http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/fellner170408.htmlby Kim Fellner
The day after Charlton Heston's death, I received a barrage of emails from old friends about the demise of my once-sworn enemy. Back in the 1980s, when I was information director of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Heston considered me to be the Red Menace. But when I first came to Hollywood, I could never have imagined that Moses himself would soon play a starring role as my nemesis.
SAG -- the film and television actors union -- claimed both Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston as former presidents. While many guild members loathed Reagan for collaborating with the House Un-American Activities Committee to blacklist fellow actors, Heston had few detractors; he was acknowledged both for his admirable service as head of the union and for his participation in the 1963 March on Washington as a supporter of civil rights. But Heston's views gradually listed rightward, and he welcomed Reagan's ascendancy to the presidential throne.
The union, meanwhile, was headed in the opposite direction, which explained my own unlikely presence on the set. While SAG had traditionally hired entertainment publicists to run its PR department, a younger and more liberal leadership recognized that multinational corporations were replacing the old studio autocrats in a climate growing ever more hostile to unions. They asked the AFL-CIO to recommend a labor person for the job, and they, in turn, called me. As the crusty PR director at the AFL put it, "You're the only person we know who's both smart enough and crazy enough to take this job."
At the time, I worked at the Service Employees International Union, which represented janitors, nurses' aides, and public employees. But there was a touch of show biz in my past: my dad was a musician, my mother sewed concert gowns for young singers, and I had been brought up on afternoon matinees at the old Thalia movie theater on the Upper West Side. I packed for L.A.
Most of my friends thought I was crazy rather than smart. The Screen Actors Guild was viewed as a weird cul-de-sac of labor, not a "real union," like auto, steel, or even the Service Employees. But Dick Greenwood, my old friend at the machinists' union, reassured me. "That's where our future is," he told me, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, "and anyway, the labor movement lives in you as much as in the union. You'll carry it with you wherever you go."
And Greenwood was right; those labor skills came in handy. During a three-month strike in 1980 against the movie corporations, we engaged the press and the public in a vibrant dialogue about the plight of actors and the changing economics of Hollywood. Subsequent to signing a new contract, Edward Asner, an outspoken liberal, was elected president of SAG, much to my delight.
FULL story at link.
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