Entertainment critic, reporter, and contributing editor at Vanity Fair Maureen Ryan has devoted much of her career to writing about misconduct and coverups in Hollywood. It’s content that takes its toll, and as a coping mechanism, she often vents to friends.
“I text angry things to friends a lot, or I rant about things a lot,” Ryan says.
About two years ago, she was working on several articles that led to an especially frustrated series of text tirades.
“There was a particularly ranty series of texts that [were] like, ‘Burn this whole industry to the ground. Maybe don't even start over again,’” she recalls.
She revisited the texts, and realized it might make for a good book proposal.
Ryan’s resulting New York Times best seller is “Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood.” In it, she exposes the patterns of unprofessional conduct, harassment, bias, toxicity, and exploitation of workers entrenched into the very foundations of the entertainment industry. She also puts forth solutions to help break the cycle, including proposals for grassroots reforms and labor actions that recent scandals have ignited. Her reporting for the book includes interviews with actors and entertainment professionals like Evan Rachel Wood, Harold Perrineau, Damon Lindelof, and Orlando Jones, and others.
Ryan says “Burn It Down” was driven by two motives: One was selfish, in that she wanted to become a published book author, “because that sounds like a cool thing to be able to say.” The other was more altruistic: To draw on her knowledge and experience to create a work that could propel change or cause things to shift in the industry — to not just report on its problems, but help move the conversation forward.
“I wanted to write a book that got into these issues more deeply, and I keep going back to this thing Orlando Jones said to me: ‘It almost feels like the system is set up for this outcome.’ And by that, he meant a bad outcome or a series of bad outcomes,” Ryan explains. “I think that there's more truth to that than I would like to admit, but the factory that is designed to produce damaging workplaces actually has produced plenty of damaging workplaces.”
In her systemic examination of misconduct and inequity in Hollywood, the veteran journalist points to the myth of Hollywood as a meritocracy, and likens it more to an authoritarian regime. “I often think of it as a series of linked autocracies, because very few people on a film set or at a studio or on a TV production – maybe one or two or three people – have real, meaningful, ongoing power, and everyone else has zero power,” she says.
In the book, Ryan sheds light on problematic situations at companies such as Lucasfilm and on shows like “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “The Goldbergs,” “Saturday Night Live,” and “Lost,” as well as films like “The Flash.”
Ryan cites a 2022 Elle interview from “Insecure” creator Issa Rae as an example. In it, Rae discusses “The Flash” actor Ezra Miller and the litany of unprofessional incidents and legal issues – including arrests, accusations of grooming, abuse, and erratic, disturbing behavior – and how despite all of that, Warner Bros. decided to continue the film's production.
“I’m gonna be real, the stuff that’s happening with Ezra Miller is, to me, a microcosm of Hollywood,” Rae said. “There’s this person who’s a repeat offender, who’s been behaving atrociously, and as opposed to shutting them down and shutting the production down, there’s an effort to save the movie and them. That is a clear example of the lengths that Hollywood will go to to save itself and to protect offenders.”
With “The Flash” production moving forward, Ryan says the studio should have just admitted that its decision was solely based on profits, and explain why it shelved the already completed “Batgirl” movie.
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“[Warner Bros. should] just put out a press release saying, ‘We care most about making money from this,” Ryan says. “I can't have the Warner Bros. conversation without talking about ‘Batgirl.’ I will always pair ‘The Flash’ with ‘Batgirl.’ They shelved a really promising film that maybe, it was bad. I don't know. But, a young woman of color [Leslie Grace] was going to get this big opportunity and they just dumped that. To me, that's what makes ‘The Flash’ situation that much more troubling.”
Ryan says the industry’s lack of accountability for Miller’s misbehaviors exemplifies what has allowed abusers to thrive in Hollywood.
“I don't have a good rebuttal for that, because what we can talk about people doing is making amends and atoning, either to the individuals harmed or to the communities harmed, and that's what's completely missing about ‘The Flash,’” she states. “What did the studio do? Close its eyes, pray for the best and hope that it all [goes] away.”
She points to the hit ‘00s series “Lost” as another example of Hollywood’s complicity in bad behavior. While on book tour, Ryan penned a piece for featuring In interviews with “Lost” showrunners Jeffrey Lieber and Damon Lindelof — recently excerpted in Vanity Fair — Ryan says the latter admitted that he “failed” in his leadership role during the show’s production, but that both men equivocated when pressed about the show’s toxic behind-the-scenes atmosphere.
“They both said, in various permutations of the following statement, ‘I don't recall those,’” Ryan says. “I read them each a litany or showed them and used case documents, like, ‘Here's a list of things that were said in this workplace.’ They both said that they did not recall those statements being made.”
Despite the industry’s pervasive patterns of abuse, she believes the general public has become more educated about its corrosive culture — and that that awareness may be the first step towards change.
“People understand this more clearly now [that] Hollywood is not like a sharing circle where everybody is kind and eats organic yogurt. It's very hierarchical. Everyone's very obsessed with status,” she says.
“Burn It Down,” then — despite its title — offers solutions for fixing Hollywood’s broken culture.
“I think that in general, we need to stop building up people,” Ryan says. “And I [am guilty of that]. I did it too. I built up people and put them on pedestals, and I just don't want to do that anymore.”
A good start, she proposes, is for Hollywood to simply value — and prioritize — human dignity.
“I think that if there's a set with 400 people on it… all of those people are human beings. All of those people deserve to have their basic humanity respected and they all deserve decent treatment,” Ryan affirms. “For far too long, the industry has tried to escape in a manner that doesn't routinely do that.”
“Burn It Down,” is available everywhere.