Maureen Ryan can’t deny it, as she writes in her first book: “Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood.” For much of her life, the former Chicago Tribune and Variety critic and reporter couldn’t get enough of the grisly, salacious show-business lore spawned by the tyrants, the predators, the power structure, the bias, the damage, the wreckage. The all of it.
She “consumed these narratives like candy,” she writes in her book. “Horrible behavior — hundreds of pages of it — in ‘Live from New York,’ the oral history of ‘Saturday Night Live’? Of course I devoured the whole thing. When I was coming up, not only as a consumer of popular culture but as someone who wrote about the industry, these narratives — dishy stories of industry people behaving badly — were, in and of themselves, a popular subgenre of entertainment.”
Change, and some real consequences when it came to a conspicuous handful, came in 2017 with MeToo and the fall of Harvey Weinstein. Meantime, increasingly widespread pushback on racial, financial and gender inequities in Hollywood — inequities Hollywood set in quick-drying cement a century ago — gathered momentum.
Yet a lot of the old structural biases remain in place, even if things are fairer now. Better. Mostly. Partly? Depends on who you talk to. In “Burn It Down,” Ryan, now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, collates a wide range of stories, examples and evidence of how some shows, such as the ABC-TV hit “Lost,” were also amiss in terms of what was going on behind the scenes. Already widely read, Ryan’s chapter on the rancor behind the making of “Lost” was excerpted this month in Vanity Fair.
“Burn It Down” (available June 6 from HarperCollins) canvases dozens of sources and interview subjects, drawing together stories of bullying, humiliating, rage-aholic producers such as Scott Rudin — who, Ryan’s sources suspect, will be back in action soon enough. The second part of “Burn It Down” looks ahead to what needs to happen next — especially, Ryan says, since a certain weariness has begun to afflict both the industry and the public regarding the revelations of the last few years.
Ryan lives in Chicago’s western suburbs with her husband and their son. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: When did you get the idea that everything you’d learned needed to be dealt with in book form?
A: In 2020 and 2021, when we were all dealing with the pandemic. People were tired of various entertainment industry reckonings. I understand that feeling. I get tired of these topics, too, at times. But I also got the sense that people thought it was more or less fixed. Exploitation, abuse, racial bias, gender bias — all these affect Hollywood very deeply. People had begun to think that because some high-profile people made the news, it wasn’t going to happen anymore. In the first six months of 2021, it got frustrating to write about more and more unprofessional or even horrifying behavior being enabled and allowed to continue. I felt I was living inside some sort of rerun. “Groundhog Day,” you know. So I decided a book was my way of getting at how these outcomes were basically preordained, and had been for a century, because of the dynamics baked into the industry.
Q: In the book you write: “Opportunities to paint on the big canvases and scream at the little people are not distributed equally.”
A: For so long, many different forms of bullying or intimidation or outright abuse were filed under the heading of “creativity.” Creative license. But that wasn’t true for everyone. The opportunities were not handed to everyone. They may have been the norms, until recently. But we have to remember: For who?
Q: In “Burn It Down” you call out various A-listers who’ve worked with film and Broadway producer Scott Rudin, from Frances McDormand on down, who stayed mum when it came to showing any solidarity to those who accused the producer of some pretty grubby and violent behavior.
A: I still don’t understand it, to be honest. I don’t get the downside in standing in solidarity with those Scott Rudin abused. Just to say: “I’m going to do my level best in this industry to stop that kind of behavior and create a better culture.” Look, I understand why people are afraid of vindictive people or companies. But at some point, if your’re espousing a certain set of values, then you have to act on those views. Privately is one thing. Publicly is another.
Q: You write about the train wreck appeal to so many of us when it comes to megalomaniacal Hollywood. We eat these stories up. And as viewers — take “Succession,” say — there’s a sizable audience for whichever show nails the winning formula of “snake pit” plus “scads of money.”
A: You can’t deny the voyeuristic element to tales of bad behavior. We’re constantly watching these visions of terrible people doing terrible things, and often they’re done brilliantly as pieces of storytelling. But you know? Keep it on the screen, guys! I liked watching the Roy family being jerks to each other as much as anybody! But I wonder if we’ve been trained all these years to accept it behind the scenes.
I’m not saying all entertainment has to be squeaky-clean and goody-two-shoes. The people who make our entertainment don’t have to be perfect; we all have any number of flaws and neuroses. Just, you know, stop acting in ways that damaging to your co-workers over time. For too long Hollywood has said, basically, that it wouldn’t be a creative workplace environment if people weren’t being toxically damaging to each other. But it can be done. Look at (creator and director) Vince Gilligan; he did it twice, with “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” As far as I heard, that’s a load of fascinatingly awful behavior being handled by good, responsible people behind the camera.
Q: For those who haven’t read what you wrote for Variety in 2017: Can you talk about what happened to you in 2014?
A: Sure. In 2014, I was physically assaulted by an industry executive. A number of things happened that evening, and they had a cataclysmic effect on my life. Also it came at a really tough time in my life. I struggled for a long time.
But it gave me something valuable. It gave me this absolutely ferocious understanding of what happens to someone who goes through something like that. And when they try to fix it in some way by reporting it to someone in authority. I understand what it feels like to worry about repercussions to your career, and to go through these processes that can damage you all over again.
Q: In the book you write a bit about your Chicago upbringing as the daughter of a cop, and a product of Catholic schooling. I know you’re a Buddhist now, but it sounds like you were raised a lot more Catholic than I was. I wonder if there’s some measure of atonement going on in secular Hollywood among the white male block of “creatives” who are starting to acknowledge they’ve had a pretty sweet deal all these years. And that change isn’t just inevitable; it’s plain right.
A: I think more people now have an awareness of the difficulties and obstacles other people face. There’s a different kind of awareness and honesty in the air now. Whether that translates to people from historically excluded communities getting into more positions of power — that’s still very much up in the air. It’s a hard conversation to have. But more and more people seem invested in trying to right these historic wrongs.
Q: Was there an emotional toll, revisiting and recounting everything that provoked this book?
A: When you embark on any ambitious project, you put on rose-colored glasses about what you’ll be able to accomplish and what it’ll take. But then, some weeks …. There was one week when I talked to a woman, funny, smart, brave, someone in the orbit of “Saturday Night Live.” (The woman spoke to Ryan under an alias. Earlier this year, she also anonymously spoke with ABC News “Nightline” regarding “SNL” cast member Horatio Sanz, whom the woman accused of sexual assault.) This was the same week I talked to a Cosby (alleged assault) survivor, whose story is harrowing. When I talk to people, especially the first or second time, it’s not unusual for me to talk for two or three hours. I want to answer their questions. And I want to give them space to tell their story and make them comfortable.
Weeks like that, I’m privileged to hear those stories and I’m grateful they’re willing to share them with me. You don’t get a ton of writing done in weeks like that.
Q: What’s your hope for the book’s reception?
A: Well, I’d much rather be writing about the cool stuff people are making (laughs). I don’t want to sound like a megalomaniac, the sort of megalomaniac I’ve covered. But since MeToo I hadn’t seen a book quite like this. Various reckonings have informed all kinds of books, often someone’s autobiography, or a look at a specific set of issues. But with this, I’m trying to take a bird’s-eye view of the industry as a whole. To use a phrase used by Orlando Jones: The Hollywood power structure was set up to produce this outcome. I wanted to look at that. And I hope there’s some value in it.