TV can spark social change. These big names just urged Hollywood writers to embrace it

Arts

Alison Brower March 27, 2024

Halle Berry got the memo.

At A Day of Unreasonable Conversation, a conference

at the Getty Center

in Los Angeles on Monday, the star regaled an audience of TV and film writers, Hollywood executives and activists with a deeply personal episode: About three years ago, when she experienced excruciating pain after sex with her then-new partner, Berrys doctor diagnosed her with the worst case of herpes he had ever seen, she recalled.

Event co-chair Kerry Washington had opened the proceedings by urging speakers to be not just unreasonable but also brave in tackling hot-button topics from artificial intelligence to climate change to the throbbing bass line of the day, political polarization and Berrys shocking revelation was certainly brave.

It was also funny, informative and clearly more than a little surprising to her onstage conversation partner, First Lady Jill Biden, who joined the event to tout her husbands recent executive order investing $12 billion in womens health research.

Im not making

any

comment, Biden said with a slightly uneasy laugh as Berrys testimony gained steam toward the big reveal: The cause of her post-coital misery was not herpes for the record,

not herpes

but the hormonal changes that come with menopause. Menopause is a focus of the new White House health funding.

Youre going to have so much to write about, Biden told the Hollywood scribes in the room.

But will they?

The answer to this is better TV shows?

A Day of Unreasonable Conversation, spearheaded by social impact agency Propper Daley, with partner organization Invisible Hand as creative directors, was meant to unlock progress through the power of narrative and creative expression. As in, inspire Hollywood creatives TV writers in particular to embrace their role as change agents and tell stories that amplify urgent social and political issues, stories that reach audiences across the ideological spectrum.

Were facing tremendous obstacles, whether its the climate crisis, the need for affordable care, wars in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine, an epidemic of loneliness, shattered ideas of what reality and truth are. Its a lot, Washington said to the crowd, which included Emmy-winning writer Jason Katims, producer Stacey Sher and FX executive Gina Balian. Now some people might say, So you guys think the answer to this is better TV shows? And I say yes! I do! I think at least thats part of it, because for many people, television is the only way that they meet people who are different from them.

Energetically emceed by comedian and actor Phoebe Robinson, a self-declared low-budget Oprah, the program was a fire hose of conversations between creators, activists and politicos. Adam Conover, a comedian and member of the Writers Guild of America 2023 negotiating committee, kicked off the first panel (topic: The Labor Understory) by going off-prompter to rail against the billionaire class, including the Getty family whose Brentwood campus was the setting for the day.

Cord Jefferson, the Oscar-winning writer-director of American Fiction, interrogated Americans exhaustion around discussing race alongside One Day at a Time showrunner Gloria Caldern Kellett, psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl, journalist Michele Norris and comedian-filmmaker W. Kamau Bell. Nobelist Maria Ressa, the Filipino and American founder of digital news site Rappler, sounded the alarm on techs existential threats to journalism and our human rights. Christine Blasey Ford, the Brett Kavanaugh accuser whose memoir came out

on

Tuesday, and sexual assault survivor Chanel Miller explored the risks and rewards of truth-telling.

There was gloss and sass to leaven the tough stuff. Kesha shared her songwriting journey. Who wants to listen to an angry woman? she said of her 2017 hit, Praying, that arose from her long legal battle with producer Dr. Luke. Turns out, a lot of f people do. Joining U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy for a discussion about loneliness, Paris Hilton was vulnerable in her studded Valentino stilettos (and generated just the faintest cynical murmur across the auditorium with an opportune mention of her production company). Even TikTok empress Charli DAmelio took a turn onstage, for a crowd older and smaller than her typical target demo, with her own message on mental health.

It was a briskly paced and tightly run show. It was entertaining, illuminating and galvanizing. And, to borrow Washingtons phrase, it was

a lot

.

My friend Stacy Rukeyser, a writer and showrunner, took it all to heart and wondered how she would deploy what she was learning. As the daughter of a woman with Alzheimers, she related to a discussion between Maid and Class author Stephanie Land and actor Yvette Nicole Brown about sandwich-generation caregivers. As a storyteller, she sparked more to the days characters, imagining back stories for speakers like Dawson Holle, a 20-year-old dairy farmer turned North Dakota state representative with I Love Dairy socks peeking out from under his cuffs. Or Sharon Lavigne, the grass-roots crusader battling petrochemical plants in Louisianas Cancer Alley, whose anguish for her community was palpable.

Hollywood under threat

Hanging over the proceedings was the possibility of a second Trump presidency, though his name wasnt invoked much until an afternoon session with the Guzmn family conservative Mexican immigrants Bernardo and Lupita, who voted for Trump in 2016, and their liberal daughter Mnica, author of “I Never Thought of It That Way: How To Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.”

The Guzmns told moderator Krista Tippett how they communicate with love and respect across the red-blue divide, despite some raging arguments over the issues. At this point the audience was well into its seventh hour of active listening, and I found myself wishing for more demonstration of the Guzmns good, juicy conflict (a Robinson coinage), but Tippett kept the focus on the tools of detente.

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Among the unreasonable conversations that did not happen, at least onstage, was the one about a contracting entertainment industry where fewer TV series are being greenlit. The writers in the Getty auditorium were already on board, game to use their platform to change hearts and minds, but as production grinds all too slowly back into action after last years strikes, plenty of them dont yet know what their next platform will be.

Still, non-TV-writer me was struck by futurist Sinead Bovells forceful comments on artificial intelligence, perceived by many Hollywood writers as a potentially uncontainable beast poised to ravage their livelihood. It is impossible to build towards futures if you are only shown examples of futures that you dont want, Bovell said. Tell the stories of technology and evolution, the co-evolution with people, that you want to see the stories where we do get our future with it right.

Environmental activist Sage Lenier made a similar, if more confrontational, case for an end to glorifying hyper hyper consumerism on screen. I dont want to see any more Wolf of Wall Street, I dont want to see the luxury fashion shopping sprees, she said. You need to tell better stories about what living sustainably would mean, about what a sustainable culture would mean, what a decarbonized culture looks like, thats not just, like, Oh, the Escalade is electric, I swear.

Almost everyone in Hollywood wants to get back to work. What’s taking so long?

In an era when horror is the surest thing at the box office and dystopia dominates TV drama, are creators really going to take this kind of direction from do-gooders outside the industry? Im inspired to be as out loud and proud as Halle Berry was about menopause, said Rukeyser, who created Sex/Life for Netflix. She wont shy away from hot flashes next time she writes a middle-aged female character, Rukeyser added, and Ill make the point that her life and career are far from over.

At the conferences cocktail reception, Lynn Renee Maxcy, whose writing credits include Hulus The Handmaids Tale, cited the loneliness panel as a highlight before flipping open her notebook from the day: several pages of eye-bleedingly dense notes. I focus on something called protopias, which is somewhere in between dystopia and utopia, where there are serious problems, but were making them better a little bit at a time, Maxcy said. And we have to get everybody involved; you need the community in action.

Michael Kelly, vice president of social impact at Participant, a studio where social change is embedded in the mission, was also looking on the bright side. Im a nerd, so I love Star Trek, he told me. And what I appreciate about Gene Roddenberrys Star Trek is, it presented this picture of the future and what it looked like when you look at the bridge of the Enterprise, it has women in leadership, its got different ethnicities, and I think his vision was, Hey, if we can show you whats possible, maybe well get there.

So Hollywood, storytell the change you want to see in the world, while you still can.

Halle Berry’s perimenopause was misdiagnosed as ‘worst case of herpes’ her doc ever saw