Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, about harassment and bias in entertainment, comes out June 6. Shows that get a close-up in the book include Lost, The Goldbergs, Saturday Night Live and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Maureen Ryan, a former TV critic and an entertainment reporter, wrote the book.
The description for Burn It Down reads, “Abuse and exploitation of workers is baked into the very foundations of the entertainment industry. To break the cycle and make change that sticks, it’s important to stop looking at headline-making stories as individual events. Instead, one must look closely at the bigger picture, to see how abusers are created, fed, rewarded, allowed to persist, and, with the right tools, how they can be excised.”
Burn It Down is a Mariner Books title, which is part of HarperCollins.
A review in Publishers Weekly states, “Filled with revealing behind-the-scenes stories and blistering analyses of the industry’s failings, this makes a convincing case for rebooting Hollywood.”
A chapter excerpted in Vanity Fair, where Ryan is a contributor, looks at how non-white and non-male actors, writers and producers were treated on Lost. “The environment on Lost drove Javier Grillo-Marxuach to quit the show after its second season,” it reads. “He was the only person from the show’s original nucleus of writers still in the writers room in season two. Despite the show’s massive success, Grillo-Marxuach had reached his limit. He told me the writers room ‘was a predatory ecosystem with its own carnivorous megafauna.’”
