John Ridley has been active in Hollywood since the early ’90s, to the degree that he wrote for one of the best obscure sitcoms of that era, The John Laroquette Show. But his career hit turbo speed when he wrote the script for the 2013 Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave, for which he received an Oscar for his screenplay. Since then, he’s written even more movies and produced American Crime, a three-season ABC series that dug into political and social issues with real nuance and depth, in a way even cable television struggles with, to say nothing of broadcast network television. 

Now his new documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, tackles the long buildup to what are commonly known as the LA riots, but which the film calls the LA uprising. Tracing the history of racially charged incidents leading up to the police beating of Rodney King, as well as the horrific relationship between the LAPD and black Angelenos, the film also looks at how Los Angeles was — and wasn’t — changed by the events of April and May 1992. 

Ridley joins Todd to talk about the ways history has erroneously remembered those events, as well as his long career in Hollywood and his favorite superheroes.