I.U.M.M.S.W. with Love

A schoolteacher from the little (pop. 5,000) mining town of Silver City, N.Mex. sat down and wrote a letter to Screen Actors Guild President Walter Pidgeon. A group of Mexican-American miners and their families, the teacher reported, were hard at work nearby on a semi-documentary movie. The film was being sponsored by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, which was ousted from the C.I.O. in 1950 for being Communist-dominated. Director of the picture: Herbert Biberman, one of Hollywood's "unfriendly ten" (TIME, May 31, 1948). Director's assistants: Paul Jarrico and Paul R. Perlin (both were called Communists at hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee). Heading the production: Clinton Jencks, international representative of the I.U.M.M.S.W.

Worrying about the Mexican-American amateur actors, the Silver City schoolteacher wrote: "I cannot bear to see a minority group . . . used . . . Please help and advise me how to do my duty." The news of the project was all over Hollywood last week. Film groups were demanding a federal investigation, and it looked as if they would get action.

In Silver City, Clinton Jencks barred the press from his moviemaking and blandly explained that the film would merely try to win friends by tracing the union's history and presenting its problems. True, he admitted, two carloads of Negroes had been imported to play in mob sequences, and there would be strike scenes. But, Jencks said, the picture is mostly fiction and would even have some love interest. "If Hollywood tries to blacklist some of its finest workers," he added, "that is Hollywood's loss, but if these workers help us ... that is our gain . . . The union has just as much right to make a movie as RKO or M-G-M."

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