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Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal

The Hollywood Black Friday Riot (GT Mini)

Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal

Ghost Town

Social Sciences, True Crime, History, Science

3.7938 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A labor strike comes to a violent resolution in 1945 Hollywood.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hollywood-held hostage. I'm Rebecca Lieb. I'm Jason Horton. And this is Ghost Town.

0:19.3

On October 5, 1945, a six-month strike by the set decorators represented by the Conference

0:25.1

of Studio Unions came to a boil leading to a bloody riot at the gates of one or

0:30.0

other studios known as Hollywood Black Friday. And it is Friday. It is Friday. Today is a Friday.

0:39.1

This is about a Friday and we're discussing Fridays. What do you want? What do you want?

0:44.8

Nothing. Probably everything. No, this is all you want and it's all you'll get.

0:49.8

Well, that's what Hollywood told the crew and workers and they were like, no, how about

0:57.3

we riot? In 1945, the movie industry is at the tail end of the Golden Age of Hollywood and post-World

1:04.0

War II. Things are changing and the movie industry is making huge profits. Think about that time

1:10.1

in the 1940s. I mean, I'm really releasing like 40 movies a month or something like that.

1:16.0

Exactly. Movie stars are big. We got your carry grants and your Gregory Pecs.

1:22.4

Totally, but they're all tied to the studio system. So they are really beholden. It's not like

1:26.7

now where celebrities are bigger than life. They can work for many studios, do lots of different

1:31.4

things. At that point, unless the studio released them to do a film somewhere else or to do

1:37.2

some kind of shoot or a player, whatever, they were really, really beholden to the studio that

1:41.3

they worked for. And they worked there for many, many years, like contracts for 10 years, 20 years.

1:45.3

It's a long time. And sometimes that worked out and sometimes you found that that wasn't great

1:49.3

because careers waned and things changed and you're stuck at a place where you can't do what you

1:55.4

want or you can't do something that will continue your career. For once, we're not going to talk

2:01.3

about the celebrity. For once. We're going to talk about the people that make the things happen,

2:07.6

namely, in this case, the set decorators. I like that. The people that made, you know,

2:13.0

these sets were amazing lavish, huge ground breaking, especially the time, like go back and watch

...

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