My mom and I have a ...
Question: My mom and I have a disagreement about the movie Cradle Will Rock, and we'd like you to settle it. I say it's based on true events, but Mom says they just added real people to a fictional story to make it seem more authentic. A pint of Ben & Jerry's is riding on the answer.
Answer: Actor-turned-filmmaker Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock is based on actual events, though it takes liberties with the details. Marc Blitzstein's 1937 anticapitalist operetta The Cradle Will Rock, about the effort to unionize steelworkers, was originally produced as part of the Federal Theatre Project. The Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939), in turn, was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was created in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to employ people during the Great Depression. Directed by Orson Welles and produced by John Houseman, Cradle was shut down right before it was due to open because of "budget cuts" at the FTP. Everyone involved believed the government deliberately cut funding because the play's message offended its more conservative contingent; Actor's Equity prohibited its members from taking part, apparently oblivious to the fact that Cradle was a pro-union piece and Actor's Equity was — and is — a union. Welles, Housman and Blitzstein spontaneously rented another theater and planned to put on Cradle with Blitzstein himself singing/reading the piece; the show sold out and various actors defied Equity and performed their parts from the seats they'd bought. The secondary plot which involved Mexican painter Diego Rivera butting heads with Nelson Rockefeller when the mural the latter commissioned for a Rockefeller Center lobby on the high-minded subject of "human intelligence in control of the forces of nature" included a portrait of Lenin, is also based on fact, though it happened in 1933. The incident is also dramatized in the film 2002 Frida. Robbins clearly included it because it tied into the theme of artistic integrity vs. economic practicality.
