Why one Hollywood expert wants to ‘burn down’ the industry

Actors and writers are striking over basic workplace protections and pay models used by movie studios and streaming companies, as well as these employers’ use of artificial intelligence. But the conditions underlying these workers’ dissatisfaction (and they are workers, even if their work looks more glamorous than most) go back decades, says Maureen Ryan, author of Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, a scathing new book on the entertainment industry’s pervasive workplace problems. From Harvey Weinstein to #OscarsSoWhite, waves of reckonings have laid bare just how toxic Hollywood often is as a workplace—and inequality, discrimination, and harassment remain rampant across the industry. 

“There is this huge cultural myth that, because people are pursuing artistic or creative goals, Hollywood has some higher purpose—and a better reputation,” Ryan told me in an interview. “As a whole,” she added, “the industry has used that false perception to cover up a multitude of sins.”

RoGina Williams-Montgomery/courtesy of Maureen Ryan

I spoke with Ryan, a veteran reporter and TV critic who’s currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, for a recent Fortune feature about the death of the Hollywood “dream job.” She told me that the idea for her book hit in early 2021, as she was reporting on industry misconduct and rage-texting a friend about her findings: “I remember looking at the screen and realizing, ‘If you take out the swearing, this is a book proposal.’”

At the same time, in the post-#MeToo era, “I had the sense that people were tired of stories about misconduct,” Ryan acknowledges. “I get it, because I get tired of it.”

Her solution was to marry her larger thesis about these ongoing, systemic problems with a high-minded version of Hollywood gossip: juicy, headline-grabbing, deep reporting about the awful things that were really going on behind the scenes of your favorite TV show. It’s a thoughtful, and compulsively readable, approach that got results: After Vanity Fair ran a Burn It Downexcerpt about the hit show Lost, Ryan’s reporting went viral—and vaulted her book onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Several weeks later, Ryan told me she’s been “really heartened” by the response to her book—but she’s also even more aware of the broken economic models and causes of “massive” worker frustration fueling the current Hollywood strikes. 

“This industry will break your heart every time,” she told me. “Maybe that should have been the title of my book.”

Read more of my interview with Ryan here. 

Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan

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