinema to shape policy and public opinion.”
But there’s one topic that the museum has not quite confronted: the history of labor and unions in the industry itself. To be fair, it makes a few stabs at it. The exhibit on “The Wizard of Oz” uses the movie as a case study on the contributions of different departments such as publicity, sound and editing. It reminds visitors that the magic was made in “factory-like settings” and gives a nod to the teams of craftspeople who made it happen. Still, the museum presents filmmaking as primarily an artistic endeavor, not an industrial production.
A prominent display on the capacity of movies to influence the public highlights four issues: climate change, the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and labor relations. The labor section mentions classic films such as “Norma Rae” (1979) and the blacklisted “Salt of the Earth” (1954) and documentaries including “American Factory” (2019) and “Harlan County, USA” (1976). But all of it is focused on labor conflict outside the industry. Labor relations within Hollywood are left unexamined, at least for now. (The Times asked the museum to address the absence of a more comprehensive exhibit on unions and the industry, but Kramer’s statement did not offer a specific comment.)
It’s not as if there’s a shortage of material. Unions have played a significant role in the history of Hollywood. Filmmaking was the original gig economy, and how the movie business dealt with solving problems of pay and portable benefits has lessons for today, says Catherine Fisk, a UC Berkeley law professor and author of “Writing for Hire,” a history of labor relations in film, television and advertising.
On such issues as pay, residuals and credits, the unions have helped establish “a system of sector-wide collective bargaining wage and benefit and intellectual property systems that are the envy of video game production, software development” and other tech industries, Fisk says.
But the studios were often deeply antagonistic to the unions and time and again tried to break them. An important part of the Red Scare and the blacklist was an attempt to weaken the unions by suggesting they were havens for communists.