Stars across Hollywood, sports, politics and academia came together on Monday for the fourth annual A Day of Unreasonable Conversation, a one-day summit of candid conversations designed to challenge beliefs, expand perspectives and influence onscreen stories.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Greg Berlanti and Simpson Street producing partners Kerry Washington and Pilar Savone served as co-chairs for the event, held at The Getty Center in Los Angeles with The Hollywood Reporter as media partner. Washington kicked off the programming by telling the crowd of largely TV writers, producers and execs, “In this moment, when the algorithm really only feeds us what we already believe and fractured media silos us into polarized corners, content matters more than ever. The truth is that good storytelling doesn’t live in the binary … having the courage to step into that complexity is one of the best ways that we will understand each other more deeply.”
Savone added, “Today’s event was purposely designed to push you, to stretch you and to grow. Because even in Hollywood, especially in Hollywood, we can fall into the trap of hearing only the perspectives that are closest to us — and when we do, our stories suffer.”
And so began a day that of conversations that spanned politics, social media, journalism, education, food, climate change, AI and toxic masculinity, with Don Cheadle, Lisa Joy, Mara Brock Akil, Sara Gilbert, W. Kamau Bell, Phil Rosenthal, Jay Shetty, Terry Crews and creator Jake Shane among the Hollywood participants; Kamala Harris also stopped by for a special conversation to close out the event, and Atsuko Okatsuka emceed throughout.
Kerry Washington
Lindsay Rosenberg
Despite the many topics at hand, politics was the dominating one, as Bell joked that in the political fight, “As a Black person, I don’t have the luxury of focusing on being exhausted. Whenever I think about how hard it is to do whatever work I’m doing, the ghost of Harriet Tubman shows up like, ‘You’re tired? Oh, is it hard to direct documentaries and write on Substack?’
“It’s not worth thinking about, because we have a choice to make: Are we fascist? Are we anti-fascist? The revolution is exhausting,” he continued of being worn out at this moment. “It is on you to stop fascism in America — I don’t mean the collective you, I mean each and every one of you. What are you doing today? When you do it tomorrow?”
Vice President Harris, who is currently promoting her book 107 Days, later took the stage to a standing ovation and looked back on the election night she lost to Trump, recalling, “I couldn’t articulate anything else — I kept saying over and over again, ‘My God, my God.’ I had never felt that level of pain and grief except that when my mother died, and it was grieving for the country. I knew what was going to happen.”
Sitting down with WNBA player and advocate Napheesa Collier, Harris had a message for the many creators in the room, saying, “We are living history right now and you all as storytellers are living this. You’re not passive observers, you’re living it and I would ask you that all the emotions that we are feeling, give those emotions, gift that experience to those people that you are writing about and writing for; it gets back to my point about helping people, just put a label on it, even if it doesn’t change the circumstance. Because there is so much about this moment that is trying to make people feel like they’ve lost their minds, when in fact, these motherfuckers are crazy,” she declared, which was met with huge applause and laughs from the audience. “I call this ‘The Freedom Tour,’” Harris cheekily responded of her post-campaign honesty after the crowd died down.
The politician also touched on some of the current censorship fears in Hollywood — particularly in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s show being temporarily suspended — as Harris noted, “I don’t envy some of the folks who are here, who are in a situation where you are being subtly or maybe not even so subtly being sent signals that now is not the time to speak a certain level of truth with certain level of candor. Every person has to make that decision for themselves, right? But there will always be risk associated with speaking truth.”
Michele L. Jawando, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tomicah Tillemann
Lindsay Rosenberg
Among the other event highlights was Gordon-Levitt sitting down for a discussion about AI both in and outside of Hollywood, as the actor — who has become an outspoken voice on the issue — noted that “these large language models are really impressive with what they can do and I’m not against the technology at all. The problem that I have with it is there’s an unethical business model that’s dealing with the money in a way that’s not fair,” explaining, “the model itself can’t do anything at all by itself without all the content, all the data produced by humans that’s fed into it.”
He continued that the technology “can be so great in so many ways, but then these companies who are unprecedentedly lucrative, why can’t some of that money — maybe about half of it or something — go to all the people who put that intelligence into that collective intelligence?”
Gordon-Levitt also expanded the impact beyond entertainment as he mused, “if a tech company is allowed to just take something valuable that someone else did — whether it’s a creator or it’s a doctor, it’s a professor of science, it’s an engineer, whatever it is — and they’re allowed to just take what they’ve done and make money with it, without paying them, then what kind of economy are we going to have? What kind of jobs are going to exist anymore? What kind of incentive is there going to be for anybody to have a good idea, to work hard, to strive? This is not a tenable thing. This is dystopia that we could be heading for. I like to try to zoom out because frankly, the critics in Silicon Valley will say, ‘You’re just a bunch of Hollywood actors, nobody cares about you.’ And frankly, they’re right. But it’s about so much more than Hollywood.”
A Day of Unreasonable Conversation is a program of Propper Daley BPI, in partnership with Invisible Hand.
