LABOR: Hold Your Hats, Boys

Hollywood’s labor picture unreeled like an old-fashioned serial. For the umpteenth time in the industry’s hair-raising history, movie producers and quarreling A.F.L. unioneers scuffled along the brink of studio chaos.

Pickets massed angrily last week at the gates of Warner Brothers, M-G-M and five other major Hollywood lots, as they had done for 34 weeks last year and again for two days in July. Studio laborers scattered tacks in the path of movie stars’ automobiles, threw coffee in the faces of picket-line crossers, stoned busloads of rival A.F.L. workers convoyed through their jeering, milling ranks.

The new blowoff came when the studios instituted wholesale firings of carpenters and painters belonging to the A.F.L. Conference of Studio Unions. C.S.U. members had refused to work on sets where producers had handed over disputed jobs to the competing A.F.L. International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Neither the jurisdictional squabble nor the producers’ inclination to string along with the I.A.T.S.E. faction were new angles in Hollywood’s continuing labor war.

Moviemakers had acquired the habit of dealing exclusively with the I.A.T.S.E. when the union was bossed by racketeers Willie Bioff and George Browne (since jailed and paroled). I.A.T.S.E. control of movie-house projectionists had always been a trump card. The C.S.U., led by beefy, belligerent Herb Sorrell, business agent for the Painters Union, had gradually broken the I.A.T.S.E. monopoly.

Low-Flyer. A rough, tough bargainer, ex-prizefighter Sorrell raised producers’ hackles last year when, after winning a 25% pay increase, he cried: “From now on, we dictate.” His politics are of the far left; his relations with the C.I.O. are chummy. The I.A.T.S.E. once threatened to try him before an A.F.L. court on charges of being a Communist, but later dropped the accusation. Last winter he was thrown in jail for defying a court order to restrain mass picketing.

Because a local ordinance prohibited sound trucks, Picketer Sorrell patrolled last week outside Warners with a portable amplifier strapped to his back. Later he took to the air, blared encouragement from a low-flying plane.

After last year’s protracted strike, the C.S.U. and I.A.T.S.E had agreed to let a three-man committee, appointed by the A.F.L. executive council, iron out their studio jurisdictional differences. Last August the committee had awarded the set-building jobs to the C.S.U. But neither the I.A.T.S.E. nor the producers abided by the decision. With a fat backlog of finished pictures, moviemakers talked of shutting up shop and starting all over again to settle the mess. Said Sorrell: “Well, hold your hats. Here we go again.”