A new book by author Maureen Ryan reveals the toxic environment behind ABC’s LOST. Vanity Fair has published a chapter from Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood which detailed some pretty horrible episodes of verbal abuse, misogyny and racism. Former cast members and screenwriters go on record about their experiences and paint a pretty damning picture of what went on behind the scenes.
Let me preface this by saying that this is not at all an attempt to excuse what apparently went on on that show, this really bums me out. Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love LOST. No hyperbole, I really think it is the G.O.A.T. It is really disappointing to hear how toxic a workplace it was for so many people and the responses from the show runners, well, they don’t really help. Lindelof and Cuse essentially say “How could I know I was a dick on a show I was running if nobody told me?!”
That is some weak sauce.
The weakest. Especially since when they were told (by Harold Perrineau), they immediately fired him. That’s not going to foster an environment where people feel comfortable bringing issues to you. It seems like Carlton Cuse was the bigger problem of the two and, at least based on how he responded to Maureen Ryan’s queries through a PR person rather than straight-on, less willing to engage in real introspection about it.
You’ve got to be firmly ensconced in your own bubble to not even realize the implications of talking about wanting a black character lynched “from the highest tree” and having his genitals cut off and stuffed in his mouth…things that have actually happened to actual black men. Maybe the anger came from a place unrelated to race but they sure took it there (in Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s case.) There’s really no excuse for being ignorant about the historical and present-day realities of racism in this country. If you’re not familiar with these things, then you end up bringing racist imagery into your workplace like Cuse did, and people are harmed by that, and your claiming ignorance doesn’t undo that harm.
Not that it excuses anything, but Lindelof is surprisingly candid in the excerpt from the book on Vanity Fair. He says he doesn’t recall ever saying, “He called me a racist, so I fired his ass,” but he readily admits to contributing a toxic, sexist and racist work environment that “hurt” the cast and crew and caused them “trauma” and that he was “one thousand percent a part of that.”
I would hope that in Burn It Down… the author contrasts all that bad behavior with how those same producers run their shows now. By all accounts, Lindelof’s Watchmen staff was incredibly diverse and all the best parts of the show came from his openness to listening to voices that came from besides his lily-white world.
In the season 4 finale of LOST, “There’s No Place Like Home”, Harold Perrineau’s last scene as Michael Dawson, the ghost of Jack’s father appears to him and says, “You can go now.” That scene is a lot more chilling in light of “so I fired his ass.”