Our presenters this afternoon, our critic and journalist marine mo ryan, whos a contributing editor at, vanity fair and has written for entertainment weekly, the New York Times e, w salon, gq vulture. Prior to joining vanity, ryan worked as a television critic, variety and the Chicago Tribune. She has spent the last decade writing indepth pieces on matters of inclusion misconduct and abuse in hollywood and on efforts to make the industry. Her first book, burn it down power, complicity and a call for change in hollywood is a deeper exploration these issues. She lives in the chicago area. Mikki kendall, the author of the New York Times, best selling feminism. A recipient of Chicago Review of books award a best of the year and a best of the year at the bbc bustle and time. She is also the author of amazons abolitionists and activists a graphic illustrated by adam eco as a public speaker. She has appeared the bbc and pr the daily show, pbss good america, msnbc al jazeera, wbez and showtime. Her essays can be found at time. The New York Times, the guardian, the washington post. Essence vogue. The boston globe and nbc. Com. Think they will both be signing books after the event. You can purchase them outside of the black curtains over there and i hand it over to both of. Thank you. Who . Hi, everybody. Hi we sound fancy. I mean, i dont know what happened. Like. Like i made words, and then i people words and then, i dont know, stuff happened. I might have made trouble online. I think thats how we met. Yes. Oh, 100 . I was, you know, i dont know if anyone heard of the site called twitter. I wont call it the new name. Were not doing well. No, its still twitter. Hes still just high right now. You know, someone made a comment about twitter that i wrote a death of twitter piece six months ago, which is maybe slightly premature. It was some podcaster who said, you know, twitter, twitter was the moment when elites found out what people really thought of them and they lost their minds. And im like, yeah, oh no. So this is the thing, right . And i dont know. So i had this hashtag solidarity is for white women. And the premise this is relevant. So i was talking about racism and feminism and all of these things and then like eighties actresses, i had not seen in a million years, hopped twitter to argue with me, not all of them, but some of them had very strong feelings and on the one hand, disappointing. On the other hand, if youve ever been by their characters in a john hughes, i got to tell you, it was the moment like. 14 year old me got to tell Molly Ringwald to get off. And that was great. Right but it was this like weird moment culture where i was like, oh, themis people think we require you to listen to them or like. Who told you that . Like baby who lied to you . Were from chicago, right . Its not our thing. Really. We send governors to jail. We to start sending more mayors to jail. Im just going to put that out there. We arent even nice to the home team. You ever heard us yell about cops . What did you think this was . But so this. Why so back story we meet mode is not realize but mom was super supportive at a time when a lot people were telling me i was never going to succeed at anything. What . Yes, you were like. I was like, here is a rock star. I need to learn her. What . Like shes the best. Thats. Yeah, yeah. And so it was. It was what they needed in the moment. And ive always been like, oh, more, right. Its great. And so then theres like this follow on thing especially as the lead up to this book and also around several of your where people get very emotional because they think that the character on the screen or the person who made the thing they has to be a good person has to be a worthwhile person. We must be lying about how bad of a person they are and was just like i, i could not be writing what, she writes because i would blow up 17 jobs with the things would say to people 5 minutes into her mentions because like, i dont know how much you actually look at your mentions like you drop an article or you drop a piece and then theres like this like sound that happens on twitter, like the alarm going off in the depths of stand them right. Someone has criticized whedon. We at dawn and im like, this isnt even like new news. Are we are we doing this again . We did this on livejournal. How do you how thats know thats not a question of how really question for my long suffering spouse probably yours also also. Yeah i i fear what youre talking about time because you know we had lunch and you know ive been a critic and i, you know, i went to journalism school. I was, was kind of like mixing journalism with and doing both and i a lot of times youre doing your job right. You are interrupting peoples preferred narrative. You know, the studio puts out movie in their preferred narrative is that were doing a great thing. Its like, are you though . Its super, you know, i dont love that that are you know, like, you know what i mean . Like youre the one that stands there and they look at, you know, the but youre up. Youre a poor youre youre critic. How when are you bowing down . You know what, i mean, its just they get very you know, people are talking just to bring the strike right now. Its like, why are they why are the studios and the studio heads messing up so much . Why is their pr so trash and its like because theyre in a bubble and they dont listen. Theyre not in contact with the people actually making stuff. The weird thing about this book and the reception i have had those moments where a weird way sometimes like fans will kind of like ride for me like oh yeah, we want this bad person out of this, you know, dc realm. So i it happened a lot more i would say know when twitter was a young and you know like more like when you know there was that moment i feel like from what would you call like. 10 to 2015 where like it was happening where twitter was everybody, was on twitter. It seemed like everybody trying to understand how to make twitter happen for them. We just kind of seeing it on tick now were celebs are getting like tick tock account. And then they i dont know they do the dances, whatever. And youre like, okay, and hi, but so like there was this whole thing. You have all these celebs make time to hop into any criticism of them. They would search their names they would respond to you or me or anybody else. Yeah, i wrote about the guy who originally originally ran charmed like a woman created charmed, and then a man took it over. I wrote about his tenure at a later. One of the ncis shows, which was where. And by the way, thats not like he was not a wellknown dude but part of the i do what i do is because we we cant live in a mediocre ecosystem only the famous get called on their terrible like the average guy whos churning out a 22 episode. Cbs procedural and like ruining Work Experience for most people. That has to be talked about too. So one of the one of the original charmed actresses, i want to say, either online or dmd me like you never reached out for to me im like i did your clearly didnt pass that on so there a lot more resistance to the kind of stuff was saying especially around say know Sexual Violence on game of thrones recently you know like there was im some protected because im so i saw it it would happen and so in a way tried to stand up a bit more because im like okay if i have any of status within these spaces, im, ill, ill myself a target because you know, if im the for the Chicago Tribune or for i have a status and ill say it i dont give a like, you know, like i dont want to like if your priority to be friends with celebrities dont be a critic dont like i dont get it you know weirdly enough so just bring it to the book. It is scary. Thank you for saying that. I know. I mean. I dont know what its like for you. I, i do know that, like when you write peoples cages and they live in plush designer gucci cages where theyre all reinforcing for each other, theyre the greatest people in the world. I was terrified, this book coming out because, as you know, i, i go to very sacred in in los the tv show loss which by the way i wrote about a ton and so like im not im you the complicity word in that title its dont think im non complicit you dont i mean i think though i think the work you did i think the work a lot of people did during that sort of ferment of the height of twitter at the height of social media of a certain period it changed conversation to some degree. Yeah i think part of what changed the conversation is that we were talking about this over lunch. Theres like a point in the bubble where people think their their particular silo is all there is and then they could stay in those bubbles pre twitter, you could stay in those bubbles media. Now though reps want them to get online reps want them to be on tiktok, twitter or instagram or something. Its part the deal, right . Its the same for writers i promise you every writer has published anything in the last couple of years has gotten that email about how to use tiktok or how to get your social numbers going, how to act on social media. And so one of the reasons we were sort of shaking the and it wasnt even that this was the intent were having the conversations we were going have. Side note, jamie nesbit golden a. K. A the way the it is sitting over there hiding. Hi friend. She was with me in a lot of these conversations. Hi. Yeah. Yeah im going make you stand up later. Just. Yeah yeah. Why dont you stand up jamie . I know shes not any taller. Thats great. But one of the things that happened, we would be having a conversation sometimes were in those conversations, other people in those conversations and these celebs would be and it could be directors, it could be writers. I mean, when im saying slips, i dont just mean the actors. I mean, anybody in the hollywood who was remotely in them or wanted to be a name they would have such strong emotional reactions to the criticism. It wasnt like we were soandso is an absolute and we hate him and we hope he dies would be like, huh, i watch this show and the writing on it is really kind of sexist, especially for this one character. Or they relied on this old racial trope and then we have like this argument and one of the weirdest moments is to see some of the creators who dont do that leverage. Rodgers yes john rogers was like engage in actual discussion, but it would be like this weirdly refreshing thing where he would be like, oh, that we screw that up. Im to figure out where i went wrong. Wah, wah, wah and then youd have someone with a milder critique that was like, oh, i love the way that soandso wrote this. I cant believe attacking me. The woke mob is bringing me down. You dont know that you are. And i would be like, i dont if you know this, but if youre going to create for the public the public gets to criticize you. Oh, let me let me up a receipt here that ive never dropped in before. So were going to have fun with this and hope theres no libel suit. I was a big proponent, a tv show in its early days called the hundred, and its obscure like write about obscure stuff. But ill hopefully this relevant to anyone whos not seen everything the cw ever made, which is me. So its basically like, you know, kind of like a survival, like these kids, you know, theyre the last like sort of like earths been nuked. But were going to parachute these very. Cheekbone models dont always clean, always clean. The hair is. Just must just straight with thats the cw. They know their brand right. So i actually i thought was pretty interesting, you know, the way that they of like didnt shy away from some of the brutality and so forth and whatnot they up like real big time because i watch i literally actually watched the showrunner of the show do a victory lap, especially the queer press, but in the mainstream media, because they had notable bisexual, you know, lgbtq characters and especially this recurring role of this, you know, basically like a warrior queen lexa. So they had the lead of the show, you know flirt heavily and all the like. It was a very big shipping thing. It was like, you know, were it was just interesting, you know, they really embraced it and all that. Of course, kill lexa in the most stereotypical way. And i called the monitor whole bunch. And and during time, by the way, i didnt come out as bisexual till later, in part because of interactions like this. These fans kind of like gave me felt like a huge boost as a human being. They churned out fans just lost their minds and i understand why but they also churned out you know testimony journalism back stats like if you have narrative there are almost never any queer and if there are queer women, there are thin cisgender white women. If there are any queer women of any kind, they get killed off because the narrative isnt interested in them or theyre just like a tool because the we were in the age of there has to be a big death like in of thrones, there has to be a big death. So like who of our characters . Who do we kill . Its like were always landing on that square, huh . Interesting. So i wrote some things. Jason rothenberg was showrunner of that show. You know, i had interviewed him plenty of times. He knew where i lived, had my phone number. He had my email and they some of the things i write and this was the true in this case. Im to tell the studio or the show or the creative people messing up your reaction to this is not fans having a tantrum this not a two year old having a tantrum on the floor of target. This is a community that has been is one person called to me says to me we are nomads queer women and, femme and nonbinary people we are nomads. We go from show to show because we never have like ten shows. We have one. We were all going watch the l word. Were all going like even if it has, we dont have anywhere to go. So they had done this to this community. It was a bursting around a topic where the dam needed to burst because when discussions came around about queer characters in tv and film, often it was, you know, cisgender white men. Those characters in queer white men have made up to those upper tiers. Thats great. But like, were not having these conversations, so was educated. A lot of people were educated, was trying to help convey my and also education around these topics. So i did one big piece around that time and it was basically one of them was heres a laundry list you should not have engaged social media with fans promising thing a nice you know that this character would kind of there was implications character would make it that there would you know that there would be good things happening this that and the other and you should not have taken a victory lap the press you should have known your own history of your own medium. So that was i want to say the year. 2006. It was early 2016 because that was a year a lot of queer characters were being killed off on tv and it was like bad thing and women were being, you know, its like whole thing what characters we kill off like i guess it has to be a lady and i guess it to be that third tier black character that you never did a decent arc for. You know, like thats always what right. So i shared that piece in early 2016 and then this is this is three seed im going to drop two years later so they botched the entire handling of that people still watch the show like no hate if you it im not going to judge like what you like like two years later i had left that job for reasons and you know i had kept in touch with that community. I actually friends out of that whole experience because you get in the trenches with people in these kind of wars. If will two years later i wasnt working for that publication anymore and that that really that tribe of people talk about burning it down. They walked through a fire for their community and got a lot of abuse for educated a lot of people. I do think they changed the narrative around queer nonbinary representation. And i do think that. And so i tweeted the piece out again. I just said something like, you know, you know, recognizing, you know, the crew that that did all this work, just sharing this again two years later. Jason rothenberg deemed me. Well, hes smart. And so, so now and this is kind of like what were talking about with like when you have status and the position, youre in the bubble, but you get told youre in the bubble and some signal reaches you like is this someone not like me, i like this feeling like he he knew like the like the the whole rules are, you know, so i could have personally i were him spent that time educating myself and maybe doing some outreach with that community. I do a whole chapter my book, what is making amends look like i messed up everyone messes up what is real reparation of the Community Reparation to the community and amends and atonement in apologies how do you do stuff so he dms me something along lines and i had the screenshot shot i do i saved it i we all have that file of like oh heres some something i could drop sometime. Your story was trash then and its trash now. You didnt even bother to try to interview me or whatever. And im like, what . Im like, you you really you really had the energy to reach out to me two years after this controversy that you walked into, that you. So heres my thing and this is my cw rant buckle, right . I dont know how many of you remember upn, but when upn before cw and way upn got built was shows starring black and brown people, thats how cw comes to be it comes to be enough value for cw it all of it. But thing. And im going to bring up Sleepy Hollow now is that would have these beloved characters they have entire fan bases and i know showrunners would be like well we had idea but literally also know that there were people whose job is to monitor the fan chatter, that there are people internally who at how many fan fictions are written about specific characters, how much attention and energy fandom is putting into things. And its not just a nighttime show thing. Daytime soaps with sitcoms do, it the if anybody remembers when scandal first airs how scandal night would unite black twitter in discussion. There are all of these articles about the power of, black twitter and all of these things. So execs would then act like, well, we didnt pass dibley. No, fans love that character much. You you literally hire Market Research to keep track of which characters are being reacted to you literally have entire departments who reach out to those super fans and send them and merch and and so much so but even for things that you are not watching necessarily in attempt to get you to watch it right and i will fully disclose here im one of those people whos been on twitter since around 2009. Also her fault. I have a relatively large footprint now, around 160,000 followers, give or take a few thousand. I get those reach outs, right . I get emails or pr emails that sometimes im like, okay. Mm. Did you just send me something for show with. Absolutely no black people like one you dont even have like a token possibly could be black character, right . Your whole lineup is white and mostly men have you met me . Do you know how i wi