 What's the rest of the song? So what the hell has happened over the past year? That's what I came to talk about, since our very creative and very ill businesses are related. Last year, a few brave reporters wrote an expose that blasted through all 24 time zones and ripped the artifice off the working relationships between men and women. It's not like nobody knew these things were going on, the sexual abuse of powerful men, of women by powerful men. It's just that those men had been protected by their wealth and leverage and lawyers for so long that no one had the brass knuckles to break through the iron wall. But the New York Times and the New Yorker had the muscle to do so and a sweeping historical change began almost immediately. The story began with an expose in my workplace, Hollywood, where I somehow managed to toil mostly successfully and mostly happily for the last 30-something. We won't say quite how many years. Within weeks, the same behavior turned out to be rampant in other businesses and bad guys fell from the sky all over the place, notably in the restaurant business, the media business, academia, theater, and other traditionally male-dominated businesses, i.e. all of them. From there, this outrage has spread as wide as China, India, and even Saudi Arabia. This message is bigger and far more impactful than any international blockbuster we ever made. I wanna share with you what it was like being at the center of the storm as this broke, being at the center of the brokenness itself and how I tried to keep it from dimming my slowly rising star all the time, refusing to see how it diminished me and the women around me. Last spring, our town caught emotional fire with long-suppressed cries of me too and my son, grown son, who's a manager, whose clients include many talented women called me in dismay. Mom, this is horrible. What was it like for you when you first started out? I said, he said, I'm reading this and realizing how horrible this must have been for you. And as much as I appreciated his sudden appreciation for my long road and appreciation, I must say, he'd never shown before. I said, Harvey didn't hit on women like me. I didn't seem powerless even before I had any power. I came from the newspaper business and maybe they thought I would tell. I was trying to figure out why men like that never hit on me actually. But then I realized they needed powerless women who needed them to get a job and thrived on that power imbalance and realizing that infuriated me. In the movie business, powerless meant aspiring actresses, interns and assistants who were just starting out. In your business, the parallels are clear. Line cooks, servers, hostesses. The more you need the powerful man, the more succulent you appear to them, ready for the spit. I began my own movie career developing flash dance with a woman who became my best friend, Dawn Steele, then at Paramount and you were all not born yet. Which is a harrowing, harrowing thought to me. We were among many young women in development called D-Girls. That meant we passed out water, fancy water at meetings at the time. And she later became a legendary powerhouse, one of the first two women to become studio heads. She was a star up from the marketing department. In fact, she had marketed Gucci toilet paper just to show you how ahead of her time she really was. And as though, even though she later became famous for being a doyan of the girls club, one of her greatest joys was crashing anything that reeked of boys only. Rafting trips, men's rooms, board rooms, an iconic picture of her by Carl Lagerfield has her coming out of the men's room zipping up or fly. She was a guy's gal. Like many women of my generation, she loved bad naughty men, men full of testosterone. She was not afraid of a good fight. And sometimes she lost. Ultimately, she was fired by a trusted male boss while she was pregnant. And she found out in the end that she was as vulnerable as any woman despite her enormous strength and camaraderie with her male peers. When she died of brain cancer, she was buried with the girls club as her pallbearers. Ironically, she found her greatest strength and comfort with us. The guys had let her down. I was lucky to have come to town, just as women like Dawn were getting traction in positions of authority. And I naturally gravitated towards them. We had never heard the term sexual harassment, let alone that HR department. But we were frequently moving errant hands on our thighs back where they belonged with small acts of swats. Screaming bosses and aggressive flirting were part of the fabric of everyday life. That our bosses were vulgarians. That came with the territory. That was life penetrating the locker room. Once in a studio chief's office deciding on a leading lady with a big director, the studio chief dismissed the award winning actress we wanted to hire by saying, I would never fuck her. I almost fell off my chair. But if I had, that would have been my last meeting in the studio chief's office. So the director and I kept talking about her chops, which is not in my business a cut of meat, but a way we refer to real acting talent. If you wanted in on the decision making, you just had to block out the insulting sexism and keep talking about the actress. You had to go deaf. Don't get kicked out of the room was the rule. And in the end, we cast the woman we wanted and we stayed in the room. As the small warm-blooded animals among the dinosaurs, we learned to huddle together to be nurtured. There were men we called pigs and drunks and we warned each other about them with a code word or an eye roll. The worst offenders are being outed now. They were in the center of the Venn diagram we called pig drunks. I've heard you all did the exact same thing. It's female primate behavior. For some reason, excuse me, coffee please. I've only had two today and my usual is four as everyone at Squirrel will tell you. That's why I'm here. Thank you, Squirrel. For my dinner at Noma. Brene. And the finest and nicest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of keeping company with. Who have a lot to teach my peers. For some reason when women got these jobs, no matter how immensely successful they were, they never acted like they were versions of Mad Men episode gone horribly awry. There were perks, drivers and beloved jets, but no sense of the abuse of power that seemed to many men like it came with the job like Fitzgerald Novella. We all felt so lucky just to have the jobs. Remember that word, luck, it's a killer. And if darting and dodging unwanted passes was part of it, well that was life. And we built an arsenal of tools to deal with it. We were like octopi with arms and legs swinging wildly and pasted on smiles. Kind of like my granddaughter's dance, The Floss. When Deborah Hill and I first got together in the 90s, packaged by Dawn and brought to her studio, the first of the girls club's deals, many agents set up these get to know you deal meetings with their actresses. Now I look back on those meetings and understand why they, the actresses seemed so excited to be there. For one thing, it never occurred to us to meet in hotel rooms in our bath robes. Crazy, isn't it? On set, women producers would go into the wardrobe trailer genuinely to discuss wardrobe. In astonishing relief it turned out for costume designers, wardrobe assistants, actors and set PAs who were used to protecting trailer doors from Trump misuniverse type invasions made by peering male producers. It was a whole other ball game. People felt safe. Female stars were immediately attracted to the idea of female producers. And as they watched us, they studied us and they began producing themselves, wrapping themselves in their own leverage as had always been used by others. This was a sea change. Now you can look at your movies and see produced by Reese Witherspoon, produced by Sandy Bullock. I taught Sandy how to produce. And that makes me very proud. And it's no wonder all of these abusers were clearly living in the bubble of their own enormous narcissism. Successful, big scale narcissism attracts a mirroring entourage that blocks out criticism, common sense and ethics in return for money and access. This narcissistic derangement is like a distortion in the local space time, warping everything and everyone around it until a radical event like the one we've just experienced, one's in an Eon event, wax it back in perspective, eviscerating the black hole center, leaving everyone who had been orbiting, spinning outward, stunned at all the carnage and deception they'd been literally party to. We see it everywhere. In the claims of the junk and alpha chef who thought all the waitresses really wanted to caress him. And the repulsive Harvey, thinking that his significance and suddenly made him sexy after all these, after a lifetime of being the ugly duckling. They lived for years with a swag they felt entitled to, along with the Rolls Royce, ripe something young, new bile and female. This came with the territory for the moguls and for some of your pardon the expression top chefs too. And while the cultural clock was ticking, the dinosaur in all his ways started going out of style in Hollywood. Bullying, screaming, phone throwing and hide dungeon went out of fashion. The overt use of drugs diminished and gentility and team building was becoming the new order. These outsized moguls were literally bursting the themes of their fancy pants. Even with the good manners and less phone throwing growing in popularity, there was still nowhere for us to go with our complaints. The cops didn't try to get them prosecuted. It wasn't until we reached critical mass, I think with the outrage, outrage of Donald Trump and his pussy grabbing, that women built the courage to talk to reporters. Finally, it all cracked. The moral arc of the universe took its damn time to bend. What is it about our two cultures that attract these outsized creatures? What encourages these bubbles and entitlement that had grown around them? Their names are often the brands of their business. Their ambition pushed their creativity to turn their names into a commodity, something we women were rarely bred to do in the same way. Significantly, in my generation in movies, women became producers instead of directors, using our considerable talents in service of others. Give me some money for my great male director. He's a genius. We would never push ourselves. For fear we would be laughed at for being so audacious. Founder entitlement, which we see at our famous restaurants and with guy directors pushing their own logos, was much harder for my generation of women to muster. Like mother bears, we could fight for others, but not for ourselves. That took way too long. Since this unraveling began, I've learned that young women are not only furious at men. Here's the hard part for me. They're angry with women like me too. At first, the stunned me. They're angry that it went on at all. They're angry that they don't feel safe at work or writ large, given who is in charge in our country as he would tweet, bigly. Everything seems broken and rigged against them and they're mad as hell and won't take it anymore. And as we are part of the system, we are part of the problem. I've debated this with my 30s and 40-something girlfriends long into the night. I gave my side and listened to theirs. I argued that we did what we had to do given that the business had been closed, shut, period. That there was no one to tell about what went on but each other. The police, that's a cruel joke. And if a man got in our way, we navigated around him, learning strategic skills that were great for us. As you can see, I've come a long way myself this year. And if a man was kind and nurturing in a fatherly way, we were thrilled. Guys like that let us participate and taught us the game. And we, in turn, did the same for women who came after. I scored mentors, I mentored scores of women. And I scored mentors of women, too. I wonder how you do that, actually. I'm gonna work on that. And I produced nor Efron's, proudly produced nor Efron's directing debut in the 90s when it wasn't a thing. And there was no systemic support for it in the business as there is now. No women would be writing shows, I told them. They wouldn't be writing shows or movies if I hadn't cracked the glass ceiling for them. All of us, blah, blah, blah, they told me. They already knew this. It wasn't the point, they argued. I felt underappreciated and glum. It took me a long time to understand what they were saying. Yes, individuals had succeeded. Each one of us who broke through, for each one of us who broke through, room was made for a talented few more. Until year by year, more women earned positions of power and influence. But we let the handsiness go as the price of doing business. We didn't tell on the abusers who gave us green lights and money. We didn't use our power as a group to protect the whole of us. We used it to protect us individually. They feel that we tolerated it as the cost of doing business. And we left it for them to deal with. The story of BBC China editor, Carrie Gracie, is the one that crystallized it for me. A woman of my generation, that means she's 130 just to be clear, she sacrificed the job she loved where she worked for three decades when it was revealed that they'd lied to her about getting equal pay to her male counterparts. She forced the issue and in the process exposed to the staffs, the fees for the entire new staff. And the information was used to fight for pay parity for all the women at the BBC. As the New Yorker recently wrote, Gracie's gift is part of a growing bid to fix the system rather than hope that a few determined women might be able to beat it. Here and there, some of the time it's the multiplier effect of solidarity. This is what I hadn't realized. As we, my generation, was just squeaking in the door, so happy just to have the job, so grateful to be making our living doing what we loved, like fortunate second class citizens. We never received proper participation or even asked for it. Or I didn't, like the men did, those with fewer hits than me for sure. Not until Sherri Lansing, the other woman's studio head, took me into her studio in my third decade of pro-producing, appalled that I didn't receive profit participation in my movies. She said, what the hell is going on here, Linda? And gave me gross points for the first time. It was the way it always was, and I just stupidly acquiesced because we were outliers. We were women lucky enough to be doing a men's job. The luck drug again. No more mister and miss and miss and misses. No more women outliers, lucky to be in the game. We are not lucky because we are here. We are here because we are talented and really good at what we do. We are in the game as any other player. We are writers, showrunners, directors, producers, studio heads, DPs, chefs, owners, franchise owners, entrepreneurs, artists, creators of businesses that never before existed. So now, how do we forgive imperfect men? And now we find out imperfect women. For that is certainly part of the future we face. I have come to see at my age that life is full of grays and that our idols, mentors, comrades, and coworkers are imperfect as we are. So we must invent new power relations with room for collaborative comfort because that's what makes work joyous. We have to and want to work with men in a new power relation of equals. We must hone our chops by working with the best people around as you have done, Renee. And I will talk about it for a very long and boring amount of time to everyone in Hollywood until they finally shut me up. We can tolerate and even enjoy, as I do, a certain amount of individual eccentricities as long as we let people know when their behavior crosses a line. If we are strong, we will not lose our way and become the worst versions of those very talented but flawed people we learned from. We need to understand how to be powerful in a way that's not abusive, not hierarchical, and encourages the best of our growing team. We must reconceive power so we don't see the same terrible patterns of victim becoming victimizer. We read in Kim Severson's important new importing. We must not idealize all women, nor demonize all men, but show the best of what is different about us women that we can learn and learn to carry our success with grace. So I say to my son, it was tough, but I'm still standing and learning and I'm still having fun. And now I have gross points. And women are everywhere and safe, I pray, at last.