The stories of the deaths of James Dean, Hattie McDaniel, John Garfield and other notable Hollywood figures who died untimely in the 1950s are told in the eight-episode podcast series “Death on the Lot.”

The podcast will be released by American producer, screenwriter, comedian Adam McKay, his company, Hyperobject Industries and Sony Music.

In an interview, McKay said the project grew out of his 2021 podcast “Death at the Wing,” which examined the untimely deaths of basketball players in the 1980s, placing them in the context of the sociopolitical climate.

“Throughout the making of ‘Death at the Wing,’ we said the only other comparison we can think of is post-World War II Hollywood,” McKay said. “Then we thought, ‘Well, let’s do an episode cycle on this and see what we can uncover.’ “And it was even deeper and more at the core of American history than we expected,” explained Adam McKay.

“Death on the Lot” was completed before the writers’ strike began in America, but in an email in mid-May, McKay singled out the second episode of the podcast as especially timely during this tumultuous time: It focuses on the death of Willy Bioff , a representative of organized crime and a corrupt trade unionist, who was murdered in a car explosion. McKay points out the parallels with today.

“We knew we wanted to do an episode about labor and the film industry because people tend to forget that Hollywood, like the country in general, was built by unions,” he wrote. “Little did we know that the story would be as relevant as it is now, with the writers once again fighting for a viable future. And when you hear the way those in power in the 1940s and 1950s talked about striking film workers… it sounds sickeningly familiar. There are many lessons from the labor struggles of the post-war era,” he estimated.