Where To Buy ‘Burn It Down,’ Maureen Ryan’s Exposé On Hollywood

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Last week, Maureen Ryan of Vanity Fair reported on the “poisonous culture” behind the scenes of the groundbreaking TV drama Lost.

This week, Ryan’s new book, which contains more stories like those from Lost, is available to purchase.

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, published on June 6, is quickly rising on Amazon’s bestsellers charts in several categories, including TV History & Criticism and Movie History & Criticism. It’s also a top seller on Bookshop and Libro.fm.

As a veteran reporter, Ryan has had access to the entertainment industry for decades. In Burn It Down, she uses this access to investigate Hollywood’s “corrosive” culture and highlight problematic situations at popular shows like Lost, Saturday Night Live, The Goldbergs, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and at large production companies, including Lucasfilm.

Ryan exposes patterns of harassment and bias in Hollywood. As the book’s back cover says, “It’s never just One Bad Man.”

In addition to her own reporting, Ryan spoke to actors and creatives like Evan Rachel Wood, Damon Lindelof, and Harold Perrineau. The book dismantles the self-promoted myths about Hollywood and paints a fuller portrait of what’s gone wrong — most notably, that abusers continue to thrive in the industry — and how we can fix it.

The book also looks at “labor and activist revolutions that recent scandals have ignited,” which comes at an interesting time in Hollywood history with the WGA currently on strike and SAG-AFTRA authorizing a strike if a new contract can’t be ratified by June 30.

While those events are too recent to have made the book, it’s still a worthwhile history lesson, a cautionary tale, and hopefully, a way to move forward.