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Mar 16, 2023

‘Burn It Down’: Maureen Ryan Kindles The Silence Coming From Networks Over Allegations Of Misconduct

Ayesha Johnson June 2nd, 2023 - 7:34 PM This

Ayesha Johnson June 2nd, 2023 - 7:34 PM

This veteran reporter exposed the high-profile lawsuit shrouding Saturday Night Live, revealing why she wants to cleanse it with fire and why it's absolutely necessary to dig up those allegations plus confessions of alleged misconduct and bias from the grave. Picking up a feather from The Hollywood Reporter, author of the imminent Hollywood exposé Burn It Down, Maureen Ryan, reveals that several entertainment companies, studios, and major networks hung on the mute button when she reached out for comments about allegations involving their television shows.

As an entertainment reporter and an influential editor of Vanity Fair, she was featured on The Hollywood Reporter‘sTV's Top 5 podcast speaking on the methodology of her new book, which glues together a pattern of bias and harassment in entertainment taking root from an excerpt about the toxicity and prejudice on Lost behind the kaleidoscope of the camera.

During the discussion, Ryan describes how she put together four years of reporting that covers several shows like Saturday Night Live, The Goldbergs, Sleepy Hollow, and Lost.

"One of the things that's threaded through the book" that pulsed through her like electricity were the "crickets" she often received when she tried to speak with studios about the allegations.

"The number of times that people who do PR for very large industry companies simply did not respond to my questions at all — like not even the grace or the favor of a ‘no comment,’" she told podcast co-hosts Daniel Fienberg and Lesley Goldberg.

Ryan pointed to her communications with public relations reps for Saturday Night Live. She asked NBCUniversal a streak of questions concerning the allegations surrounding the show including "a very high-profile lawsuit that was settled last fall" linked to bygone castmember Horatio Sanz (Boat Trip, Year One).

"I emailed many people at NBCUniversal and that whole world. I did get the favor of a ‘no comment’ from someone high up in [communications], so that was exciting," she said. "But for other situations, a theme that you will see running throughout the book is no one replied to my emails. No one answered me. Nobody wanted to address this."

She added that "problematic showrunners" for a high-profile intellectual property have gone"into many different iterations" on television. Ryan said she wasn't merely interested in people employed in that same world but also with what production companies are "doing now to make sure that all of your workplaces and that the staff feel sufficiently protected if they come forward."

The journalist/author said that is only part of the formula that drove her to write the book and what cultivated an experience that was more than just a "trashy cash grab," as Ryan said one Twitter user wrote.

"When I got done laughing, I’m like, frankly, this is the opposite of a trashy cash grab. With every chapter in my book, there's a version of this that is an 800-word hit piece. But I don't know that that's valuable," she explained about her decision to dismantle shows that "ended six, seven years ago."

"There's value in dredging it up because the people who were harmed are still in the industry," she continued, talking about those paved over with allegations. "Most of the projects that I touch on in my book, or even in my previous reporting, a lot of those people are still in the industry. It's not like there was a mass — just to refer to The Leftovers — there was not a mass disappearance of people. So I think there's value in asking those people what they would have done differently, what they wish had gone differently, what they wish they’d known."

Ryan prefers to illuminate the issues of Hollywood over an "ad hominem beat down" of "bad man stories," and gather all the seeds left behind from HR and production studios, and resign a light that sees everyone who is resuscitated into the Hollywood workplace that has been forced to swallow a little red pill. Inspired from a dose of her own reporting during 2020 and 2021, which slowly faded into an "endless doom loop of the same stories being told over again" but, after flicking open a lighter, ignited a "clubhouse and a handbook" of misconduct in circulation.

"The easy thing to say is, ‘Well, bad things happened on that set or at that show or that production office or at that network,’ and we close the book on that, and we will never speak of that," she said. "Again, I don't know that that's helpful. We need to talk about it. We need to have productive, proactive conversations about what realistic limits on behavior and conduct and management should be."

To accomplish that, she has interviewed a criminal justice expert, a rabbi, and a Hollywood screenwriter to helm a nourishing blueprint for justice that will help her unwrap gifts like forgiveness, atonement, and "what does a reckoning look like?" She also expands on "people in the trenches who are making it better, have made it better and are providing better role models" after emerging from destructive workplaces.

"There aren't enough good examples of, ‘OK, terrible revelations came out. Now what?" Ryan added. "Whether you’re the head of the camera department or the head of a major feature film, you typically did not — or do not — get the training or support that you need to be a good leader and, on top of that, you’ve seen a lot of bad examples, probably. This is the dynamic that I’m hoping to unpack."

The author also denoted to discovering the synchronized ghosts of alleged misconduct and discrimination on Fox's Sleepy Hollow, saying it "gives necessary and important context" on the trajectory of a star on the show — and why she followed up on her Vanity Fair interview with Jeff Garlin (Curb Your Enthusiasm, WALL·E) from The Goldbergs.

It was her reporting on Sleepy Hollow that made her want to "burn it down" in the worst way.

"If there's a thing that causes me to want to burn things down, it's when people leave the industry or are essentially forced out of the industry or forced into, essentially, career hiatuses," said Ryan. "Not due to a pattern of serious misconduct or serious unprofessionalism or serious transgressions of any kind but because they feared for their mental health, their physical well-being, their safety, and their overall quality of life was terrible."