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Equity
Are you in or out? The year is 1919. Your name is Frank Bacon, and you’re the author and lead actor of the most successful play in Broadway history. Your fellow actors are about to go on strike in support of their union, the Actors Equity Association. You’ve spent your life fighting for the rights your friends are hitting the bricks to protect. If you go out on strike with them, you risk losing everything you’ve achieved. Your wife doesn’t want you to go out. The managers will fire you and take away the rights to your play if you don’t cross the line. What about it, Frank — which side are you on? Are you in or out?
AEA executive board members ED WYNN, NED SPARKS and FRANK MORGAN speak about strike veteran actors … especially FRANK BACON and his wife JESSIE. They also discuss GEORGE M. COHAN, SAM HARRIS and FLORENZ ZIEGFELD, some of the theatrical managers against whom the actors were striking for recognition of their union. Frank Morgan is greeted by CLEMMIE FENSTERMACHER, the AEA's secretary.
Cut back to the year of the strike. Clemmie and MARIE DRESSLER discuss the lack of progress in negotiations. The Bacons are at the Gaiety Theater, where they're the stars of “Lightnin’”, the biggest hit in Broadway history to that point. Marie and Ned join FRANCIS WILSON, the AEA's president, in trying to discuss their cause with them, but are stymied by Frank's ambivalence and Jessie's overt hostility.
The twists and turns of their lives as Broadway hurtles towards its first actors’ strike, are the subject of my screenplay, EQUITY.
Carol Burnett
Drew Barrymore
My parents were animators who met on the picket line at Disney Studios in 1941, and I spent almost thirty-five years in the labor movement as an officer of the Animation Guild Local 839 IATSE. About fifteen years ago I started taking classes with Joe Bratcher and the late Judy Farrell at the Twin Bridges Screenwriting Salon.
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