When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler Source: chronicle.com A debate is raging over the studios' alleged collusion with the Nazis in the 1930s.

richertwilliam@mac.com

 

Dear Eric and Dennis,

 

Started reading this article then wrote a bit for facebook:

 

SUNDAY MORNING REFLECTION ON AN ARTICLE ABOUT COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS AND HITLER:  WHAT DID THE UNIONS KNOW?

 

While our present lawsuit against the lawyers in the Hollywood unions -- USAC VS SCREEN ACTORS' GUILD -- is nothing like the fight of much of humanity against Hitler, it illustrates the labyrinth levels of collaboration amongst seeming enembies – like Jewish studio heads and exterminating Nazis – can exist and do exist for complex reasons, mostly involving money.

 

Like union lawyers working both sides, studio and union, for their own benefit.

 

Right now I’m watching two of the publications mentioned in this article – VARIETY and THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – along with the other major LA Newspapers and virtually all the national telvsison media – either distort the facts in the lawsuit against corruption in Screen Actors’ Guild and its inscestuous marriage to American Federation of Television and Radio Artists – or refuse to write and report openly that some of the union’s most respected and illustrious members are saying in a courtroom that the unions are thieves and liars and have misled their membership.

 

Instead the reporters write almost nothing at all, anywhere, except to cast the fighters against the union as "disgruntled" instead of outright rebels against a corrupt and secretive union hierarchy, an executive staff where no actor is allowed to work, and no elected official is allowed to speak.

 

Since his virtual coup in 2009, installed in office without any vetting from a compliant Board of Directors, no elected official has been allowed to speak on union matters except through David White, its CEO, and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, General Counsel.

 

This is democratic?

 

In reporting about our lawsuit against SAG, where 16 actors and more are litigating about theft of residuals and foreign levies, both VARIETY and THE HOLLYWOOD RFEPORTER have withheld key facts from their readers, while the other newspaers like the LA Times have actually provided the unions with facts in out lawsuit even before the unions got the complaint -- the Los Angeles Times Richard Verrier gave SAG  inside information, got union response, and then wrote one story that mislead and not a word since.

 

More on this later.

 

This morning I’m remembering, based on this important article, how my great pal Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean, who wrote THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT which became Hitchcok’s movie, used to talk about the Vichy regime’s support of the Nazi’s and the hypocracy of Joe Kennedy and others who secretly helped Hitler.  There were many.  Jimmy could sing Milton to the tune of Inke dinke parlez vous (sp?) and I was there the night he fired Lyndon Johnson by telegraph, sitting in the corner of his couch, dictating like Churchill (I know this worked because I spoke at length with Johnson’s daughter Lucy Johnson Nugent during an interview in Austin, Texax and she rememberd a particular incident before Johnson made his decision not to run a second time) (one night Jimmy and Winston got totally drunk in a bar in Italy I think it was, in a city with a steep hill, and Jimmy wanted one drink more but Winston said no and took a cab.  When Jimmy took his cab down, it was crashed by another car, where Winston would have been sitting and killed no doubt.

 

Lots of stories I heard those days with Jimmy and his wife Diana Forbes-Robertson, whose aunt Maxine Elliot was mistress to Edward  VII of England and J.P. Morgan (one morning at breakfast at Cannes, where Maxine had a slide that went down to the ocean, my friend Diana went down to the long long table and there was Winston and he was talking about Franco making alliances with Germany and some line had been crossed in Spain and he put his fist down next to his coffee and said that he must return to England and perhaps look to Russiia for help – Churchill was an Admiral at the time – and Maxine said “Oh Winston, you wouldn’t ally yourself with those awful Communists, would you? And Churchill answered:  “I would make an alliance with Satan Himself to save England” – I heard this from the woman who heard this, and who repeated it to me while sounding like Churchill –( has there passed away a greatness from this earth? )– now it’s here on facebook me to you; I can still here Diana’s imitation of Churchill ringing like the bells of Parliment) – anyhow, we used to drink martinis me being twenty something and feeling short next to the tall Irishman and Jimmy would sing AIDA (once I answered the phone to a woman who said “it’s Mary” in a deep Southern accent,  it was the great opera singer Leontine Price – also Greta Garbo would call and Thornton Wilder and John Gunther – but mostly Jimmy would tell stories and sing operas while frying or reading Wordsworth or Keats or Milton with a kind of a lisp as his teeth were going.

 

(In some of our all-nighter conversations I used to tell River Phoneix stories I’d heard from Jimmy and read him Wordsworth and Lawrence and others, like Jimmy read them for me.  River liked them as much as I did and sometimes played his guitar with the poetry. That was an amazing time too, but another story.)

 

Jimmy was also great friends with Faisal of Arabia and Mahatma Ghandi – Jimmy was there in the next room when Ghandi was assassinated, and I often took up mail from the doorman downstairs from his Mahatma’s  daughter Indira when she was Prime Minister of India – Jimmy famously powerfully lectured the full-house Louisiana senate in front of Huey Long on the treatment of the former slave population, who he said had to be included with total equality by every human measure before America itself would be freed from slavery --  This was during Vietnam, and he explained to me  how the United States would no longer be a “capitalist country” because it was spending all its capital on oil and bombs. He’d cook bacon in a frying pan sipping martinis at his side, himself being six-foot-four, friends with the leaders of China, too (Chou En Lai, Chairman Peoples Republic of China at the time told Jimmy with a smile “it is true, a nuclear bomb could destroy half a billion of our people.  But of course we would still have half a billion more, while with this number you would have less than none.”  This is a direct historical quote, maybe printed nowhere before.)

 

Jimmy said that in 20 years the Red Chinese would be marching down Broadway, since the tiger was awakening.  That hasn’t happened, except metaphorically. Jimmy watched the rise of Hitler with his friends Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemmingway and a hundred other legends of their time and Jimmy despised the Nazi’s with a visceral anger you won’t find in CASABLANCA, and he knew first hand how an entire people could be overtaken by tyranny while they watched it happen.  Nazis were never entertaining or endearing in any way whatsoever, as they almost were in STALAG 17, for example, which I acted in in High School.

 

I don’t have conversations like those any more, but I see these present-day Hollywood studios and their secret deals with the unions, with blacklisting and stealing and backstabbing a culture like it must have been during the McCarthy days or now it seems the Hitler days, if this article holds true.

 

Presently I am writing a story for fellow USAC anti-corruption fighters – we’re not a “committee” connected to any institution but a wholly-independent self-formed and ultimately numberless committee of CEO/Actors, insisting on taking charge of our destiny and getting the money owed to us – I’m writing a memo about how THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER and the formerly august (tinselly) VARIETY and the LA TIMES have blatantly succumbed to union-studio pressure and refused to faithfully report the truth about the lawsuit we’ve filed in a Federal Court naming the union studio-owned lawyers who’ve completely and absolutely taken control of the members from the elected officials and absconded with the actors, writers and directors they were meant to represent.

 

When the leaders of a company town are named as crooks, this is important to the company town, and the company town’s reporters ought to write about it.  Once upon a time it would be their duty to report the such news. Sharon Waxman is emblematic of the trending smart silent set of self-censoring “journalists,” a word sullied and newly defined by this invasive specimen of the un-reporting reporter, she formerly of the NY TIMES.

 

 

In 2013 Hollywood’s newly-famous “Black List” is actually a list of “good” scripts, unlike the WGA-HOLLYWOOD REPORTER-MAJOR STUDIO “Blacklist” of our fathers that sent great writers into hellish retreat from the business they helped shape and create.

 

Our Federal case is a story being told as it unfolds, we won’t wait for a generation to pass before the aims of UNITED SCREEN ACTORS COMMITTEE VS SAG are known to the thousands of artists who have lost income and civil rights because of collaborative unions and studios.

 

We need free and transparent economic representatives for artists, because mostly ill-paid artists are the canaries in society, with special songs that lawyers can’t silence or suppress, or barely hear themselves, that need to be heard by the people, even if we must discover lawyers as outraged as ourselves who do heed the calls and songs like Helena Wise and fighters like Eric Hughes and Ed Asner and Tom Bower and Dennis Hayden to help us remove betrayers like David White and Duncan Crabtree-Irland and Robert Hadl.  I mention these union lawyers names because the newspapers will not, even though these names are written 49 times in our lawsuit, one of the most significant labor lawsuits in US history.

 

It is very dangerous to have artists in the grip of bad union leaders.  Artists are unpredictable, universal, narcissistic, selfless, relentless, fearless, highly communicative, potent observers, and often very rich. Cheers William Richert.