The Waves: Hollywood is On Strike. Let’s Burn it Down.
Slate Books
Slate Podcasts
3.8 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 3 August 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, we’re talking the Hollywood strikes. Slate senior supervising producer Daisy Rosario is joined by longtime journalist and author of Burn It Down, Maureen Ryan to unpack the systematic oppression that has taken place behind the scenes of your favorite movies and television shows for decades. They dig into the structures in place to keep women and marginalized voices from getting to the top of the ladder, and how none of these stories are examples of one bad apple. They also explore how the ongoing writers and actors strikes are an inevitable result of years of injustice - and what they need to bargain for to make true change in Hollywood.
In Slate Plus: A recap of episode 8 of Max’s And Just Like That…
If you liked this episode, check out: How to Survive in Hollywood
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery. Additional help from Paige Osburn.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to The Waves Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and today, Burning Down Hollywood and its broken systems. |
| 0:15.7 | Every episode, you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing that we cannot get off of our minds. |
| 0:20.7 | And today, you've got me, Daisy Rosario, senior supervising producer of audio here at Slate. |
| 0:26.1 | Later in the show, I'll be joined by Maureen Ryan, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. |
| 0:31.4 | She's a longtime entertainment journalist and TV critic whose book, Burn It Down, Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood |
| 0:38.2 | was released earlier this year. |
| 0:41.0 | Maureen, or Mo, as she likes to be called, has written an in-depth and thorough accounting |
| 0:46.3 | of various Hollywood horror stories from over the years. |
| 0:49.5 | We're talking racism and sexual harassment in writers' rooms, powerful bosses mentally and physically |
| 0:55.6 | abusing assistants, and most importantly, how none of these stories are examples of one bad |
| 1:01.1 | apple. They all show how systems work to protect abusers with power and how even well-meaning |
| 1:06.6 | people can get pulled into protecting bad behavior when that is what is rewarded. |
| 1:12.0 | You might remember at the start of the summer hearing some wild details about what it was |
| 1:16.3 | like for some writers and actors working on the hit TV show Lost. |
| 1:22.5 | We must have been at about 40,000 feet in a nap. |
| 1:26.5 | Get an air pocket. |
| 1:32.4 | Drops. But we crash. have been at about 40,000 feet in a half in an air pocket dropped but we crashed a thousand miles off course they're looking for us in the wrong place stranded on an island no one's coming for us |
| 1:39.1 | this place is different we all know it we all feel those stories came from a chapter of this book that was previewed in Vanity Fair. |
| 1:49.0 | This is a book that certainly could not exist without both the Black Lives Matter movement and the Me Too movement. |
| 1:55.8 | People that never would have spoken to Mo before were willing to share about some of their worst and sadly frequent |
| 2:02.1 | experiences. I wanted to hear from Mo about the process of writing this book and releasing it |
| 2:11.8 | when we are already living in the backlash to the movements that made it possible to write |
... |
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