Adam McKay

If you're ever checking the local listings and by some fortunate chance there's a revival theater in your town that is showing a movie called The Misfits, go watch it. I love The Misfits. Maybe you've seen it, maybe you haven't.

Adam McKay

I actually didn't see it for the first time till about five, six years ago.

Adam McKay

It's a 1961 American Western written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, and it's about a newly divorced woman who finds herself in Reno and meets a cast of characters, including an old-school cowboy,

Adam McKay

his tow truck-driving friend, and a bunch of other broken, oddball characters. It stars, and check this lineup out here, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. Not a ton happens plot-wise.

Adam McKay

They gamble, they come up with schemes, but you can't take your eyes off the movie. It's about so much more than what happens in the story. The movie's really about the aftermath of World War II, the birth of the suburban dream and the end of the Old West,

Adam McKay

toxic masculinity, the false promise of American freedom, brutality, capitalism, our relationship with nature.

Adam McKay

It's stuff that only a film like this can wrestle with, and it's stuff that only a country like America at the time had to wrestle with. We're talking about post-World War II America. The whole country has a giant party when the war is over,

Adam McKay

and then suddenly there's this moment where we all realize there are still dozens and dozens of unanswered questions about distribution of wealth, labor, race, gender roles. And all of these questions create clashes, clashes between the old and the new,

Adam McKay

the culture, the counterculture. And everyone was looking at each other, wondering, where do we go next? There's a shot towards the end of The Misfits that shows Monroe, Clift, and Gable, all in a parked car with Eli Wallach at the wheel.

Adam McKay

Monroe, Clift, and Gable are all sound asleep, and there's a long beat where Eli Wallach sort of just sits there. He's the one guy who's awake, kind of looking out, sort of just taking a big, long breath as you do sometimes when you finally get home and pull into the driveway.

Adam McKay

And watching the movie, it hit me, within a few years, Monroe, Clift, and Gable, all three actors asleep in the car, would all be dead.

Adam McKay

I just couldn't get that shot out of my mind, and I started thinking about this time in American history and about how Hollywood, the place that I now live and make my living, at that time was really ground zero for the fight over what would be the American dream,

Adam McKay

the American narrative for the next 50 years.

Adam McKay

You had the disintegration of the studio system, the rise of radical new ideas about art and acting, the immense pressure of a brand new kind of fame, huge political questions roiling the whole entertainment industry.

Adam McKay

And often the answers to those questions would be paid for with people's lives, with a body count. And then I started thinking about all the deaths that happened around that time, all the iconic actors that died through a myriad of reasons.

Adam McKay

And I realized that this needed to be the next season of this podcast.

Adam McKay

In the first season of our show, Death at the Wing, we explored a series of tragic deaths from the wild world of 1980s basketball. And those deaths helped us understand a political and cultural moment that changed America in a big, big way, the Reagan Revolution.

Adam McKay

Now we're taking that same lens and going back to post-war Hollywood. It's one of the few other moments that we could think of when this many deaths happened in such an insular world in such a short amount of time. So this season, we'll see what the tragedies of that era can tell us about the world we live in today.

Adam McKay

We're calling it Death on the Lot. We'll meet trailblazing actors who got railroaded by racism.

Speaker 4

The Academy Award for the Best Performance of an Actress in Supporting Role during 1939, The Hattie McDaniel.

Adam McKay

New kinds of stars who live fast and die young.

Speaker 5

People say racing is dangerous, but I'll take my chances on the track any day than on a highway.

Adam McKay

Actors and directors exploring new political ideas and then finding themselves called before Congress on trumped-up charges as the Cold War took hold.

Speaker 6

Are you a member of the Communist Party, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Adam McKay

Superheroes who felt the burden of fame and writers who chose to fight back against a system that was trying to crush them.

Adam McKay

These are all stories that will hopefully help us paint a more vivid, or certainly different picture, of an immensely critical moment in American history.

Adam McKay

I'm Adam McKay, producer, director, writer. I'm also a card-carrying member of the Hollywood elite. I'm part of the liberal cabal that is trying to destroy American and world morals, and I just joined the Illuminati,

Adam McKay

which is pretty cool. And of course, being a giant, wealthy narcissist, I believe that Hollywood is the only thing that matters and explains everything. So tonight's episode will lay the groundwork for what happened after the war and into the 1950s.

Adam McKay

The studio system was collapsing, American conformity was ascendant, and creative people in film and TV had to pick a side. This is episode one. Don't change that channel.

Speaker 7

This summer, serve up the cookout classics, Oscar Meyer hot dogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard, or load it Chicago style. We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Meyer and Heinz.

Speaker 8

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the contents of their freezer. So what does the Bottle Jägermeister say? It says you have standards. You don't cut corners. And you like your Jägermeister shots the way they're meant to be enjoyed, ice cold. As for the frozen taquitos and mystery leftovers, we'll keep that between us. Drink it cold, or don't drink it at all.

Speaker 8

Jägermeister. Damn, that's cold. Drink responsibly. Jägermeister Liquor, 35% alcohol by volume. Imported by Mast Jägermeister, US White Plains, New York.

Adam McKay

One of the reasons that Hollywood felt so much pressure and suffered so much tragedy in the wake of World War II was because up until that point, they could do almost no wrong.

Adam McKay

Through war and peace, feast and famine, the movie industry was riding the hottest of hot streaks, and there was really no reason to think it would ever end.

Adam McKay

Between the years 1930 and 1945, the number of Americans who watched at least one movie in a theater per week swelled to more than 80 million. I mean, can you imagine that? That's more than half the US population at that time,

Adam McKay

putting on their Sunday best and heading out to the movies every single week. By 1939, the film business had quickly become the nation's 11th largest industry.

Adam McKay

And this was largely due to the studio system, which had money to burn thanks to its stranglehold on distribution.

Speaker 9

At the time, studios owned movie theaters, and that allowed them to hedge against risk.

Adam McKay

Isaac Butler is a historian and author of The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act.

Speaker 9

Studios made the movies themselves. They would make them soup to nuts, and they kept writers, directors, and actors on salary.

Adam McKay

The studios own the theaters. They own the movies. But even better, with all the long-term contracts they were forcing actors into, they own the stars.

Speaker 9

You belonged to a studio. They could loan you out to other studios if they wanted to. But you know, if you were a contract player for Warner Brothers, like John Garfield, the first Method actor was, you made all of your movies for Warner Brothers unless they gave you permission to do otherwise over the course of your seven-year contract.

Adam McKay

And as a result, Tinseltown, as it was called, was rolling in the dough. But the ground was about to shift beneath Hollywood's feet thanks to two major disruptions. One, the courts.

Adam McKay

A number of Supreme Court rulings broke up the Hollywood monopoly, effectively ending the studio system era.

Speaker 9

The most famous one it forbids is that they can't own movie theater chains and make the movies at the same time. As a result, they're no longer protected against the financial risk of making movies, and so they stop making them gradually over time. The studio system unwinds.

Adam McKay

The other major threat, an entirely new way for Americans to get their entertainment, television. That's right, Hollywood's run of glory was about to come to an end in part thanks to one man.

Susan Murray

Philo T. Farnsworth.

Adam McKay

Susan Murray is a professor of media culture and communications at NYU. She's the one to talk to if you want to get geeky about the invention of television, which is what we're about to do with old Philo Farnsworth.

Susan Murray

He comes along in the 1930s, and he develops an image dissector and an amplifier and other kind of devices that improve picture definition.

Adam McKay

Old Philo Farnsworth, which, by the way, is what I'm always going to call him from now on. Old Philo Farnsworth had figured out how to capture moving images with beams of electrons. The first image he projected was actually just a straight line on a TV screen.

Adam McKay

Not that exciting. But in his second test image, old Philo Farnsworth sent a very clear message about TV's potential. In that one, he projected a giant dollar sign. TV was now poised to completely change the entertainment industry,

Adam McKay

and Americans were more than ready for it.

Adam McKay

In 1945, the war ended, and the world transformed. Americans, flush with cash for the first time in decades, were looking to spend, spend, spend.

Susan Murray

There's also a time in which you'd be the first person on your block to get a television set, and then you would invite people over.

Adam McKay

Only 9% of American households had televisions in 1950, but by 1959, that figure had swelled to 85.9%.

Susan Murray

Of course, television was understood to be this major threat to the film industry. It's not like radio, which is already presenting stories in people's homes and keeping them in a home to listen to stories, but it's offering the visual aspect, which is one of the things that film was offering that radio could not.

Adam McKay

Unfortunately, at this time, for Philo Farnsworth, I'm sorry, old Philo Farnsworth, his patents had already run out. Nevertheless, the creative industry was shifting and fracturing. Scary for the studio system suits, but also an opportunity for new creative voices.

Adam McKay

And for a small window at the birth of TV, it was a hotbed of new ideas about what the medium could accomplish.

Speaker 9

In the '50s, you have the live television drama movement.

Adam McKay

Isaac Butler again.

Speaker 9

Now, the live TV drama movement has been underhistoricized, underdiscussed, in part because it was broadcast live, and a lot of it has been lost. If you weren't, literally, if you weren't pointing a kinoscope at a TV, because there wasn't VCR then, while it was being broadcast live, it doesn't exist anymore.

Adam McKay

Live TV drama was a space in which people who couldn't find a home in the disintegrating studio system and were also being squeezed out of radio might find their voice.

Speaker 9

Live TV drama is made in New York, and it's made by people who come out of radio and theater. And it is coming from a different place. It is coming from a place of questioning society. It's much more a tourist. They're getting a playwright or whatever and be like,

Speaker 9

"Hey, write us an hour-long special," and they come up with what they come up with.

Adam McKay

One of those writers making the transition from theater to television and exploring the new medium was a man by the name of Rod Serling. And his story would come to encapsulate everything that people with something to say were trying to do in that era and what they would find themselves up against.

Speaker 11

Some television's wonderful. Some television is exciting and promising and has vast potential.

Adam McKay

Rod Serling always had something to say.

Speaker 11

Some television is mediocre and bad, but I think it has promise.

Adam McKay

This is Serling talking to Mike Wallace in 1959 after years of trying to navigate the new world of television.

Speaker 11

And I stick with it because I think it can only improve, and it can improve tremendously, and I think aims toward that.

Adam McKay

He was just a few months away from his biggest success, The Twilight Zone, the show that would turn him into a household name. But instead of focusing on his upcoming project, the two turned to an incident earlier in Serling's career.

Speaker 11

Well, we hear a lot about censorship of the writer on TV. We write a good deal about it in your own case especially. Well, depending, of course, on the thematic treatment you're using. If you have the temerity to try to dramatize a theme that involves any particular social controversy currently extant, then you're in deep trouble.

Speaker 11

For instance? A racial theme, for example.

Adam McKay

It had been years at this point, but Serling was still feeling burned after trying to tackle the death of Emmett Till on the massively popular United States Steel Hour.

Speaker 11

My case in point, I think, a show I did for the Steel Hour called Noon on Doomsday, which was a story which purported to tell what was the aftermath, the alleged kidnapping in Mississippi of the Till boy.

Adam McKay

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy who was kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after a white woman claimed he had made sexual advances towards her.

Speaker 12

This is the muddy back woods Tallahatchie River, where a weighted body was found, alleged to be that of young Emmett Till.

Adam McKay

The two men were arrested, but an all-white, all-male jury acquitted them of all the charges after deliberating for less than an hour. When wire services reported that the United States Steel Hour was going to tackle the Till story, Serling said the network received some 15,000 letters and wires protesting the production.

Adam McKay

The executives swooped in. The network's suits went over the script with a fine-tooth comb.

Speaker 11

And I wrote the script using black and white initially. Then it was changed to suggest an unnamed foreigner. Then the locale was moved from the South to New England.

Adam McKay

The killer was changed from a psychopathic malcontent to a, quote, "good, decent American boy momentarily gone wrong."

Speaker 11

It became a lukewarm, vitiated, emasculated kind of show.

Speaker 12

Who's the culprit?

Speaker 11

Is it the network? The sponsor? It's a combination of culprits in this case, Mike. It's partly network. It's principally agency and sponsor. In many ways, I think it's the audience themselves.

Adam McKay

Ideas like the death of Emmett Till, race, violence, ugliness, a mirror put up to America in a way that is extremely uncomfortable. We can only imagine what the executives and the suits must have thought of that. And you got to remember,

Adam McKay

it had only been a few years since another show, one so depraved, so sexually explicit, borderline pornographic, had rewritten the rules of what you could even show on TV.

Speaker 13

Lassie!

Adam McKay

That's right, Lassie. Disgusting.

Speaker 11

About a year ago, on the Lassie show, Lassie was having puppies, and it was probably one of the most tasteful and delightful and warm things depicting what is this wondrous thing at its birth.

Adam McKay

But viewers, well, some viewers at least, were not having it.

Speaker 11

And after the show, they got many, many cards and letters, sample cards, from the Deep South, this was. If I wanted my kids to watch sex shows, I wouldn't have had them turn on that. I could take them to burlesque shows.

Adam McKay

To be clear, there was no hardcore Lassie humping in this episode, just a seemingly doped-up dog laying on a pile of hay.

Speaker 13

She's going to have her pups.

Speaker 12

And I'm going to have pups too if you don't let go of my arm so I can milk the cow.

Adam McKay

Look, I think you all know I'm a director and producer, so we're always working on projects. And it was about four years ago we were 10 days into shooting a major reboot of the Lassie story, and the studio just pulled the plug. Lars Von Trier was a co-producer on it,

Adam McKay

and it depicted Lassie in super realistic terms. Lassie was a filthy mange, abandoned dog who met a pit bull that had survived dog fighting, and Lassie had puppies in an old steel mill.

Adam McKay

And we actually showed it like the birth of real puppies for like, no, none of this happened. I think you knew I was making that up. But the truth is, in 1954, just showing Lassie with puppies on hay was enough to cause a real ruckus.

Speaker 11

And as a result, the director went down that there would be no shows having anything to do with puppies. That is, in the actual birth process. Well, obviously, it is this wild lunatic fringe of letter writers that would greatly affect what the sponsor has in mind.

Adam McKay

Sure, the people who objected to Lassie may have been a lunatic fringe, as Serling put it, but the networks were able to justify their decision by hiding behind the line that every scared suit loves to trot out. We're just giving Americans what they want. And what did Americans want?

Adam McKay

Well, apparently, according to the suits, it was something smooth, something easy, something everyone could conform to.

Speaker 9

It's this era of very intense pressure to conform to a series of new social norms that are arising in the wake of the Second World War.

Adam McKay

Americans were ready to say goodbye to the dark days of the Depression and death. They'd just defeated Nazism. Now it was time to kick back, put up their feet, enjoy the good life.

Speaker 9

And what we had to do in order to survive and in order to thrive is to fit ourselves correctly into the social order.

Adam McKay

So American industry got to building. Interest rates were slashed, mortgages were guaranteed by the Feds, a massive highway system was built seemingly overnight, connecting place to place, and the GI Bill left veterans flush and looking to spend.

Adam McKay

Builders following the money were eager to get in on the action. Modernized systems were put in place. Parts were standardized. Heck, floor plans were too. America was building its future in record time, a cookie-cutter world where everything would look the same.

Adam McKay

And now that they had the product, it was time to sell, sell, sell.

Speaker 9

The GI Bill is funding a lot of people's move into the middle class.

Adam McKay

Historian Isaac Butler.

Speaker 9

The definition of whiteness is changing a little bit to start to involve Jews and other children of immigrants. And then because of the Cold War especially, there's this idea that kind of every American has a role to play in this battle of civilizations that we've found ourselves in.

Speaker 14

You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's OmniShade Technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear.

Speaker 14

Level up your summer at columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome. Columbia, engineered for whatever.

Speaker 15

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Speaker 15

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Adam McKay

The narrative of conformity made it clear that every American needed to play their part. But here's the thing. It wasn't talked about as conformity. It was pitched as a new kind of American exceptionalism.

Speaker 9

The ideas of freedom and individuality themselves meant something a little different during this period than they mean to us today. So for example, we think of freedom and individualism as sort of the right to do what you want and self-actualization and finding your bliss and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 9

But freedom and individualism in the 1950s really meant that you had found your proper role in society. You had nestled yourself into this web of social obligations, your marriage, your job, your social role, and then you were working to excel within them.

Adam McKay

In many ways, that Cold War battle played out across the entire entertainment industry. Case in point, Richard Nixon's so-called 1958 kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev during the opening of the American National Exhibition. As the two men toured a model kitchen set up in the heart of Moscow,

Adam McKay

Nixon, he tried to show off a color TV. The Soviet leaders sneered at the vice president, saying Russia would have the same technology soon. And then the two men began screaming at each other. It's really one of the most famous moments of the Cold War. And reportedly,

Adam McKay

Nixon then turned on the TV and the Lassie birthing scene was on the screen. Immediately, Khrushchev ran to his advisors and said to go to a state of nuclear preparedness. And at that moment, the USA won the Cold War. No.

Adam McKay

But the point of the exchange was that it turned out that all you needed in a debate of Russian red versus American red, white, and blue was a fully stock suburban kitchen with a color TV. The age of needing something was over. The age of wanting it had arrived. And TV was the key to the whole thing.

Speaker 16

I have some early ads for Lebitown, which always stands as the suburban community of the postwar era where houses came with televisions in them, often built into the wall, right? So they were built into the price of a new home.

Adam McKay

Television was the perfect way to sell a product, whether it was refrigerators.

Speaker 17

A place for everything, with my frigidaire, cold pantry.

Adam McKay

Cigarettes.

Speaker 12

What cigarette do you smoke, doctor? Once again, the brand named most was Camel.

Adam McKay

Or the suburbs themselves.

Speaker 18

The adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, starring the entire Nelson family.

Speaker 16

So television is participating in this larger project of creating a new kind of consumer citizen, of having consumerism being part of the everyday. And we see that not just in terms of its role in the home, but what kind of shows are on the air, particularly with suburban sitcoms of the 1950s.

Speaker 16

Something like Ozzie and Harriet, which represented an ideal 1950s nuclear middle to upper-class white family.

Adam McKay

The vision of the perfect '50s life would persist for decades. There was a yearning, a kind of instant nostalgia that was showing up on TV of the era. At the same time, some of the most creative people this country has ever produced were fighting to get their voices heard and running up against the pressure to conform.

Speaker 16

Pat Weaver, for example, who was the head of NBC in the 1950s, some of his programming strategies were called Operation Frontal Lobes, ways to kind of use television for cultural and intellectual uplift and to challenge viewers in very particular ways. But by the time we exit the '50s, he's no longer there.

Speaker 16

That idea sort of seems antiquated to many in the industry, that really what we're trying to get is as many viewers as possible.

Adam McKay

Yep, TV was rapidly growing into what FCC Chairman Newton Minow would call a vast wasteland.

Speaker 19

When television is good, nothing, not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers, nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.

Adam McKay

Along with the spray of bullets on the Intouchables and the quiz shows caught up in a corruption scandal, there was just a general banality that was quickly becoming the American brand.

Speaker 19

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off.

Speaker 19

I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

Adam McKay

For the folks producing this wasteland, that was a very profitable thing. Minow's thoughts were so unwelcome by the TV industry that Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan's Island, named the show's famous sinking ship after him.

Speaker 20

The tiny ship was tossed.

Adam McKay

That's true.

Speaker 20

If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minow would be lost. The Minow would be lost.

Adam McKay

When you talk about postwar America, I have two very different reactions. In the war for America's soul, the vast wasteland was winning. Ron Howard remembers it well.

Speaker 21

And they kind of inform one another to some extent, and in another way, I have to kind of bifurcate them and just understand them in my own terms that way.

Adam McKay

He was there, starring on the Andy Griffith Show as a six-year-old, and then the giant show Happy Days in the '70s. And after that, directing and producing huge Hollywood blockbusters. My daughters only know him as the narrator from Arrested Development. In fact,

Adam McKay

there are few people in Hollywood history that have bridged so many eras as Ron Howard.

Speaker 21

So many of the shows that I did as a young actor, the Andy Griffith Show and then Happy Days. Happy Days was set in the '50s. American Graffiti, which was '62, but really reflecting the dying sort of culture of the '50s. These things were nostalgia when they were done,

Speaker 21

so they were a little heightened, and they never really reflected my sense of the '50s.

Adam McKay

What he remembers about the 1950s was that TV audiences just wanted to feel good.

Speaker 21

Politics didn't seem to play much of a role, whether it's feel-good family stuff like the Andy Griffith Show or Father Knows Best or My Three Sons. I mean, it's kind of saying life here in the middle class is pretty good, isn't it? And it's selling that idea.

Speaker 21

I don't think that was propaganda. I think it was reflecting what people wanted to feel about the country.

Adam McKay

Viewers wanted to feel that the war they had just suffered through was about something, that it was for freedom, for family, and maybe for that nice three-bedroom house in the suburbs.

Speaker 21

The myth of the '50s as this kind of fabulously warm, welcoming, safe place, which leads to MAGA. I mean, look, that's what that whole MAGA movement is.

Adam McKay

Look at Ron Howard connecting the dots from the 1950s to the shit show we're living through right now.

Speaker 21

Let's go back to right after the war, when we were the dominant country and we were predominantly white and we were the only ones who didn't really get bombed outside of Pearl Harbor, and we ran the show. And it was an era of great American confidence. But for me, I don't see much criticism going on of anything.

Speaker 21

So it seemed to be all pretty celebratory.

Adam McKay

And if the people in power, well, if they had their say, it was going to stay that way. There was certainly no room for uncomfortable conversations about things like race. Think about it.

Adam McKay

The Andy Griffith Show, a show that took place in the Jim Crow South, somehow managed to sidestep the fact that race even existed.

Speaker 21

There was, I mean, definitely no diversity. Andy, I suspect either the South was it just didn't include the black community or that wasn't what the sponsors wanted.

Speaker 20

Who's the culprit? Is it the network, the sponsor? It's a combination of culprits in this case.

Adam McKay

A combination of culprits, for sure. But either way, the pressure on anyone who was trying to push against conformity was growing more and more intense.

Adam McKay

In 1959, when he sat down for that interview with Mike Wallace, Rod Serling was still licking his wounds from the Emmett Till debacle. He knew what types of stories he wanted to tell, but he also knew that General Mills and Quaker Oats weren't going to pay for them.

Adam McKay

And so he decided to stop breaking the rules and started weaponizing them. This time, he would tell the network suits exactly what they wanted to hear. His new venture, The Twilight Zone, was just a 30-minute fantasy show. That's all. Super entertaining for the whole family.

Speaker 20

We're dealing with a half-hour show, which cannot probe like a 90, which doesn't use scripts as vehicles of social criticism. These are strictly for entertainment.

Adam McKay

The TV scribe had wondered, how do you confront the problems of the world in a world that wants to be done confronting problems? For him, the answer would be in another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.

Speaker 20

Well, these are very adult, I think, high-quality half-hour, extremely polished films, but they deal in the areas of fantasy and imagination and science fiction and all of those things.

Adam McKay

Serling had carved out his little corner of the business and helped etch a few lines into the story of the era, the story of culture and counterculture.

Speaker 9

One of the things that's different about that era from where we are today is because there's a real monolithic, monoculture dominant force, it's easier to have a counterculture that pushes back against that. And that fight is very clear. You know who's on what side and what those sides mean.

Adam McKay

Within this context, every act was a political act. Every creative decision, every new art form, every person who decided to speak their mind was taking a stand for the old order or for a new vision.

Speaker 9

And that really infects everything, and it raises the pitch or the temperature of the volume on sort of every cultural dispute.

Adam McKay

Amidst all this, you can spot the seeds of revolution and repression, the conflicts that spilled out from the world of Hollywood into the world at large. People who were trying to go against the cultural norms were painted as misguided, soft.

Speaker 9

What's interesting about it is how overtly they talked about it, that Eisenhower talks about it very openly. Now is not the time for softness and self-indulgence.

Adam McKay

In many cases, new ideas were tarnished as un-American.

Speaker 9

And nowhere was that clearer than in the unfolding drama of HUAC, which would claim a lot of people's lives.

Adam McKay

Even new ideas about creative expression like method acting were seen as a threat.

Speaker 9

And so you get people who are very, very enthusiastic about this, but you also get people who are pretty horrified by it. And the old guard in Hollywood gets pretty freaked out about it.

Adam McKay

For every push towards progress, there was a counterpush. Labor unions were ascended while being corrupted from within.

Speaker 19

The New York City Anti-Crime Committee was formed to help in this work.

Adam McKay

And the very idea of fame itself was being transformed. Turns out, once you scratch the surface of postwar America, that thin layer of conformity quickly tore away, revealing a rebellion from within.

Adam McKay

Father may have known best in prime time, but the real world was increasingly defined by conflict between right and left, white and black, north and south, capitalism and communism, the future and the past. Over the next seven episodes, we're going to meet the people at the heart of this Hollywood upheaval.

Adam McKay

Names like John Garfield, James Dean, Errol Flynn, George Reeves, Hattie McDaniel. And in the next episode, Willie Bioff, a gangster who took over the movie unions and corrupted the face of labor for generations. It's all coming up this season on Death on the Lot,

Adam McKay

where the Great Depression was over, the war was won, the battle of America's soul was underway, and Hollywood was going to be on the front lines. And not everyone was going to make it out alive. I'm Adam McKay. I'll see you next episode.

Speaker 22

When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything so people can see your thing,

Speaker 22

feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

Adam McKay

Death on the Lot is a hyper-object industries and Sony Music Entertainment production. It's executive produced by Jody Avirgan, Claire Slaughter, Harry Nelson, and me, Adam McKay. Episodes were written by Brian Steele and Hadley Mears and edited by Jody Avirgan. Our managing producer was Jennifer Siegel,

Adam McKay

and talent producer was Katherine Shoemaker. Producers were Shane McKeon and Kendra Hannah, with additional production support from Jordan Allen and Zélie Mahon. Consultants on the show were Justin Geldsauer and Sarah Mathis. Episodes were fact-checked by Matt Giles and Tom Cody.

Adam McKay

Our music is by Beacon Street Studios. Episodes were mixed and sound designed by Joanna Katcher at Nice Manners. Special thanks on this episode to Tim Mendelsohn. I'm your host, Adam McKay. Thanks again for listening. We'll be back soon with more Death on the Lot.