Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Companies that implemented abortion benefits saw mixed feedback, Rihanna's Savage X Fenty drops a collection of maternity clothes, and Fortune senior writer Maria Aspan discusses the Hollywood strikes and the entertainment industry's workplace problems with author Maureen Ryan. Have a thoughtful Thursday.
- Broken dreams. Hollywood is having a very “best of times, worst of times” summer. Yes, it’s celebrating the runaway success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie–which last weekend crossed the $1 billion sales mark, making Gerwig the first solo female director in history to reach that milestone. Yet at the same time, large swathes of the entertainment industry are now on strike. Writers walked out in May, more than 100 days ago; and last month, about a week before Barbie hit theaters, actors joined them—marking the first such double strike since 1960. Neither group is expected to come back to work anytime soon.
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.”
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 Down excerpt 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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