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The Politics of Glamour: Ideology and Democracy in the Screen Actors Guild

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When does a labor union cease to become the solution to individual worker struggles and start becoming the problem? Dr. David Prindle sets before the reader a titillating example of just such a case in his definitive; The Politics of Glamour, Democracy and Ideology in the Screen Actors Guild.

Tracking the sound reasons for forming SAG in the late 1920's, Prindle details the many early injustices visited on workers in front of the camera in uniquely American industry, the movie business. Adroitly, Prindle illustrates how SAG was born as a Guild and bred into a Union. This is a comprehensive history of the titanic forces at play shaping the most widely known yet little understood labor union in the United States. Dr. Prindle explains in careful detail the evolution of SAG from founders like Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Cagney through recent Guild Presidents Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston and Ed Asner.

If you want to know how the Screen Actors Guild evolved from a scrappy, tough-fisted bunch of actors bent on decent jobs, wages and working conditions to a wimpy, politically correct pack of star-wanna-bees, then you will enjoy this book.

Prindles style has snap, crackle and pop because he doesn't take sides in the many ideological wars that ravage SAG politics even to this day. He lets the towering Hollywood legends call it as they see it. Then he documents the antics of their retinues, deployed in battalion strength to muscle political control over one of Americas most influential labor organizations.