Hollywood Loves True Stories. Just Not From the People Who Lived Them.

They say Hollywood is dying. The articles and Instagram carousels keep arriving, mapping the transition: tech conglomerates owning studios, monopolistic mergers, mandate-driven development, fewer sales, lower production value, AI, productions fleeing, and on and on. The industry that once promised the most original work would rise to the top; that opportunity was endless, that anyone had a shot; looks nothing like what we have now. With so much we are willing to change, it seems there is one thing that stays the same.

In 2020, I pitched a show called Sponsored. Modern feminism through the lens of Instagram models using the democratization of power by way of social media to create autonomy, access, and opportunity. Everyone passed. The notes were familiar. Escorts aren't sympathetic. Is this a comedy or a drama? No one wants to watch a show about sex workers. The show was not about sex workers. It was about commodification, financial independence, wealth disparity, and power dynamics—conversations women have every day, told by the community who lives them, set in a town that preaches equality and opportunity. Then I was told no one wants to watch a show about Hollywood, that entertainment-industry shows don't sell. The show went into a drawer. None of the no's were about appetite. The appetite was always there. The no was about who was carrying the material.

Five years on: Euphoria Season 3—set in Hollywood, about sex work, the commodification of self, the overindulgence of sex, power, and money—told not by someone who has lived it, but by someone who has consumed it, fetishized it, and fantasized about it. It is the gaze we keep getting handed back.

Marginalized communities and cultures spawn the interest of creatives because of their allure, taboo, and intrigue, then get sold back to us by people whose only reference point is their perception.

Euphoria isn't the exception. It's the rule. There's the recent series about a struggling college student using sex work to pay her way—written by a man. The romanticized luster of a stripper's life—written by a man. The list runs long. This is not a criticism of those creators—I admire their talent. I respect their craft. I regard them as industry giants. The pattern is the criticism. The material is real. The audience is real. The theft is in the delivery—the choice, again and again, to hand the most legible version of an authentic story to a writer whose authorship is more legible to the buyer than to the world they're sharing. The question I anticipate—does this mean storytellers can only tell stories from worlds they know?—is the wrong question. The right one is whether we can include the storytellers from those worlds and give them a creative runway, too.

Even more confronting: we indulge audiences with the most controversial material; sex work, drugs, exploitation, race, and sexuality, and then glamorize the addict, the prostitute, the criminal, the gang-banger, the disenfranchised, or shrink them to a plot point fueled by the mystique of a world the author doesn't know. What we neglect is the depth and weight of those stories outside of the tropes we have learned to expect.

In Euphoria Season 3, a young woman with a drug problem is sent to a rehab facility for "treatment." I know that story. I am twenty-two years sober. For the last five years, I have been self-financing a three-part documentary series about the addiction treatment industry called In Your Best Interest. It is the true story of what actually happens when a young woman gets dropped into that system; the pipeline from rehab into sex trafficking and body brokering.

For four years, I traveled the country to make this. I followed the system from Buffalo to Palm Beach to Los Angeles, and into the towns in between, where the same machine has been running for years.

I sat with the young people who survived the system that exploited their insurance for profit and endured the unfathomable. They told me what they had done to stay alive, and what had been done to them. I sat with politicians from multiple administrations who watched the crisis explode over decades and could tell you, in detail, where the warnings were and who chose not to listen. I sat with former brokers; the people who built and ran the machine, who walked me through how the economics actually work: what a patient is worth, where the money flows, what happens when the insurance runs out. I sat with bereaved parents who can still tell you their child's intake date. And worse, the day they were found dead in a facility that promised them care.

The treatment industry in this country is a $43 billion business. There isn't a family in America that doesn't know someone in it; a brother, a daughter, a parent, a friend. The audience interest is not theoretical. Scripted addiction stories pull viewers in by the millions. Euphoria. Dopesick. Painkiller.

Audiences have already shown up for the fictional version of this world. Repeatedly.

Yet the true story, I am told, is one audiences don't want to hear. Yet search body broker on TikTok, and you will find first-hand accounts of a modern-day con so extensive you have to see it to believe it.

Young people are dying everywhere. A generation is screaming for someone to listen; filming from inside facilities, naming brokers in viral testimonials, eulogizing each other in public because the institutions that should have protected them did not. The audience the streamers say doesn't exist is already producing the evidence themselves, asking the algorithm to do the work the gatekeepers won't.

The audience is already here.

They're already publishing.

They're already begging to be taken seriously.

So why is the truthful version of the same story so much harder to get made than the dramatized one?

I have shared the series with every major streamer. The notes:

Incredible, but it doesn't meet our mandate. Too newsy. Needs a pop-culture twist. How about a celebrity? We fought for it, but couldn't get it over the line. We hope it finds a home.

The irony is not subtle. We will cosplay this material in scripted television, then flinch at telling it honestly to the same audience. A scripted addict is metabolizable. These communities function as ornament—useful for conflict and drama, rarely afforded the color and shape of the people who lived them.

And it isn't just about my project. This is about every project and every storyteller with a uniquely qualified perspective who keeps getting the door shut because an algorithm knows better. We aren't the only ones who suffer. The audience pays for this, too. There are truths about addiction, about the scale of a con this great, about what actually happens inside "treatment," and every other nuanced story that you cannot get to from the outside. They come with the people who lived them. When those accounts get filtered out, what's left isn't a kinder picture of the world. It's a less true one.

I have to believe the modern viewer is more interested and more intelligent than we keep giving them credit for. We have a drug crisis still proliferating, a healthcare system out of control, a socio-economic gap that keeps widening, and a social climate fractured by misinformation and infantilization. This is the mandate. How many true-crime stories about dead women do we need to produce to anesthetize a culture already reduced to sixty-second videos? It almost feels like there's a benefit to managing what gets digested; keeping the same kinds of stories, and the same kinds of storytellers, in the lead. The powers that be will tell us they follow the data, that mandates work because the data says so. But is the data what they say it is? Sinners—Ryan Coogler writing and directing from inside the material—hit at a scale the industry didn't predict, but he knew. The audience was already there. The mandate was the wall.

The argument isn't that authorship requires identity. It's that authorship by the people inside a world shouldn't be the rare exception.

This isn't an accident. The system is doing exactly what its incentives ask of it; preserving the gatekeeping function and calling that progress.

The audience is ready.

The material is here.

The storytellers from inside these worlds are in the room, pitching, self-financing, waiting for the call.

What's missing isn't proof of demand. It's the will to seat the people who have always been carrying the story. The mandate doesn't describe what the audience wants. It describes who the industry is willing to bet on.

In Your Best Interest exists. Regardless of a green light. The audience just hasn't been asked.

I am not quitting. Everyone is going to suggest I shouldn't write this; that publishing it puts whatever opportunity I have left at risk. They might be right. But what do I actually have to lose? The only way to test the hypothesis I'm laying out here is by the response it gets. I believe you want to see it. I know there is power in numbers. Sometimes the only way to get something done is to take a risk, to think outside the box; and as someone who has had to live outside of it, I know how to do that pretty well.

This is for the people with a dream, the people who keep having the door shut on them, the people who want to tell meaningful stories and believe the audience is ready to hear them.

Photo © Cara Santana Leto / Photographed by @annamuradas