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Tidbits – Nov. 2, 2023 – Reader Comments: Israel-Gaza War – Ceasefire, Stop the Bombing, Free the Hostages; Stop Ethnic Cleansing; Staggering Oil Profits; Bela Lugosi; Artists Call for Ceasefire Now; Workers Unite Film Festival

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Reader Comments: Israel-Gaza War - Ceasefire, Stop the Bombing, Free the Hostages; Stop Ethnic Cleansing; Never Again. For Anyone; New House Speaker; Staggering Oil Profits; Bela Lugosi; Artists Call for Ceasefire Now; Workers Unite Film Festival

To Live and Strike in Hollywood

Gary Phillips Stansbury Forum
Writer Gary Phillips traces the history of the Writers Guild, the militancy of Hollywood unions, beginning with the writers, the difference between the writers and actors, and why the actors remain on strike.

How Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus Broke the Hollywood Blacklists

Taylor Dorrell Jacobin
Telling the story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome, the 1960 film Spartacus was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in Hollywood and publishing.

What Might Finally Resolve the Hollywood Strikes

David Dayen The American Prospect
The unions raised the need for antitrust enforcement, and the Biden administration’s top antitrust cops paid attention. The one-two punch of simultaneous WGA and SAG strikes, for the first time in 60 years, has stalled out virtually all productions.

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Hollywood Is a Union Town, but the History Is Complicated

Steven Wishnia The Indypendent
The American movie industry has been one of the most consistently unionized sectors of the economy since the 1930s — but to achieve that, workers had to overcome “the iron fist of the moguls” and organized crime, says historian Gerald Horne
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