Word: mr
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Messrs. Browne & Bioff had not long been tops in I. A. T. S. E. before it began to expand. President of a motion picture projectionists' union was a Chicago racketeer named Tommy Maloy. President Maloy was murdered in 1935. Mr. Browne took over the union. One Clyde Osterberg tried to organize a rival union of movie operators. He was murdered. Louis ("Two Gun") Alterie was doing well at organizing theatre janitors when he, too, was murdered. Mr. Browne inherited this union...
George Browne's Willie Bioff appeared in Hollywood, and soon they were mighty figures in cinema. In 1936, Mr. Browne in Manhattan worked out a deal with the Hays office whereby I. A. T. S. E. won a closed-shop bargaining contract for its Hollywood technicians, absorbed and squelched other unions and within 18 months acquired 12,000 members. Last year Willie Bioff admitted (to a grand jury) that after this bargain was struck, he received $100,000 as a loan from a prominent producer.* Willie Bioff, receiving a year's salary and effusive thanks from Mr. Browne...
This ambition brought Mr. Browne up against "the White Rats." In 1896, before whimsey became a social crime, the first U. S. actors' union worthy of the name was organized as the White Rats of America.† By eventful metamorphosis, including a Broadway strike of actors in 1919 for their right to have a union, that organization is now called Associated Actors & Artistes of America. A sort of union holding company, Four As has eleven affiliates for stage actors, cinemactors, radio performers, vaudevillians, et al. Last week such affiliated Rats as Tallulah Bankhead, Ralph Morgan, Lawrence Tibbett, Edward Arnold...
Stagehand Browne was there as a vice president and executive councilman of A. F. of L., sitting with his fellow councilmen and president, William Green, at their summer meeting to review Federation affairs, deal with such inter-union disputes as this. "It is all a headache," said Mr. Green, who enjoyed elbow-rubbing with stars but had a cold and much confusion in the head...
...simple case, which they naively expected the council to treat as a moral problem. Four As, for reasons which it considered good and sufficient, recently threw out the subsidiary American Federation of Actors (vaudeville, night clubs, circus, etc.) and A. F. A.'s Executive Secretary Ralph Whitehead. Alert Mr. Browne promptly rechartered A. F. A. as a subsidiary of his union, with authority to snatch cinemactors from Ralph Morgan's Screen Actors Guild, singers from Mr. Tibbett's American Guild of Musical Artists, stage actors from potent Actors' Equity Association, any & all performers from all other...