MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

We often turn to Hollywood in order to find representations of working class culture, but we rarely look behind the screen. While Hollywood movies entertained American workers and depicted their daily struggles, the studios responsible for those movies were also busy cultivating a distinctive labor force – the creative working class. By systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, and writers, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, the big motion picture companies delivered the first attempt to regulate creative work on a grand scale. The success of their endeavor provided the blueprint for the streamlining of creative production in other forms of media and entertainment. More than mere factories, they found a way to embed artistic sensibilities into the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism.

The people employed by the studios emerged as a new class: They were wage-laborers with exorbitant salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers, people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, William Wyler, and Anita Loos, were the outliers of the American proletariat, an extraordinary working class. As part of their contribution to popular culture, then, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM invented a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy. My paper will discuss the experience of these creative laborers. It will describe how they developed a unique professional way-of-being, arguing that despite the glamour, their stories belong to the history of the American working class.