Adam McKay is Exploring 1950s Hollywood Tragedies in New Podcast Series DEATH ON THE LOT
Adam McKay and his company Hyperobject Industries and Sony Music Entertainment have produced an eight-episode podcast series titled Death on the Lot. The show will explore several of the Hollywood tragedies in the 1950s.
The stories will dive into the deaths of James Dean, Hattie McDaniel, John Garfield, and other notable Hollywood figures who died prematurely in the 1950s.
The project was born out of McKay’s 2021 podcast Death at the Wing, which explored the untimely deaths of basketball players in the 1980s. McKay said: “All during the making of Death at the Wing, we kept saying the only other comparison we can think of is Hollywood after World War II. Then we thought, ‘Well, let’s do a season about that, and see what we can uncover.’ And if possible, it was even richer and deeper, and more to the core of the American story than we anticipated.”
When talking about what he likes about working on podcasts, McKay said: “You’re able to walk into the project, and make the project, with questions still unanswered. With these podcasts, the questions are the central theme of the show — and it’s really fun, because you’re constantly making discoveries. It’s just a very living and breathing process, all the way to the very end, when you record that last couple of sentences.”
Some of the people that were interviewed for the podcast include Ron Howard, Lee Grant, and James Cromwell, as well as the relatives of some of the subjects, such as McDaniel’s great grand-nephew. McKay said: “That diversity of voices, it’s essential to this kind of storytelling, because it’s incredibly interdisciplinary. You’re not ever just looking at things through an economic lens, a sociological lens, an entertainment history lens — the lens is always shifting. So it really creates this need for an incredibly broad perspective.
He added: “That collection of voices is the center, the core, of the show. It’s the living questions — and then going to this incredible array of people to get those answers.”
McKay specifically talked about the podcast’s second episode, as it resonates with what is currently happening with the writer’s strike. The episode focuses on the death of Willie Bioff, an organized crime figure and a corrupt labor leader, who was murdered in a car explosion. McKay said: “We knew we wanted to do an episode about labor and the movie industry because people tend to forget that Hollywood, much like the country at large, was built by unions. We didn’t know that the story would be as resonant as it is now, with the writers once again fighting for a viable future for the people who really make this industry tick. And when you listen to the way that striking movie workers were talked about by those in power in the ’40s and’ 50s… it sounds awfully familiar. There are lots of lessons from the labor fights of the post-war era.”
All eight episodes of Death on the Lot will be available on Sony Music’s platform The Binge on June 1, and will roll out weekly on other podcast platforms.