Have We Tried Burning it All Down?

While I was covering the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, an obvious question for a follow-up was what the future of Hollywood would be.

While there’s certainly been a lot of pieces since the end of the strikes, one of the conversations I found that touched on this was with Adam Conover on his Factually podcast. It’s from August of last year, arguably during the height of the strikes.

I actually linked to it before during one of my posts last September, but I’m linking to it again because I’ve since had a chance to read the book Ryan wrote that was the basis for the interview. The title of the book? Burn it Down.

And rest assured, even though the conversation above goes for about 70 minutes, the book still goes deeper. And it’s not just grotesque sexual behavior, it’s also abusive workplace issues like bosses habitually chucking objects at their subordinates. What with the recent Nickelodeon documentary, Quiet on Set, it feels like we should be asking for more change, faster. One nice aspect of the book is that Ryan does detail some success stories to that effect in the second half.

There’s a whole lotta heavy lifting to be done though. So check out the interview, check out the book if you want to go further (it just may be at your local library).