Breaking the Dam, with Sameer Gardezi

Welcome to Free Radicals — a collaboration between Every, Sherrell Dorsey, founder of The Plug, and writer and editor Annaliese Griffin. Each edition features a conversation between Sherrell and someone who embodies leadership, focusing on equity, expansive thinking, and progress. 

Sameer Gardezi likes to tell stories. His writing has graced major networks like the CW, Fox, Comedy Central, and NBC; he’s worked for Universal and Disney and 20th Century; he’s won a Writers Guild Award for his work as a staff writer on the Emmy-winning show Modern Family. But his most beloved project is his biggest yet—rewriting Hollywood altogether. 

Gardezi is the founder and CEO of Break the Room, a screenwriting incubator that funds and staffs writers’ rooms to support the work of people underrepresented in Hollywood. Break the Room intentionally upends standard writers’ room hierarchies, transforming the way stories get told, how films and television get made. 

“Talent is everywhere, it's just that Hollywood does a poor job of being able to create access and opportunities to arenas that exist outside their purview,” he told Free Radicals. As a Muslim-American who has been working in Hollywood for close to two decades, Gardezi is clear-eyed about what the concept of diversity, as practiced by agencies and studios, can actually accomplish—their efforts are largely undertaken to make executives look good, and have little affect on achieving true equity in the industry.

Take Sister Act. “Whoopi Goldberg was the star of one of the highest grossing comedy films of all time,” Gardezi says about the 1992 blockbuster. But nearly three decades later, Hollywood still acts as if projects that center BIPOC, women, and queer folks are financially risky. Viewers, he says, are hungry for a more expansive set of narratives, and writers and performers are ready to create them. It’s Hollywood that hasn’t built the infrastructure to support these stories, largely by maintaining a very white, very male, very heteronormative layer of executive power.

Sherrell Dorsey spoke with Gardezi about Hollywood’s parallels with the tech industry, the differences between opportunity and equity, and why getting a seat in a writers’ room is just the beginning of the story. 

What’s the show that you've worked on that has been the most meaningful and the most aligned with where you would like to see the industry going? That made you say, Man, I wish we could just do more of THIS.

Hands down, East of La Brea, which is also how Break the Room got started. Back in 2016 or 2015, I had the idea for a show centered on two Muslim-American women, one Black, one Bangladeshi. The entire hook and pitch was that these are the sides of L.A. you don't see, that no one really talks about—Salvadoran, Black, Bangladeshi LA. I knew that it wouldn’t be made by Hollywood.