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SNL Meets Blt. Is Michaels Adapting McNally’s Memoir?

Looks like Lorne Michaels may have found his next prestige project — and this one comes with steak frites and a side of passive-aggressive Instagram feuding. Sources tell Rambling Reporter that the Saturday Night Live creator has optioned Keith McNally’s dishy new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, which charts the legendary restaurateur’s rise, fall, stroke, suicide attempt, recovery and general disappointment with humanity. In other words, comedy gold.

McNally, of course, is the onetime Brasserie King of Manhattan — the man who, as The New York Times once put it, “invented downtown” with such ’80s and ’90s hotspots as Odeon and Balthazar. More recently, he’s drawn attention for his unfiltered Instagram account — a kind of running off-off-Broadway one-man show where he’s taken aim at everyone from James Corden (banned from Balthazar in 2022 for alleged omelet-related rudeness) to Jessica Seinfeld...

Academy Award-winner Adam McKay’s Hyperobject Industries and Sony Music Entertainment today announced Death on the Lot, a new eight-episode podcast series that will spotlight the untimely deaths of the biggest stars in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood, launching Thursday, June 1. Developed and hosted by McKay, Death on the Lot will dive into the cultural transformation of Post-war America and Hollywood’s fabrication of a new American dream, as well as Hollywood unions and labor strikes. The trailer is available now and all eight episodes will be available on The Binge on June 1.

In each episode, McKay will focus on the story behind one celebrity’s tragic death and the cultural implications that upended their life. The podcast will cover the deaths of gangster Willie Bioff, method actor John Garfield, teenage idol James Dean, Superman actor George Reeves, first Black Academy Award winner Hattie McDaniel, swashbuckling star Errol Flynn, and western legend John Wayne.

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, centered on the deaths of James Dean, Hattie McDaniel, John Garfield, and more 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 subjects.

“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,” McKay told Variety. “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.”

McKay continued,...

Industrious as she is, Amy Poehler can't be everywhere. At times, that can be an issue — for example, on the set of Parks and Rec, where she was often needed to help block out shots. So for four years she had a stand-in, Hadley Meares, who recently wrote about the experience for Atlas Obscura. Meares describes her career as "a moving piece of furniture" and emphasizes the patience required: "if you don’t like being stared at or prodded, standing in is not the job for you." She also shares a specific story about knowing when not to wander across Andy and April's front lawn when they're filming, no matter how bad you have to pee: I got up and started walking on the lawn, positive that I was safely out of camera view, when I noticed that Chris Pratt was staring at me, looking very confused. “Why on earth...