Adam McKay is unveiling his follow-up podcast to 2021’s “Death at the Wing,” this time focusing on 1950s Hollywood deaths.
The Oscar nominee and his company Hyperobject Industries and Sony Music Entertainment will release “Death on the Lot” on June 1, which focuses on the deaths of James Dean, Hattie McDaniel, John Garfield and other Hollywood figures. The eight-episode podcast is hosted by McKay and features interviews with Ron Howard, Lee Grant, James Cromwell, and even relatives of some of the episode’s subjects.
“During the making of ‘Death at the Wing,’ we kept saying the only other comparison we can think of is Hollywood after WWII,” said McKay Variety. “Then we thought, ‘Well, let’s do a season on that, and see what we can find out.’ And if anything, it was even richer and deeper, and more central to American history than we expected.
McKay continued, “You are able to go into the project and do the project, with questions that are still unanswered. With these podcasts, questions are the central theme of the show and it’s really fun, because you’re constantly making discoveries. It’s just a very alive and breathing process, until the very end when you record the last couple of sentences.
“Death on the Lot” is written by Brian Steele and Hadley Meares, Clare Slaughter and Harry Nelson of Hyperobject, and edited by Jody Avirgan.
McKay noted that interviews were central to the podcast episodes.
“That diversity of voices, it’s essential to this kind of storytelling, because it’s incredibly interdisciplinary,” said the director of “Don’t Look Up.” “You never look at things through just 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. That collection of voices is the center, the fulcrum of the show. It’s the living questions – and then going to this incredible array of people to get those answers.
On the film front, McKay is gearing up for his “next big hit” for Netflix, “Average Height, Average Build,” starring Robert Pattinson, Amy Adams, Robert Downey Jr., Forest Whitaker and Danielle Deadwyler. The political satire is confirmed to center around a serial killer who hires a lobbyist to change murder laws.
