When Ronald Reagan Attacked Hollywood Studios: The Story of the 1960 Actors’ Strike

It was another Hollywood. The one where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had just swept Benhur, and Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe had won a victory with One Eve and two Adams. The one where Disney had released its most expensive animated film to date a year ago (and one of its biggest business missteps), sleeping Beauty (1959).

At this time in the industry, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) identified that its members were not being adequately compensated and approved a strike. If in the current mobilization the focus of their demands is on issues related to the era of streaming and the use of artificial intelligence, then the heart of their demands was linked to the changes produced by the massification of television.

Ronald Reagan had been in Los Angeles for more than two decades and he had already held the presidency between 1947 and 1952. His colleagues trusted the future president of the United States – at that time, a Democratic Party activist – to play the role again and lead the negotiations with the major studios Hollywood.

Actors were looking for a specific and, until those years, unprecedented change: to receive payment each time a film was shown on television. The so-called royalties, which until then only applied to each new airing of their series. With Reagan at the helm, the Screen Actors Guild sought not only to introduce future compensation, but to enforce it retroactively, particularly around the 1948-1959 period.

The lawsuit stunned studios at the time, including Universal Pictures, Paramount, Disney, Warner Brothers, MGM, Columbia and 20th Century Fox. they had already paid the performers when they filmed the tape in question and that any subsequent amount was irrelevant.

But the players stuck to their guns and, after negotiations failed, went on strike.

It began on March 7, 1960 and had immediate consequences, crippling the filming of the films that Elizabeth Taylor (A mink Venus), Marilyn Monroe (the beautiful sinner), Gina Lollobrigida (go naked in the world) and Jack Lemon (The craziest ship in the army). Hollywood has been suspended twice , because since January of the year the screenwriters of the medium have mobilized. The situation was tense. Until this week, it was the last time the actors’ and writers’ unions went on strike simultaneously.

The request of the SAG, considered an excess at the beginning, was suddenly accepted. Reagan showed the political doll, and Universal Pictures was the first studio to accept royalty payments. Then the rest of the companies accepted the idea, causing the strike to end on April 18 of that year.

At the end of these 43 days, the actors did not obtain all their requests, but there were significant advances: they would receive royalties for each reissue of the tapes made after 1960 and, although there was no compensation for films released between 1948 and 1959, a one-time payment of $2.25 million was agreed to go directly to guild coffers. This amount allowed the creation of a health insurance plan and a pension plan, which will continue to this day.

Actors like Reagan himself didn’t benefit the most (he gave up acting during that decade), but one figure settled that rules to this day: payment for TV shows. or, more recently, streaming. The future American president and his company have gone down in history.