A GREAT AMERICAN HAS DIED, aged 97, and to the disgrace of our national media, he will not be appropriately honored. Rather, even in death, Roy M. Brewer, former leader of the Hollywood Stagehands Union, has been and will be vilified, as heroes are often defamed in an age marked by apologetics for immorality.

Known in showbiz as “the IA,” the Stagehands remain one of the most powerful cinema labor organizations. Their official title is the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists, and Allied Crafts (IATSE, AFL-CIO). Once they absorbed the motion picture projectionists’ union, they rose from a fading remnant of the early American labor movement to become the dominant representative of filmdom’s vast armies of craft workers.