Recently, former Paramount head Barry Diller suggested that movie moguls—and Hollywood’s highest paid actors—take 25% pay cuts. The goodwill gesture, by Diller’s reasoning, just might help bridge the gap between the striking writers and actors and the big studios and streamers. When I first heard Diller’s proposal I thought, It’s déjà vu all over again. Few remember that in 1933, the studios actually joined together to mandate that administrators and creators making over $50 a week take a 50% pay cut.

It didn’t work then and it probably won’t work now.

There are many reasons the move failed 90 years ago. But the bottom-line difference was that in 1933 writers and actors were not yet unionized. And in retrospect, it is clear that the studios, by imposing those steep cuts, made the writers—followed by the actors and directors—realize that their contracts were worthless without unions. (Screenwriters formed a guild that April; actors did so in July.)

Yes, there were already cinema organizations aplenty. For years, writers had belonged to clubs and associations. In 1922, a consortium of film companies had created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), otherwise known as the Hays Office, to lobby for the industry’s interests and to try and minimize censorship. Then, five years later, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was formed, in large part to prevent the unionization of the still-burgeoning, if silent, film business. Brought together under one umbrella, the Academy’s five branches—writers, actors, directors, producers, and technicians—served to speed along the process of making sound pictures. (There are 18 branches today.) But by early 1933, a perfect financial storm had swept across Southern California, one that threatened the industry that, along with agriculture, tourism, and oil, was the backbone of the Los Angeles economy.

The Depression, which began in 1929, had circled the globe and hit Hollywood with a wallop. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in early March of 1933 and closed the country’s banks for a week to get a handle on the economy. Suddenly, fewer and fewer Americans had cash for necessities, let alone movies. (By 1933, audience numbers had dropped to 60 million a week—from a sky-high 110 million in 1929.)

Filmmaking was a cash-on-the-barrelhead business, so studios turned to Wall Street for financing, eventually welcoming new moneymen and risk-takers who really hadn’t a clue about the movies. It got to the point that by the end of the year, there was not one person on the board of Paramount Pictures with previous experience making films.

It was the MPPDA, after all, that had come up with the idea to push the salary cut. And Warner Bros., Paramount, and Columbia complied: All three were among the studios that, on March 9, 1933, instituted wage reductions. At the time, MGM alone was operating in the black, thanks in large part to the success of the popular comedies of Canadian actor Marie Dressler. But MGM’s boss, Louis B. Mayer, apparently, only had enough money on hand to cover his staffers’ salaries for a couple of weeks.

As MGM story editor Samuel Marx later wrote in his book Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints, Mayer, with his beard “stubbled and his eyes red,” entered the largest auditorium on the lot at a pivotal moment in March to address his assembled employees. Mayer promised to keep the salary reductions short-lived and, if necessary, to repay them all out of his own pocket. He feigned tears. His voice caught. Lionel Barrymore and others cheered him on, expressing their support. When Mayer left the room, feeling triumphant, Marx heard him ask the casting chief, Benny Thau, “How did I do?” (Mayer’s crocodile tears moment was recreated in a scene in David Fincher’s 2020 feature, Mank, about the tortured birth of Citizen Kane.)

Word of Mayer’s cynical comments soon spread. And the film community got mightily riled. They held meetings. They looked to other industries across America in which organized labor was becoming a vital force. In short order, the screenwriter Albert Hackett would credit Mayer with creating, in one fell swoop, “more communists than Karl Marx.” And one long, hard look at their “contracts” proved to the writers, directors, and actors that those pieces of paper offered them no protection. Their only option was to unionize.

On March 28, 1933, movie scribes Anita Loos, Frances Marion, Jane Murfin, and Bess Meredyth were among the 100 women and men who gathered to sign $100 membership checks made out to the Screen Writers Guild (SWG). A week later, on April 6, those 100, along with scores of compatriots who joined their ranks “by invitation or application,” comprised the newly formed SWG. John Howard Lawson, who had few film credits to his name (but who, 14 years later, would become one of the blacklisted Hollywood 10, was elected the guild’s first president. Frances Marion, the town’s highest paid screenwriter, male or female—and one of its most prolific—was named vice president; producer-screenwriter Ralph Block, treasurer; and Joe Mankiewicz, still in his early 20s, secretary. (When his older brother, Herman, was asked why he didn’t support the guild, he claimed, with his cynical wit, “All the $250-a-week writers I know are making $2,500 a week.”)

In truth, half of all writers on salary were making less than $4,000 a year (nearly $100,000 in today’s dollars). Many were not even getting screen credit. By year’s end, the SWG had expanded to 750 members, most of them dropping out of the Academy after its leadership chimed in and backed the pay cuts. As Dorothy Parker reportedly said, “Looking to the Academy for representation was like trying to get laid in your mother’s house. Somebody was always in the parlor, watching.” (In the 1910s, Parker had made her name as a columnist, theater reviewer, and humorist for Vanity Fair before moving to Hollywood to take up screenwriting. Anita Loos also wrote the occasional VF piece.)

In his book The Academy and the Award, Bruce Davis, the longtime executive director of AMPAS, points out that in order to woo back Academy members (who had departed, even as union membership was on the rise), the organization would spend several years instituting significant rules changes, including preventing the Academy from interfering with labor and employment issues. Over time, the awarding of Oscars and the establishment of the body as a pantheon of proven talent would assure the institution’s unique position.

Women were the prime movers and shakers behind the creation of the SWG. A few months later, it was male character actors who urged the formation of the Actors Guild. Ralph Morgan, who the year before had appeared with Norma Shearer and Clark Gable in Strange Interlude (based on the Eugene O’Neill play), was the group’s first president. Eddie Cantor, the actor, comedian, and singer-songwriter, focused on conscripting actors from across the spectrum, helping grow the organization in a matter of weeks from 80 members—to 4,000.

That August, Irving Thalberg, MGM’s production chief, returned from a monthslong trip to Europe and was appalled by the impact of the wage cuts that Mayer, following the lead of the other studios, had instituted in Thalberg’s absence. Most of MGM’s writers respected Thalberg and assumed he would stand up for them. So when Frances Marion had a private meeting with him, she was shocked that he accused her of betrayal. As she recounted in her memoir, Off With Their Heads!, she told him, “We’re only asking for help for a lot of helpless people. You, who are so generous hearted, should understand that.” Instead, he “coldly” stared at her and said, “I thought you were my friend.” It was hard to hear, as she did consider him a friend. But when he wondered why “his writers want to join a union like coal miners and plumbers”—and asked Frances to promise to “stop all this agitation”—she refused to leave the SWG or her position as its vice president.

Thalberg had depended on Marion to write dozens of films for the likes of Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, and his wife, Norma Shearer, but faced with what he considered her intransigence, he canceled her contract, proving yet again the one-sided nature of Hollywood’s power dynamic. Until the need for content got the better of him. A few months later, he hired her back to write, one story at a time.

What followed was an eight-year roller coaster. Mayer never did repay the MGM employees, but in the summer of 1933 the company’s shareholders had received their full dividends. (Some priorities have not changed over nine decades.) Different studios closed for a week or two at a time. Transparency was an issue, then as now. The question arose in various quarters: Did Mayer and the other top studio bosses, Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, and Harry Cohn, really agree to that much-ballyhooed pay cut? Most Hollywood bookmakers wouldn’t have taken that bet.

And while the writers and actors unions had their day in the sun, they soon struggled to keep their guilds together. The leaders that emerged often paid the price—either by being marginalized or hounded by the studios, who engaged in endless power plays and grandstanding.

As a nationalistic, anti-Communist backlash began to sweep the heartland, Hollywood felt the sting as well. In 1936, a competing right-wing organization, the Screen Playwrights, came into being as the SWG’s membership plunged into the double digits. Lacking real bargaining teeth with the studios, however, the Screen Playwrights only lasted a brief time and, finally, in 1941, as the US entered World War II, the movie companies agreed to recognize the SWG. In between, many writers had been taken off salary and then hired back, one film at a time; other variations of employment were also devised. Still, screenwriters, then as before, had to sign over the rights to their stories to the omnipotent studios.

The strike of 1960 was the last and only time that Hollywood writers and actors walked out in tandem. The writers exited in mid-January; the actors followed almost two months later. The writers strike dragged on for 155 days. But before too long, several dozen independent producers (many of whom were actors themselves) began to forge their own deals with members of the SWG. Universal was the first lot to peel off from the others and enter into agreements. Meanwhile, the actors, under union president Ronald Reagan, finalized a deal with the studios, who agreed to commit to paying residuals and improving health care benefits. (“Ronnie never had an original thought,” wrote the actor James Garner—then SAG’s vice president—in his memoir The Garner Files. “We had to tell him what to say.”) The large writers bloc came back soon after, having established residual payments for both films and television, a pension fund, and a health insurance plan.

The guilds had sprung up in 1933 against gale-force headwinds: the scourge of the Great Depression, the interim shuttering of the banks, and the perceived fragility of the studio system, which was already on a financial knife edge due to Hollywood magnates realizing (after the breakthrough of the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, in 1927) that they had to invest heavily in a new technology: sound films. The moguls had built their studios brick by brick and they understood that unless they pivoted immediately to talkies, their slate of films would be destined for the dustbin.

In 2023, the guilds walked out at a similarly fraught time, as a quintuple-whammy hit them right in the paycheck. COVID had recently rocked the industry. The looming threat of AI was on the horizon. The early success of streaming had prompted studios to spend outrageously, and unsustainably. CEOs were getting massive pay increases. And actors were plagued by a lack of transparency, a reduction of residuals (last negotiated decades before), and the failure of studios and streamers to pay most of them a living wage. What’s more, the moguls of 2023 had to answer to board members, shareholders, or bankers, many of whom had no real knowledge of filmmaking but had come to the erroneous conclusion that unless their companies could come up with blockbusters and sequels, their slate of pictures—not unlike silent movies during the Depression—would be headed for the dustbin as well.

So what’s next? Well, the creative women and men who make film and television—as well as the streamers and studios who fund them—have to do what they did in 1933. They have to keep their collective eyes on the prize: a sustainable, transparent, and more equitable business structure.

Who can get them all there? It’s anyone’s guess.

Cari Beauchamp is the author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood and five other books on film history. She is the only person to have been twice awarded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences film scholarship.