How Much to Fight with Your Boss

I've had friends who've had such problems with their bosses that they've quit their jobs. Never have I personally seen that work out for the better. I did it once myself, and I was wrong. It was the best job I ever had. He was fired a month after I left. Maybe he was fired because I and others had left. And there was another time when the boss stayed and stayed.

In talking about management issues, I sometimes find analogies in the making of movies. Some big movie stars were constantly at war with the studios that employed them: Bette Davis, James Cagney, Errol Flynn, and Olivia De Haviland. All of them were not coincidentally under contract to Warner Brothers studio, led by Jack Warner.

Davis tried to quit twice, Warners sued for breach, and the court held Davis to her contract. After she finally left, her career fell apart. Cagney didn't renew his contract twice, tiring of the gangster roles Warners kept giving him. Each time he came back, and the second time he took on the most violent, malevolent gangster ever seen in White Heat, and his career took off again. Flynn never quit but grew disinterested, and it showed. Like Davis, after he left Warners, he played mostly in support of others in films made in Europe.

De Haviland sued, citing Warners' as well as the other studios' practice of assigning stars mediocre films to prompt them to turn them down. The studios would put the actors on suspension and then add time to their contract, effectively turning a seven-year term to a 14 year term. She won the lawsuit, and the result became known as the De Havilan rule, prohibiting adding time to contracts. Free from Warners, she went on to pick roles that won her two Academy Awards, but for the next two decades she worked very little. Studio heads were evidently wary of employing an actress who had prone to litigation and had single-handedly destroyed a successful studio practice.

It could be argued that for all of their complaints Davis, Flynn, and Cagney did their best work for Warners and De Haviland did most of her best work there.

This doesn't mean that the bosses always know best. Stars like Cary Grant`, Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart, and Gary Cooper bridled at long-term contracts and later in their careers basically became freelancers for studios.

There are, of course, perils in this route. But Grant, Cooper, Hepburn and

Stewart were good enough and famous enough to carry it off.

And then there are examples of actors who worked well in the studio system. One extreme example is Robert Taytor who spent most of his career working under contract for M-G-M. Taylor had a reputation for being easy-going and just darn grateful to M-G-M for giving him a contract when he knew there were many young actors who may have been more talented although maybe not as handsome who never got a chance to make a movie. He worked hard at his craft and is reported to never have turned down an assignment. The result was that, while other M-G-M contractees saw their contracts not renewed as they grew older, Taylor's kept getting renewed. He was no trouble and did good work. An interesting side-effect of this is that M-G-M didn't assign Taylor that many really bad films. It was almost like they figured if Taylor wouldn't fight for better roles for himself the studio would have to do it for him. They were prompted by the fact that his pictures made money and to put him in junk would tarnish his stardom. So, when he turned 40 and was no longer the youthful romantic lead, M-G-M cast him in Ivanhoe, and he began a series of epic costume films that revitalized his career. His career at M-G-M last 25 years.

Of course, Taylor's path only works when the employer makes the right decisions for the employee, which most employers don't.

For all of those who fought the studios tooth and nail, there are those who worked in the system and made it work for them. Which path you follow depends on how bad the job is.

Copyright 2018 by John T. Aquino