PAY TOO LOW

Grey River Argus, 18 November 1946, Page 5

PAY TOO LOW

FOR FILM ACTORS

Strike Called in Australia

(Rec. 5.5). SYDNEY, Nov. 17. The Actors’ Equity Council has ordered a jCommonwealth-wide strike by the actors employed in the film industry, until the employers grant improved salaries and conditions. The strike will upset the production of Australian films by six companies, unless the producers compromise with the Council. The Actors’ Equity secretary, Mr Hal Alexander, said: “If films are made in defiance of our ban, we will ask the theatre technicians to declare them, black and to refuse to screen them”.

Film successes “Smithy” and “The Overlanders” were cited by Mr Alexander as productions in which players were underpaid. The stars in “The Overlanders”, “Chips” Rafferty and John Nugent Hayward, had each received only twenty pounds per week, while Daphne Campbell, who played the feminine lead, was paid ten pounds per week. In America, he said, film stars were paid three thousand dolla'rs a week, but in Australia actor’s 1 were lucky to get double figures. A producer, Harry Watt, said: “I have a mandate to go anywhere in the Empire, to make films. If the Actors’ Equity thinks its members are experienced film makers because two films, “The Overlanders” and “Smithy” have succeeded, then I will be perfectly happy to accept invitations to go to Canada, New Zealand, or South Africa”.

LONG HOLLYWOOD STRIKE LEADS' TO VIOLENCE AND MANY ARRESTS (Rec. 9.30). HOLLYWOOD, Nov. 15. Steel helmeted police broke up a picket line of fifteen hundred strikers around the Columbia Studios. They arrested 610 men and 69 women, and charged them with violating injunctions which the studios had obtained for the limiting of picketing to eight men at each studio gate. The demonstration followed several days of violence, in which five homes were blasted with home-made / handgrenades', and set on fire, and many non-strikers were assaulted. The strikers belong to a Conference of Studio Unions. They have been on strike against ten major studios for eight weeks in a dispute with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees over the studios’ allocation to stage hands of three hundred set construction jobs claimed by the Conference Studio Unions. The carpenters of both unions are affiliated to the A.F.L.