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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, or if you're live streaming, or listening to this on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll speak with author Ava Chin about her new book Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming, textile artist Bisa Butler will be in studio to discuss her new solo show at a Soho gallery and we will talk about the new film Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive with its director Betsy Schechter. It is screening at Tribeca. That is our plan. Let's get this started with Maureen Ryan and burn it down.

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You know on this show, we like to talk to makers, creatives, writers, and directors who make the films, TV shows, and music we love. You also know on this show we often report on mental health, equity, and fairness. In my office, there's a sign that says work hard and be nice to people. It shouldn't be that hard to do that, but in Hollywood apparently, it is. The Me Too movement opened the door to reveal long-held open secrets about sexual abuse in Hollywood, but that's not the only example of the entertainment industry's toxic workplace environments. In her new book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood longtime media journalist Maureen Ryan provides an in-depth look at these issues and names names, from racism in the Lost writers' room to silence of A-listers about the vicious behavior of super producer Scott Rudin.

Through Ryan's reporting and some very candid interviews with people who were just trying to make a living, she also offers a series of solutions and steps that could be taken to course correct. Joining us now to discuss her reporting is author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Mo Ryan. Hi, Mo.

Maureen Ryan: Hi. I'm so glad to be here.

Alison Stewart: So happy to have you. Thank you for writing this book. Listeners, we want to hear from those of you who have worked in the entertainment industry. Have you experienced an abusive or toxic workplace in the entertainment industry? Did you decide to leave Hollywood or even New York as a result of workplace conditions? We want to hear your stories about your workplaces in Hollywood, anything that you have experienced in the entertainment industry. You can give us a call or text to us at the same number, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also reach out on social media. If you really want to be anonymous, you can DM us on Instagram. It's @allofitwnyc. Mo, to be clear, these are not stories about spoiled Millennials who don't want to work hard, or someone not being that great at their job, or suited to it, so they're let go.

We're talking about real toxicity and abuse. Would you share a story or two that made your jaw drop just to set the table?

Maureen Ryan: Well, yes, there are so many. It's almost hard to pick them, but Harold Perrineau is someone whose work I've respected for a really long time. He was in the Matrix films, he was in Oz, which is the foundational TV series that changed television, and so many other great projects. I don't understand why was this wonderful actor after the second season just-- he came back a little bit, but essentially he was done with Lost. That didn't make sense to me especially because like many projects in Hollywood Lost-- it wasn't the primary selling point, but one of the selling points for me as a critic and as a viewer was, "Oh, this is a more inclusive cast than I have seen on television," because I grew up with mostly white folks on TV or in movies. That just was so normal.

At a certain point, maybe I stopped noticing that which is on me, but if someone's good at their job, working hard, and appears to be doing a good job, what happened there? It absolutely made my jaw drop when he told me he got this phone call, and his quote to me is, "Wait a minute. I think I just got fired." This is a show where-- the showrunners of the show said, "Oh, well, there were story reasons. We had to wrap up the story about his son because the actor playing his son had had a growth spurt and that interfered with the reality of the timeline." I'm like, "This is a surreal island that skips through time and has a polar bear on it. You can't swing keeping around Harold Perrineau?" I don't know. It was weird to me.

Alison Stewart: Harold had spoken up about storyline issues for the character of color.

Maureen Ryan: Exactly. He told me he was noticing that a few of his colleagues, which he had no beef with personally or professionally, were getting most of the storytelling juice. It's not minor. You might think it's minor, but this is on top of-- Imagine at photoshoots, the actors of color are constantly asked to stand in the back, or on the edge of the frame, or they're not even in the photo. He brought that up low-key on set to a producer, didn't really get a satisfactory answer and then he brought up an issue with a script about the character appearing to be indifferent to the fate of his son who had been kidnapped. He said to the producers that this is a trope in our TV, and film, and books, and all sorts of media, that a Black father doesn't care about his Black son, and that the society at large is indifferent to the fate of missing Black boys.

I would say that that's a risk to bring up that concern now, today in 2023. He brought this up 15, 17 years ago. Again, I give everyone a chance to say their piece, but what is an inescapable fact of Lost's history is that season three arrives, and Harold Perrineau's name is no longer in the opening credits. It's a very difficult thing to do to speak up in the industry for anyone, whether it's their treatment at the workplace, issues with storytelling and scripts. The fact of the matter is, is that people who are from historically excluded communities, they face even more hurdles and barriers, and even more perceptions that impede them. I think the most jaw-dropping chapter for me was the one on a show called Sleepy Hollow. You might say, "Mo, why are you writing about this show that was canceled years ago?"

It was on Fox for four seasons. Maybe some of your listeners haven't heard of it. Totally fair, I get it, but it's so shocking to me what occurred there, and really, it played into the stereotype of Black women as being out of control and dangerous when they're angry. A lot of factors behind the scenes were going wrong there, and I go into those many, many factors in-depth. The end result of that was after Sleepy Hollow ended, Nicole Beharie, the incredibly talented star didn't work for years. Again, is Nicole Beharie bad at acting? I would argue, no. She knows what she's doing.

She's been in films by Steve McQueen. Now she's in The Morning Show in the new season. It's something you mentioned in your kind intro was people not working for years, or leaving the industry that they're good at, that they have achieved a fair amount at, not because they're bad at their job, or they don't like it anymore, but because of these other factors that are constantly driving people away or harming them.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a couple of calls. The phone lines are filling up. Let's talk to Phil from Brooklyn. Hi, Phil. Thanks so much.

Phil: Hi, Alison. Well, I just wanted to talk a little bit about being a background actor and a stand-in on television shows and movies. When you are a background actor on a show, essentially, you're a gig worker, but you are at the very, very bottom of the rung in terms of how you're treated and stuff on set. I just want to share two stories with you because this is why sometimes it's a very disenchanting position to be in. You can be working on a show, you can be doing a diligent job, you can be showing up on time, always bringing the right clothes, doing all that, so you might be what's called a core background person. In other words, if they're shooting in a police precinct, and they have people that work in that precinct, you'll always be working on that set because it makes sense. You're part of that staff.

What happens is, is that if a new AD or somebody comes into the picture, they can just drop you like a hot potato. There has to be no why you're not coming back, why they're not calling you back. If they just want to change you out, they'll change you out. The other thing that's pretty amazing is the nickel and dimming that goes on with the background. I'll give you an example. You can be on the show and they'll spend $700 on a pair of mono bland-- How do you say the name?

Alison Stewart: Manolo Blahnik.

Phil: Manolo Blahnik shoes for an actress but you will never really even see that shoe. Then what they'll do is they'll then try to come to the background, and say, "Hey, we're not going to pay you for this particular thing." One thing that happened to me once was, I was told to wear out-of-season costume. It was the middle of the summer, and I had to bring in all this wool clothing to make it look like fall. Then when I went to do the scene, they ended up not using me. What they were going to do is they decided that they were not going to pay me for bringing in all that out-of-season wear.

Alison Stewart: Ah, Phil, I'm going to dive in. Mo, you were nodding vigorously during Phil's stories about the finances and about being low on the ladder, so to speak.

Maureen Ryan: One thing I'm really trying to do-- thank you, Phil, by the way, and I'm sorry and I believe you, all of it. A thing I think I'm trying to demystify with my work, and I've been doing this a long time, is it is a gig economy. You can be an actor who has a good part in a film and not work for three years. You can have dry seasons that last a long time. Again, those can just be, well, you're just not getting the jobs, or maybe someone put your name on a list and they're not hiring you because you looked at someone the wrong way one day. It can be for reasons that have nothing to do with your enthusiasm and willingness to do the job. Also, I think a big thing I would love for your listeners to understand, this aura of glamor around the industry.

Hey, cool, if there's a party with free drinks, I'll go to it. It's fun to go to those events. That is not the reality for most people. Most people in the industry are just getting by. I've talked to Emmy-winning actors who were like, "Well, I ran out of money and had to move back home." It's very much a tenuous, precarious existence at the best of times and the last-- These jobs that people are doing, cast crew, production teams, people who work at studios and networks, they're often making far less than you think, and they're often without work for long periods of time. I often rely on statistics in my work to get these points across. If you think that a working writer in Hollywood is living the dream, maybe they are. All of them, in my experience, have nightmare stories about at least one, if not multiple terrible workplaces where people were allowed to run amok.

On top of that, the number of English language TV shows released to American consumers, about a decade ago it was 200 or so, now it's 600. In 2022, 600 TV shows. The income of writers during that time went down because the episode orders went down, the amount of time they would spend under contract went down. Really, in this industry, I've watched as some good changes have happened-- They've started to happen, put it that way, in some places, but the kind of treatment that Phil describes is fairly routine still. People are nickel and dimed, and the vast majority of people at any level in the industry, in any job in the industry worry about paying their bills a lot because the precariousness of the jobs and the difficulty of sustaining a living and even getting paid more this year than last year--

A big point I'm trying to make is that if you work in a streaming show or you work in a coffee shop or in a warehouse for a big retailer like Amazon, we're not talking about a vast chasm that separates those people in those jobs. They're very similar states in terms of lack of a safety net and working conditions that sometimes are pretty bad.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood. Its author is Maureen Ryan. Mo Ryan is our guest. She's a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. If you want to get in on this conversation, we want to hear from you. Have you experienced an abusive or toxic workplace in the entertainment industry? Did you decide to leave? How did you survive it if you decided to stay? We want to hear your stories. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC is the phone number. It's also the text line. How did you get people to talk to you about their experiences because, in theory, some of these people would like to work again?

Maureen Ryan: Yes, all of them. No doubt. In a few cases, people had pretty much exited the industry, so they were like, "Well, I have nothing to lose," but honestly, it's tough to hear about these bad workplaces or bad situations that people were in. One thing I also want to get across is that I am certainly not here to uniformly condemn Hollywood. I explain to people in the industry how journalism works, what I need because not every story as you know as a journalist can go forward if you don't have all the pieces in place. You have to answer to editors and people who are going to put that story in the world. They need to know that all of the pieces are there, and it's a solid story. What people have decided to do is do something as a group.

If they know that other people are coming forward, that really always helps. Some people really with certain parts of the book, they were just tired of living with a lie. I know how corrosive it can be to live with a terrible truth in your past that is a toxic thing inside your life, and you want to be done with covering for other people and not telling the truth. There's actually a ton of bravery amongst these people, and I'm just in awe of it because as we're seeing with the writers' strike, I think one thing that is really, really effective in helping people create change and we're seeing it whether it's people organizing it in an Amazon warehouse or people organizing in the Writer's Guild of America and ultimately going on strike, that is people coming together not just for their own personal benefit, but for a group goal that is larger than one person.

I would also like to bust up the myth that it's only doggy-dog. People in this industry are only out for themselves because I have witnessed people say, "For the younger people coming into this industry, I am going to come forward and speak on this because I don't want them to face what I faced." To me, that kind of altruistic behavior is incredibly admirable. I've seen it many times in my career and so often people say, "Well, I'm not a hero." I'm like, "Well, okay. You might not think that," and I think that's why they're a hero because they're so low-key about it. I'm really impressed by how many people are willing to do something for those coming up the ladder and for the next generation of creative people.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan. We have several calls on the line. Someone who works as a costume designer, someone who was an actor in the '70s who has a question, and we'll talk about some more specific examples after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Mo Ryan. The name of her book is Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood. Dan was an actor in the '70s calling in from Blooming Grove, New York. Hi Dan.

Dan: Hi. Glad to be on the show. Long-time listener and all that, first-time caller to talk like most people say. I'm calling because my late wife back in the '70s, her name was Joan Towers and a woman named Audrey Zaro got together at Screen Actors Guild and they formed a program called Pass. You could call in sexual harassment or any other issue in an audition, on a job, at a rehearsal, or whatever. After the union, a representative of the union would get the calls and keep track of the names. As soon as you got more than two complaints about a single individual, no matter what their job, producer, whatever, they would get a call from the union, and it would be anonymous. The actor themselves would not be involved directly and that individual would get a warning and told that their franchise was in danger. I don't know what happened to the program. It was--

Alison Stewart: Dan, hold on. Mo wants to dive in. Hi Mo. Go for it.

Maureen Ryan: No, Dan, this is a wonderful thing that you brought up. I'm really glad that you did because in the wake of Me Too, there have been efforts to revive exactly this, which I think could be a game changer for creative artists in the industry. I'm very much a proponent of this. There are now certain portals or hotlines in various guilds but what I go into depth on my book is there's a group called Voices in Action that attempted to do something similar and has some resources for folks. A bigger try is something from an organization called the Hollywood Commission, and at the top of the Hollywood Commission is Kathleen Kennedy, the head of Lucasfilm and the chair of the commission was professor Anita Hill. These are big people. I need to do some follow-up reporting because they announced in 2020 that in 2021, they would open essentially a call-in or write-in platform where you could report people.

I think Dan makes an outstanding point. You need to be able to compile information on repeat offenders. This is something you find in law enforcement. There's a small percentage of people who will go from studio to studio or project to project. Even if they were reported at that studio or that project, it doesn't end up doing anything to prevent their behavior because they're hopping around within the industry and going from place to place. The Hollywood Commission said two years ago, it should have been online, this reporting portal, which again, had a facility to catch people who were doing this a lot repeatedly, and it still hasn't gone online. I asked them repeatedly in the course of my reporting, "Where is it? When will it be available"? I think it needs to be available to all workers.

They need to be made aware of it. It needs to be publicized, robustly supported. There are many features to the service that would protect someone's identity as Dan points out because you don't want to be the one that reported the A-list actor who was harassing people. That could end all of your artistic dreams. It's still not online, Alison, and I really want this, and I do plan at some point to follow up. I hope to follow up, or I hope other reporters follow up on this because I do think that for industry workers to have a resource that is not owned by the studios and controlled by the studios is really important because, look, the industry HR, that's just a whole special brand of trash fire most of the time. Again, those folks work for the studio. How much relief are you really going to get? What are they really going to accomplish? Even if they do something, how is that going to prevent repeat offenders from just going around and doing this elsewhere?

Alison Stewart: What happens when the repeat offender is someone that everyone knows is a repeat offender? You spend a good deal of time in the book on Scott Rudin, the Hollywood and theater producer, who was long known to be a bully. That's probably the nicest word that people would use about Scott Rudin. You point out there were several very prominent people who would not speak out against Scott Rudin and worked with him again. What does it say about power?

Maureen Ryan: That's the thing. That really broke me, honestly. It broke my spirit for a long time because I've reported on this industry, I love the people in it who are trying to do right and trying to create fun, interesting, good work but how hard is it? If you're an A-lister, you're going to work again? I think the names that I drop of people who said, "No comment" to the New York Times about Scott Rudin and the many stories in 2021 that came out once again, outlining his bullying and deeply traumatizing behavior for many, how is it that you can't just say, "I stand with survivors of abuse in this industry, and I'm doing my best to help end it."? What was really wild about this, and part of the reason I wanted to write the book is 4 years after Me Too broke, a long overdue series of reckonings started to happen in the industry about behavior, about racism, about sexism, about homophobia, all these things.

So many people were intimidated or just did not feel that they could speak up. People whose names we know because they're really famous directors, writers, producers, actors. I thought, "How is it that four years into this alleged reckoning, these people who seem powerful do not want to speak up for the least powerful"? I think it's because they think he's coming back. They think he's going to remain powerful, they think he's going to settle scores if he does come back. Here's the thing that I think, and hopefully, I don't sound too much like I'm preaching from a soapbox. We all say we have values and things we believe in.

Unless you act on those values, then those are just words that you say you don't actually believe it. There are sometimes with certain companies or even certain individuals, I wish they would just come out and say, "I think I could get my project made with this person. That matters more to me than the people who might be potentially harmed by that person or we think this person can make us money. That matters more to us than the fact that this person had a million chances to reform their behavior and has never done it over a period of many years."

Alison Stewart: At least that would be honest.

Maureen Ryan: Please just be honest. Please don't get up on these stages at award shows or put out press releases saying you care about humane working conditions, you care about inclusion and respect because you don't. You don't if you're not going to at least live up to your values and the people-- and this is a theme I returned to in the book a lot. I'm really tired of people like Dan, people like Phil, why are we putting it on them to reform the industry? These companies are really huge and they're multi-billion dollar corporations. Scott Rudin can't come back unless those companies decide that he can come back. If they decide based on his word, "I'm a different man," that is simply enabling abuse. Again, that would be the highest, most powerful companies in the industry. They have to make the decision that it's worth it to them.

Once they've made that decision with him or anyone else, with a track record of not just hurting people and damaging people but being unrepentant and unchanging, then you are saying you don't care about the people who work under him, and who could be negatively affected by those toxic people. Just say it. Put that press release out. Just admit what it is that you care about most and stop with all the flowery speeches.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Leah from Larchmont. Hi, Leah. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Leah: Hi. Thanks for having me. I just wanted to take a minute and just appreciate so much the attention that Mo, you're drawing to this very complex industry. One that I love, that I've worked in for decades now. It's a multifaceted business with a lot of difficulties and beauty. I will say as a department head, much of the necessity to create a safe, comfortable dynamic work environment is left to the department heads to help create that space when that void is left by the studios themselves. That's not to say that there aren't extraordinary producers who do support the laborers and the crew that are making this content for these huge corporations, but it's fewer and far between, unfortunately.

Alison Stewart: Leah works as a costume designer. Leah, thank you for calling in.

Maureen Ryan: Oh, Leah, first of all, thank you for all you do. I know the department heads-- I completely respect everything she says. That's very true. Again, I'll ask the question. A very small number of million-dollar or billion-dollar companies control the productions in the TV and the film that we see. Yes, there are smaller production houses and smaller companies, but really, the highest tier of distributing and making these films and TV shows, it's a small number of companies that are-- last year, the two heads of Netflix made $50 million each. In 2021, David Zaslav, the head of Warner Brothers Discovery, that year alone, he made $246 million. Leah, Bill, Dan, I want your callers, I want the people in the industry who are working every day trying to create a good environment, I want them to have the support and the resources and the backup that they need.

If you're telling me, "Oh, these companies can't afford it," Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, which has a big TV and film arm, he can afford a $500 million yacht. The idea that they don't have the money to support and train people, that's a huge gap. I know we don't have a lot of time left, but it's really enraging that it's left to the people in the trenches to train themselves to be good leaders, to support each other to create healthy workplaces. They're not given the time and the money and the training and the resources and the oversight.

Alison, you know the industry, someone who was a writer tapping away on their keyboard writing a script, if you then put that person who was in that little writing cave for 3 years, writing the script and put them in charge of the 400 people making the film or making the TV show, of course, it's probably going to go wrong because that person-- I never woke up in the morning and was like, "Wow, I really know how to manage a complex logistical operation that is a film or TV show." You don't wake up knowing that. You got to have training. There has to be apprenticeship, and a lot of support and resources to learn how to be a good manager of the multi-million dollar business that is a TV or film set.

Alison Stewart: Got an interesting text, and this text almost sounds like it's pulled from your book because you tell this story almost exactly. "I'm a TV writer in LA, as a Black woman writer I've been forced to repeat staff writer three times over the course of 45 plus episodes. I've had one showrunner tell me, we've been doing that a lot lately in regards to making characters female. My most recent show was extremely toxic despite it having a Black showrunner, so this stuff is everywhere. One writer on my show got put in detention in his office for days for a perceived grievance by the showrunner." You tell two stories of Black women writers being moved to different floors from the other writers.

Maureen Ryan: There are other writers of color who on social media keep fielding the exact same-- isolated literally from your colleagues or punished. That's something I hear about too. Like, "No, now you go over in this room and you're in the punishment room.' I hear about that a lot and that's why I've written this book. I believe it. I'm sorry. I've heard way too many stories like this. Again, I go back to if the studio doesn't know about this behavior, that's not an excuse. That is actually worse. You're not giving these productions the proper oversight so that people feel safe to report that, and that these things don't arise in the first place, because we have this idea in Hollywood that leadership is bullying or bullying is creativity.

Harold Perrineau and Daniel Dae Kim say in my book, "Because these toxic examples were given the title creativity or leadership or bravery in Hollywood everyone learned the bad examples." It's like, you know what? There are people from every identity and cultural background who are capable of being poor leaders. What's the opposite of motivators? Anti motivators. I hear about this a lot, and so what we have to change is the paradigm and the model that everybody is following, because that's not creativity, that's not leadership. Punishing people, being punitive, being vindictive, being abusive, this bullying style of leadership is not the move. That's why in my book, it was very important to me to have a lot of examples and a lot of advice for people because they're not getting it from sources that have the money to give them the training, to give them the information as much as they should.

A lot of people who came up in toxic or abusive environments are the examples in my book of, "Okay, on the daily this is how I did it differently. This is what I had to learn and here are some mistakes I made." I do think that what we have to say is those people who are choosing to act that way it is a choice. They're being allowed to make that choice by people higher up on the food chain, and there are people making different choices, better choices. They're often having a harder time of it because that is too often still not supported as a leadership model, but being accountable, being transparent, and even being decisive, but with humility, these are also leadership models that we need to start building up. This can work. Someone like Vince Gilligan, please tell me that Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, well, it was what it was.

First of all, I'm just going to say to your listeners I've never heard a single bad word about Vince, who I've known for 30 years. I actually think those projects are better because there's a lack of turnover. People like working for Vince. If you're telling me that abusive or toxic conditions are necessary to someone's process, I think Vince's process [unintelligible 00:34:05] process, those are the leaders of Better Call Saul. It wasn't like that, and these people have won every award, every award. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: False on that assertion. The name of the book is Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and A Call for Change in Hollywood. It's by Maureen Ryan. Mo Ryan thank you for all the reporting you do.

Maureen Ryan: Thank you very much.

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