James Earl Jones had to contend in that one, not just with management, but with the guys down in the mine. (1976), or in John Sayles' mining drama Matewan (1987) set a half century earlier. Still, with the decline of the studio system, independent filmmakers began exploring labor stories that centered on the little guy in, say, the coal-mining documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. Reviled by many in the industry for destroying careers by doing so, he offered On the Waterfront as a rebuttal of sorts, with hero Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) depicted as noble for testifying against corrupt union bosses. Two years earlier, at the height of the Hollywood Blacklist, which barred from employment any worker who was alleged to have subversive inclinations, Kazan had named names to HUAC. No one did that with more urgency than Elia Kazan in 1954's On the Waterfront.

Mayer told his biographer that one of the ideas behind the 1927 formation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the group that hands out the Oscars, was to encourage actors, directors and designers to think of themselves not as workers, but as artists, so they wouldn't join Hollywood's technicians in forming labor unions.ĭueling visions of labor during the blacklistĪll this, while Hollywood kept churning out films that depicted labor organizers as communists, and labor bosses as gangsters. Disney was hardly the only movie mogul seeking to counter labor organizers in the industry's early days.

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