The industry is quite chauvinistic generally. Expectations of women, girls, what they should look like, how they should be, what they should say, what they should wear, how their hair should be, what colour their skin should be.
I've learned that it's often the less obvious, yet pervasive and questionable, everyday behaviors of men in our industry that collectively make it inhospitable for women.
As big as the industry is now and as gargantuan and stretched out with as many buses and trucks as there are now, it is still a big old dysfunctional family in my mind.
When you work in TV, it's such a group effort, it's not about you.
Up until recently, I've said, 'I don't notice the sexism in the industry.'
In our industry, everything is taken lightly. Guys say so many things, and if you react to them, they go, like,'We are kidding.' Things like 'You are looking hot sexy' are common.
I'd never had a mentor in Hollywood. Men have always been in control of the business, and they usually mentor people who are like them - but two inches shorter.
The thing about being black in a mostly white industry, particularly as a black male, is you can't lose your temper in the same way. Essentially, you are an angry black man losing his temper in a way that's unprofessional, as opposed to an industry that has protected unprofessional white males in perpetua.
I grew up on movie sets, I'm comfortable on sets. A movie set is like a circus. I don't understand why moviemaking has to be such an insane environment.
When I first came to comics, it was, like, dudes. The feeling, the air, the presence is overwhelmingly male.
People in the computer industry use the term 'user,' which to them means 'idiot.'
No one likes anyone in the industry
Let's put it this way: I don't have a good work ethic. I have a real casual relationship with hours. I don't understand why, in entertainment, the hours are as long as they are. It seems like everything takes forever, and no one can tell you why, exactly.
The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.
So much of Hollywood is about who the people you work with are.
In Hollywood you just fail upwards.
I felt more comfortable in TV than in the film world where the players were more erudite and intellectual.
The movie industry can be tricky and occasionally creepy, and I have this sense that the music industry is just shady as hell. I don't want to be a part of it.
In the music industry, you meet some not very nice people, some very strange characters.
There is this peculiar blind spot in the culture of academic medicine around whether withholding trial results is research misconduct. People who work in any industry can reinforce each others' ideas about what is okay.
Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don't know how to do their jobs. "I don't know how to sell this," they explain, frowning, as though it's your fault. "I don't know how to package this. I don't know what the market is for this book. I don't know how we're going to draw attention to this." In most occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job.
In L.A., we have a saying - 'What do you do?' It's less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the question because of my own answer - I write about games.
Certainly in the movie business there are bullies all over - bullies in the distribution business, exhibition business, production. Fine-tuning adult bullying is different. When a bully is an adult, it's a whole different set of colors.
It's rare to have even half-meaningful conversations in the film industry.
The music industry's very laid back while I'm very, very aggressive.
