Our Take
In 1921 the question was not what the industry should do for itself. It was what one of its most powerful people could build with the leverage she had while she had it. Mary Pickford answered with infrastructure that has now lasted a century: a working campus that still takes people in, a payroll pledge that made giving a normal line on the check, and, in 2021, an Academy Award given for the first time not to a person but to the institution she founded. The Motion Picture Relief Fund is proof that philanthropy designed in early enough, and backed by enough power to stick, can outlast everyone who built it.
The record
- Founded
- 1921
- Prime mover
- Mary Pickford (age 29), founding vice-president
- First president
- Joseph M. Schenck; Rev. Neal Dodd, administrator
- 1932 innovation
- Payroll Pledge Program: 0.5% of wages over $200/week
- Screen Guild Theatre
- 1939-1952; star fees funded the campus ($5.2M raised)
- Campus
- Woodland Hills (Wasserman Campus), land bought 1940, dedicated 1942
- Helped (2020)
- Nearly 10,000 (MPTF CEO Bob Beitcher, Variety, 2022)
- Recognition
- Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, 2021, the first ever given to an organization
- Renamed
- Motion Picture & Television Fund, 1971
The American film industry of 1921 was making a handful of its biggest names extraordinarily wealthy and leaving the rest of its workforce with almost nothing when things went wrong. A worker hurt on set had no compensation. A performer whose career ended had no pension. The industry had the money, the talent, and the audience. It had no mechanism to care for its own.
Mary Pickford decided that gap was hers to close. She was twenty-nine, and two years earlier she had co-founded United Artists with Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Griffith, on the conviction that the most powerful people in an industry could remake its economics if they chose to. The Motion Picture Relief Fund was that same conviction turned from the industry's ownership to its welfare. She drove it as its founding vice-president; Joseph Schenck served as its first president and the Reverend Neal Dodd, an Episcopal priest who played clergymen in hundreds of films, ran its day to day.
What Pickford built was not a donation. It was a mechanism. The Fund began with coin boxes set out on studio floors, money dropped by the people working that day for the people who weren't. As MPTF still tells it, Pickford kept a little galvanized bucket on her own sets, and if you were lucky enough to be working, she expected you to put something in. By 1932 she had formalized it: the Payroll Pledge Program, under which everyone earning more than two hundred dollars a week gave half of one percent of their wages, automatically. In a single month of 1933, the Fund bought groceries for more than two thousand five hundred film workers and kept seventy-five families from eviction.
In 1939 the actor Jean Hersholt, by then the Fund's president, helped launch the Screen Guild Theatre, a weekly radio program on which the biggest names in Hollywood performed and donated their fees. It ran until 1952 and raised more than five million dollars, and that money bought land. In Woodland Hills, on what had been forty-odd acres of walnut and orange groves, the Fund broke ground in 1941 and dedicated the Motion Picture Country House in 1942: a place for the industry's elders and most vulnerable to grow old among their own. It operates still, today the Wasserman Campus, under the name the Fund took in 1971, the Motion Picture & Television Fund. Per Variety's centennial reporting, nearly ten thousand people received its help in 2020 alone.
There is a circle worth closing here. The Academy's award for humanitarian work is named for Jean Hersholt, the man who ran this Fund for eighteen years and raised the money that built its campus. In 2021, for the first time in its history, the Academy gave that award not to a person but to an organization: to the Motion Picture Relief Fund itself. The honor named for the man came home to the institution he had built. A hundred years after a twenty-nine-year-old passed a bucket on a silent-film set, the industry's own highest body of recognition bent its rules to say that the care had been worth as much as the art.
"Actors are only ever between engagements."
Mary Pickford's reported insistence that the Woodland Hills home be called a House, not a Home (MPTF history)