Weekly Non-Fiction Reading List 6.12.23
Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan
I’ll start by saying that Maureen Ryan is an incredible journalist and an amazing writer. The book is fantastic. With that said, the entire time, all I could think was that the book should have the title Duh!: Every Terrible Thing About Hollywood That You Should Already Know. Maybe it’s because I think the majority of rich and powerful people are the worst people on the planet, but there’s nothing in this book that came as a surprise to me. I basically read this book to confirm what I already knew and assumed.
Again, Maureen is a phenomenal journalist and writer. She’s been writing about all of the awful things going on in Hollywood for about two decades now, and it’s all in this book. All of your favorite movies, TV shows and productions have terrible stories going on behind the scenes. There are stories of verbal, physical and sexual abuse along with racism, sexism and every awful thing power-hungry narcissists can do to others.
At the end of the day, I think this book is written for people like the author. There’s one chapter in the book where you truly see how innocent and naive she was/is. She discusses the award shows and how she believed what these people said and that outside of the films and shows, these actors and people in power live by the principles they depict on screen. Then she learns that’s not the case.
What’s interesting about the book is that for her and many others, they know what’s going on, but they have to battle this cognitive dissonance and try to separate the art from the artist.
In this book, you may learn about very specific stories that make you think differently about movies, shows and the people who work there because you didn’t know about the stories. Personally, I assume all of them are awful until proven otherwise. What I do respect about the author is she ends with a few chapters on solutions.
I hate to be a pessimist, but I assume 99% of the people the author thinks are “the good ones” have awful stories as well that nobody has spoken up about yet.
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