Death On The Lot: Hollywood's Wild Labor History w/ Brian Steele and Hadley Meares

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As it happens, the This Day team has a bunch of cool new projects coming out over the next week or two. So, we’re going to feature them here.

Today: Jody is the executive producer of a new series called Death On The Lot, a look at how changes and tragedy in Hollywood reflected larger shifts in American culture and politics in the 1940s and 50s.

The two writers for the series, Brian Steele and Hadley Meares, discuss Hollywood’s labor history, and how in the post-war era unions were corrupted by organized crime; and red-baited by politicians and the media.

Be sure to listen to Death On The Lot wherever you get your podcasts!

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Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and
0:03.7	welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.
0:07.3	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:11.1	So the crew here at this day has lots of other projects we work on and it turns out a bunch of them are rolling out right around the same time right now.
0:19.0	So we've been doing, you probably noticed this little series to highlight it all.
0:22.8	We talked about the Return of You Get a Podcast, Kelly's Oprah Project, we talked about the
0:26.9	Obama Oral History Project that Nicki works on, the obituaries podcast that our researcher
0:32.3	Jacob Feldman is making making and for the next two
0:35.0	episodes it's my turn we're going to look at a big new project that I helped steer as editor and
0:40.5	producer it's a documentary series called Death on the Lot. It's hosted by
0:45.0	Adam McKay, director of Ankerman and Step Brothers and The Big Short and Don't Look Up,
0:49.0	lots of other great things. And it's a series that looks at tragedies in Hollywood in the 40s and 50s and
0:55.2	uses those to paint a picture of how the country as a whole was changing in the
0:59.6	aftermath of World War II. So you have the rise of TV and the Suburban Dream, a burgeoning
1:05.1	civil rights movement. Of course there's the Blacklist and Hewack and the
1:09.1	Red Scare which wrapped up lots of people in Hollywood.
1:12.8	The series kind of looks at a bunch of folks in the entertainment industry who suffered tragedy.
1:18.3	Some names you know, like James Dean and Errol Flynn and John Wayne and others you may not know but are really
1:23.2	fascinating characters like John Garfield and Hattie McDaniel. I am really
1:27.6	proud of this series. It's a really big swing to try and tell a kind of big sweeping
1:32.0	story and understand a really
1:33.6	consequential era. I also think it's really fun to listen to it's Adam McKay
	...

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