20 Hilberman, Sorrell, and Bioff

IN 1947, SIX YEARS after the Disney strike, Walt Disney sat before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Two chief investigators faced him.

“Have you at any time, in the past, had any Communists employed at your studio?” asked one investigator.

“Yes,” said Walt, “in the past I had some people that I definitely feel were Communists.”1

Walt named four people that day. Dave Hilberman was the only artist he mentioned. The other three were the business managers of the Screen Cartoon Guild. One of those three was the strike organizer Herbert K. Sorrell.2

Up to 1940, Hilberman, then twenty-nine, had been happy at the Disney studio. He had been Bill Tytla’s assistant and a talented layout artist, but he witnessed the mass layoffs in disbelief. Hilberman may have been the Disney artist most viscerally affected by the layoffs.

Born and raised in 1911 in Cleveland, Ohio, Hilberman attended the Cleveland School of Art for three years before joining the Cleveland Play House as a stagehand.3 Soon he became friends with locals who were members of the John Reed Club, an association of “leftwing artists, writers, musicians, part of the anti-fascist movement then.”4 In 1932 at age twenty-one, he signed up for a one-week club trip to Communist Russia. Something about the trip hooked Hilberman, and he extended his stay for six months.5

Disney strike leaders pose with heads of the Screen Actors Guild. Standing (left to right): George Bodle, Herb Sorrell, Kenneth Thomson (founding member of SAG), Bill Tytla, and Noel Madison (founding member of SAG). Kneeling: Dave Hilberman and Art Babbitt.

Hilberman enrolled in a program at the Leningrad Academy of Art, a Communist state-sponsored school that provided its students with a monthly stipend, housing, and art supplies. He earned extra money working backstage at three Leningrad theaters. Doing so, he discovered that Communism promoted racial equality such as he had never witnessed. “Between scenes, a White and Negro character appear at opposite ends of the proscenium arch and sing tunes as overtures to the next scene,” he wrote during that time. “Between acts the Negro singer came out to the audience and made a direct appeal to them to fight against race discrimination.”6

When he returned to the States, Hilberman told a Cleveland reporter that “he finds America dull and lifeless. . . . In Leningrad there was more fun and laughter. . . . Here, he finds, people are too serious-minded.”7

In July 1936 during Disney’s nationwide talent hunt, he was recruited with about forty other artists. Hilberman listed his Leningrad training, and at the time, Walt Disney considered the experience to his credit.8 He started at an entry-level position earning twenty dollars a week.

The Disney studio contrasted greatly with Leningrad. At Disney there was little artistic freedom; the pay was nearly half of what he could get as a set painter. Hilberman must have been struck by the difference, because it was around this time that he joined the Communist Party.9 In December 1937 it was Hilberman who picked up the issue of Time magazine and showed the article about Bioff to Babbitt.10

By early 1938 Hilberman was earning ninety dollars a week as a top layout man, and he was the first production layout artist to start working on Bambi. By 1940 he was supervising six others. When it came to talking with management, including Roy Disney, Hilberman was the spokesperson for forty other layout artists.

When the layoffs began that summer, everyone was on unsure footing. “You were about as good as Walt’s eyebrow was that day,” remembered one artist.11 Everything changed for Hilberman when he learned that his friend, Fantasia layout artist Zack Schwartz, was among those being laid off. Hilberman beseeched his superiors to reconsider, making a case for Schwartz’s talent and efficiency. “The powers that be wouldn’t hear of it,” he later said. “There was a situation where, having satisfied the director with the quality of your work, having [people] pitching for you, it still didn’t count. Which meant that you had absolutely no job security. This created a real uncertainty and a fear among the people.”12

The firings seemed to be unjust, but there was no independent entity to hear the artists’ grievances. There was no one who could bargain collectively with the management on behalf of the employees. There was no bona fide union.

To Art Babbitt, the studio’s policies began to reek of injustice. In mid-August 1940, he was shocked to learn that his experienced animation assistant, Bill Hurtz, was still earning only a top inbetweener’s salary of $25 a week. Hurtz requested $27.50 a week—the starting salary for an assistant.13 Babbitt penned a vitriolic note and sent it to Walt, who paged Babbitt to his office. Babbitt stormed in. Walt told him to mind his own business, and that if he or anyone else didn’t like the way the company was run, they could quit. Babbitt retorted that if the studio could not afford to give Hurtz a $2.50 raise, Babbitt would pay Hurtz out of his own pocket. Walt must have weighed the consequences. At the end of the day, Hurtz received his raise.14

But the studio was hurting. In the last year, it had lost $1.25 million, about 12 percent of the company’s total worth.15 Walt was not one to squirrel away cash; he had reinvested everything back into the studio. To cut costs, several projects still in development were placed on hold, like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Walt needed something cheaper and faster, and he swiftly began developing another feature film—one that would be only partially animated, only partially in Technicolor, and just 72 minutes long. Called The Reluctant Dragon after its cartoon centerpiece, it would be a whimsical tour of the Disney studio on film, interspersed with cartoon sequences.16

Around late August Babbitt was put on the cartoon Baggage Buster. In the short, Goofy tries in vain to handle a magician’s steamer trunk. Once again, Babbitt utilized live-action reference. He enlisted Dick Lundy to model Goofy’s movements, and Babbitt filmed him in front of the studio soundstage for several minutes over a few days. Walt showed up one day, brimming with enthusiasm. He said he had a new idea for a Goofy series. In Walt’s hand was a manual titled How to Ski. The Goof, said Walt, could star in an entire series of “How To” shorts.17 Babbitt saw that Goofy was evolving into an active sportsman—thanks to Woolie Reitherman.

As Babbitt was animating, he grew tense and insecure. The inspired looseness that once came so easily to him was gone. “Suddenly I had stiffened up in my animation,” he later reflected. “It’s like somebody getting stage fright—on a stage or in the movies. And my work began to look and feel metallic. It had a hardness to it. . . . I wanted my characters to live, and they weren’t really living.”18 He was doing what the teacher Don Graham had warned everyone against; he was tracing, not caricaturing. Babbitt followed the live-action reference so closely that Goofy’s hands even had five fingers instead of four.

Director Jack Kinney was unsatisfied. He said, “Mr. Babbitt required live action to be shot on all of his pick-up animation, that he would follow very closely. In fact, for my money, it was too close.” Walt remembered telling Babbitt, “‘You can’t use it as a crutch; it should be for inspiration only.’ . . . It got to a point where all of his work was stiff.”19

Walt didn’t need to tell this to the art-school graduates like Woolie Reitherman, Ward Kimball, or Frank Thomas. Nor did they appear to have any interest in unions.

Vice President Gunther Lessing was in a panic. It was around early September 1940, and he had learned that the IATSE had signed up seventeen cameramen—the majority of the department. These were the same cameramen who had voiced grievances earlier that year. Lessing, flanked by Herb Lamb, called Babbitt, Bill Roberts, and the rest of the Federation’s negotiating committee into his office.20

The committee hadn’t met since Lessing’s attempt to placate the cameramen six months before. Roberts called two of the cameramen up to Lessing’s room. He asked what had happened to the schedule for salary increases that he passed to Herb Lamb and Bill Garity. The cameramen said that no raises were distributed.

Lessing demanded to know what the Federation would do about this IATSE infiltration. Roberts replied, “We can’t do anything, we don’t have a contract with anybody.”21

Lessing drew up some figures for salary increases. He told the committee members to find those cameramen and lie to them: say that the Federation had negotiated the increases. Roberts was shocked. Management “didn’t want it to look as if the outside union (the IATSE) had forced them in any way to make these adjustments that had long ago been suggested,” he said.

Babbitt was incensed, saying, “What you are trying to do is get me to stooge for you, and I won’t do it for you or for anybody else.” Roberts suggested an idea: since Lessing had the names of the cameramen who signed with the IATSE, he could transfer them all to another department, thereby making the union membership for camera operators moot. If that failed, he could simply fire them. Babbitt jumped in: “If you do that to them,” he said, “I personally will report it to the IATSE, because if you are capable of pulling a trick like that on those men for joining the IATSE, you are capable of pulling the trick on any one of us.”22

The meeting ended. Later that day, the Federation committee reconvened in Roberts’s room. They agreed not to revive or persist with the Federation but simply to “let it die.”23

Outside the grip of the IATSE, it seemed that nearly every craft in Hollywood had a union or two fighting for representation. These included:

The Art Directors Guild (ADG)
The American Federation of Musicians (AFM)
The American Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA)
The American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA)
The American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA)
The Artists Managers Guild (AMG)
The Motion Picture Costume Makers (MPCM)
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG)
The Screen Directors Guild (SDG)
The Society of Motion Picture Artists and Illustrators (SMPAI)
The Society of Motion Picture Film Editors (SMPFE)
The Screen Publicists Guild (SPG)
The Screen Writers Guild (SWG)
The Screen Office Employees Guild (SOEG)

(The list does not include unions for other trades, like engineers, electricians, drivers, and service workers.) Around Hollywood, one out of every five working professionals was a union member.24

Across the nation, unions were growing and competing for members, while parent organizations scrambled to represent them. The IATSE was one such organization, and by late 1940 it had to compete against two monoliths: the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—previously called the Committee for Industrial Organization—and the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

The CIO was a midwestern giant, focused mainly on factory unions like those of the automotive, steel, and rubber industries. The AFL dominated the coasts, prioritizing craft unions like those in entertainment and publicity. After the Federation of Motion Picture Crafts dissolved, the AFL absorbed the Hollywood Painters Union—which had won the 1937 strike.

That victorious strike caused a swell of Hollywood unionism. In its aftermath, one leader emerged as the hero of Hollywood labor: Herbert K. Sorrell.

Tall, heavy, and broad-shouldered, Sorrell looked like a prizefighter who could get things done. Sorrell was born in 1897 in Deepwater, Missouri, a state rife with labor disputes. There was great railroad-worker strike in 1877, followed by a general strike of several different types of laborers in St. Louis. In 1897 the pastor of St. Louis’s Central Christian Church said, “The burning questions of today are those of social righteousness” and declared that capitalists had built “a system of industrial slavery.”25

From an early age, Sorrell was exposed to the ravages of union wars. Sorrell’s father was a factory worker and a leader of a successful company strike. In 1900 a great streetcar-workers strike in St. Louis turned violent, ending with two hundred laborers injured and fourteen dead. When Sorrell was a boy, his father led another strike but failed. “I heard him say many times, ‘If you can’t pull the men up with you, pull out and leave them,’” remembered Sorrell.26

Sorrell spent his adolescence earning “a man’s salary” in manual labor and defending himself against bullies. In 1917 Sorrell was a riveter in a shipyard. When the United States entered the Great War that April, Sorrell went out on strike. It was a crime to stop industrial labor during wartime, and in lieu of jail time he opted to be drafted. By the time he got his papers in order (under an assumed name), the war was over.

As a young man, he was a professional boxer. He had the nose of someone who had endured many blows to the face. In the early 1920s Sorrell founded a painting business in Oakland, California, becoming an employer himself. “I hold no prejudice against employers or people who hire men to do the work. It is a necessary thing, and, having been one, I feel that I know that end of it,” he said.27 In 1923 he sold his business and traveled to Hollywood for a set-painting job at Universal Studios.

In 1925 Sorrell attended a union meeting held, as he recalled, by the Brotherhood of Set Painters and Scene Decorators because they promised free beer—and “because I could see that was one way that we could raise the standard of living in the studios. I joined the union that night.”28

One day the following year, Sorrell’s employer demanded to see everyone’s union card. When Sorrell proudly presented his, he was immediately fired. Everywhere Sorrell sought work, his union status led to his termination. Sorrell began crashing film shoots in the streets of Hollywood. He introduced himself as a union organizer and asked the cameramen for their union cards. If they couldn’t present them, he smashed their cameras.

On November 29, 1926, the first Studios Basic Agreement was made with Hollywood labor, prohibiting discrimination to union members. Sorrell gladly returned to work painting Hollywood sets.

During that time, he followed the news that George Browne and Willie Bioff had taken control of the IATSE. In 1937 Sorrell helped create the FMPC to block the IATSE from signing up members. In April he was one of the picket captains who fought in the big Hollywood strike of 1937. “As soon as we went out, Bioff and Browne said we were Communists,” said Sorrell.29 He blatantly ignored the city ordinance that picket lines could not cross a driveway, since every studio gate was a driveway. Outside Paramount Pictures, Sorrell used his intimidation tactics to drive strikebreakers from the lot. Sorrel was soon appointed the business agent of the Painters Union, competing with IATSE for members and influence. While other unions caved to IATSE’s pressures and bribes, Sorrell’s Painters Union refused to break the strike. Eventually Bioff sent Mafia goons to fight the FMPC strikers. Sorrell and his men surprised the goons at their hotels and pummeled them. “I am not pulling any punches,” he said later. “We had to fight for everything we got.”30

After the strike was settled, Sorrell confronted Willie Bioff about who had jurisdiction over a group of forty-eight scenic painters. The ex-boxer towered over the squat IATSE kingpin, and Bioff gave up without a fight. During settlement negotiations, Sorrell learned that Bioff was standing in the way of the painters negotiating a 20 percent raise (instead of only 10 percent). Sorrell went to see Bioff in his “illustrious setup” of an office. “Bioff got all white, and he sat down and he got sick,” recalled Sorrell. “So he did not get back to work for several days.” The scenic painters got their 20 percent raise.31

After the Painters Union won the strike, other crafts sought to align with them. Herb Sorrell had made a name for himself. He would shortly be called “studio labor’s No. 1 leader.”32

Sorrell’s efforts appeared to work, and Willie Bioff left town in 1938. On August 4, 1939, after nearly a year, Bioff suddenly returned to Hollywood on a secret flight. He threatened movie producers and demanded closed shops (requiring every craftsman to be a union member), potentially swelling IATSE numbers.

While Bioff regrew his influence, Sorrell was building his. He fought to strengthen the Painters Union like he was amassing an anti-IATSE army.

In October 1939 Bioff and the IATSE won a 10 percent raise for their film technicians. Herb Sorrell, however, fighting on behalf of the Painters Union, won a 15 percent increase for its studio painters.33 Some days later, Bioff received a letter from a studio manager to revoke the IATSE 10 percent raise. Unbelievably, Bioff accepted (along with a likely bribe) and tried—unsuccessfully—to meet with his representatives to cancel his own union’s wage increase.34 The news put Bioff’s true allegiance under scrutiny yet again.

Outside the Disney studio, the Screen Cartoon Guild was making strides. At the end of October the National Labor Relations Board declared the Guild the legal representative for cartoonists at Warner Bros., MGM, and Universal Pictures.35 Warner Bros. was the home of Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and a wily gray hare to be christened Bugs Bunny. MGM was working on its first cartoon starring a cat-and-mouse duo soon named Tom and Jerry. Universal produced cartoons starring Andy Panda, and in a year would debut Woody Woodpecker.36

But National Labor Relations Board certification did not require studios to recognize the Guild as a bargaining entity for their employees. That was at the discretion of studio management. And to management, Hollywood unions stank of the IATSE and Willie Bioff.

Conservative journalist Westbrook Pegler had been spending weeks preparing to take down Willie Bioff with his syndicated column Fair Enough, known for its anti-union, anti–New Deal rhetoric. Now Pegler went to new investigative lengths, traveling to Chicago to uncover Bioff’s police records and interview law enforcement officers. He published his exposé on Bioff on November 22, 1939.

With characteristic bravado, Pegler wrote, “Willie Bioff, the labor dictator of the entire amusement industry of the United States and Canada, and sole arbiter, on the union side, of problems affecting 35,000 men and women of mechanical crafts of Hollywood, was convicted of pandering in a trial before Judge Arnold Heap of the Chicago Municipal Court in February, 1922.” Pegler revealed Bioff’s 1922 conviction for running a brothel and serving only one week of his six-month sentence. He also explained Bioff’s ties to the Capone gang.37

That very day, the court of Chicago’s Cook County issued a warrant against Bioff, right when Bioff was scheduled to lead union negotiations. Bioff conveniently framed Pegler’s exposé as an anti-union smear. “It looks like a plot to discredit me on the eve of negotiations with film producers,” Bioff responded. “For fifteen years I was around Chicago and immediately available if they wanted me.”38

From late November through December 1939, Bioff and his lawyers futilely fought his extradition. Bioff was finally sent to prison on February 20, 1940, to complete his original six-month sentence. “I would call my plight persecution,” Bioff declared. “Maybe I have been doing too much for the working man. I think the big interests are after me.” He also blamed opposing unions, “and the Communists.”39

This gave George Browne, Bioff’s accomplice, license to send a Communist-hunting senator to Hollywood to set up a “Congressional Committee to Investigate Un-Americanism.” The move was designed to weaken all non-IATSE unions.40

Herb Sorrell did not let this witch hunt go unopposed. He stated publicly that this senator would do better to investigate Willie Bioff than potential Communists in Hollywood. Enlisting famed writers Dorothy Parker and Donald Ogden Stewart, Sorrell helped lead a demonstration against the fearmongering senator.41

Hollywood relished Bioff’s absence. Variety wrote, “Since he left here to return to Chicago and pay his debt to society, Hollywood labor affairs no longer have been turbulent. The people of the industry were not compelled to sit on the anxious seat because of what Willie might say or do.”42

On September 20, 1940, Willie Bioff completed the balance of his sentence. A car drove up to the Chicago prison around a gaggle of reporters positioned out front. Then it veered to the unoccupied side entrance, picked Bioff up, and whisked him away. As it drove off, Bioff threw a typed statement out of the car window: “I hope those who are responsible for my incarceration are satisfied,” it read. “I have paid my pound of flesh to society.”43

He immediately flew back to Hollywood to expand his empire.