The Projection Booth
NewSpecial Report: Stephen Murphy on The Gentlemen
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- Latest episode
- Nov 13, 2026
About the podcast
Mike White and a rotating panel of guests take on cinema from everywhere: celebrated classics, cult obsessions, and films that slipped through the cracks and deserve better. The Projection Booth pairs sharp critical discussion with production history and interviews with the people who made the movies, so you hear how a picture got made, what it says about its moment, and why it still gets under people’s skin. Special Reports put newer filmmakers and their festival films in the spotlight.
Come for the movie you’ve been meaning to see. Stay for the one you didn’t know existed.
Explore the archive at https://www.projectionboothpodcast.com/.
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Follow the show to hear new episodes when they arrive.
Part of Weirding Way Media. Explore more podcasts at http://www.weirdingwaymedia.com.
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Episodes 1,000
Special Report: Stephen Murphy on The Gentlemen
A kid who built models and sculpted monsters now lights one of Netflix's slickest crime series. Cinematographer Stephen Murphy BSC, ISC joins Mike White from Morocco, two days into shooting season three of The …
Show notes
A kid who built models and sculpted monsters now lights one of Netflix's slickest crime series. Cinematographer Stephen Murphy BSC, ISC joins Mike White from Morocco, two days into shooting season three of The Gentlemen, to trace the road from a Marvel UK magazine about Star Wars (1977) to the director of photography chair.
Murphy came up through a makeup course, a stint on the miniatures crew of Stuart Gordon's Space Truckers (1996) and a first black-and-white photography class that changed his plans. He worked his way up the old-school camera ladder, and he explains why a practical-effects mindset still shapes how he solves problems on set.
Then the work. He describes shooting episodes 3, 4, 5 and 8 of The Gentlemen in blocks with director Eran Creevy, fifteen days an episode, bonded over a shared love of Tony Scott. He recalls a week taking over for Robbie Ryan on Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite (2018), and the tricky line between rom-com and slasher on Heart Eyes (2025) with Josh Ruben. Mike also brings up Primate (2026) and Vera.
How does a cinematographer get a director to say what a movie should look like? Murphy's answer starts with listening.
Visit Stephen Murphy's website, stephen-murphy.com, to see his work.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 819: The End of Oak Street (2026)
A 1982 cul-de-sac lands among feathered dinosaurs, and the pitch is pure Spielberg. Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Culture Cast team up for a crossover on The End of Oak Street (2026), David Robert …
Show notes
A 1982 cul-de-sac lands among feathered dinosaurs, and the pitch is pure Spielberg. Mike White and Chris Stachiw of The Culture Cast team up for a crossover on The End of Oak Street (2026), David Robert Mitchell's summer sci-fi adventure, produced by J.J. Abrams, with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as parents on the brink of divorce.
They start spoiler-free, then dig in: why this does the Spielberg pastiche better than Super 8 (2011), the echoes of Poltergeist (1982), E.T. and Stephen King, a Michigan that looks suspiciously like Southern California, the original ending, and the leg-biting moment that made both of them yell. They also rank the Jurassic Park (1993) sequels
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Heartland (2026)
A country star who walked away from the spotlight, a mystery that won't stay buried, and songs that each have a job to do: Heartland (2026) is a Netflix thriller with a country heart.Mike talks with …
Show notes
A country star who walked away from the spotlight, a mystery that won't stay buried, and songs that each have a job to do: Heartland (2026) is a Netflix thriller with a country heart.
Mike talks with writer-director Shana Feste ahead of the film's November 13 Netflix release. Feste explains why she writes women who don't care whether anyone likes them, and how film noir helped her uncover the part of Misty, played by Jessica Chastain, that she had left behind.
The film is available to view on Netflix starting November 13, 2026.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Mineshaft (2026)
A notorious leather bar, a murdered film critic and a Hollywood shoot that turned Christopher Street into a battleground. Mineshaft (2026) is a new festival documentary about gay New York in the late 1970s and …
Show notes
A notorious leather bar, a murdered film critic and a Hollywood shoot that turned Christopher Street into a battleground. Mineshaft (2026) is a new festival documentary about gay New York in the late 1970s and the killing that fed into William Friedkin's Cruising (1980). Director Jeffrey Schwarz, fresh from the Tribeca premiere and a run of festivals including Outfest, joins Mike White to talk it through.
The conversation starts with Addison Verrill, the Variety critic murdered at 36, and the one box of district attorney files that survived, autopsy reports and crime scene photos included. Schwarz explains how he earned the trust of Verrill's sister, found his partner Bob Geary, and why he refused to make another exploitative true crime film. From there the trail leads to Paul Bateson, the killer who also appeared in The Exorcist (1973), and to Arthur Bell's Village Voice columns, the leaked script and the street protests that dogged Al Pacino and Friedkin.
Also on the table: Friedkin's refusal to be interviewed, the vintage audio that still gives him a voice, protest tape Schwarz held onto for thirty years, Vito Russo, and the Showgirls (1995) documentary he hopes comes next.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Behind the Lines (2024)
Strip a soldier's letter of its name, date and salutation, and the sentiments barely change: scared kids who want to be home. That idea drives Behind the Lines (2024), a new documentary in which actors, letter …
Show notes
Strip a soldier's letter of its name, date and salutation, and the sentiments barely change: scared kids who want to be home. That idea drives Behind the Lines (2024), a new documentary in which actors, letter in hand, read wartime letters and emails from World War III to Iraq and Afghanistan, set against archival footage.
Director John B. Benitz and Andrew Carroll, founder of the War Letters Project, join Mike White to trace how a stage play, If All the Sky Were Paper, became a film. Carroll recalls the house fire, a cousin's Buchenwald letter and the 1998 Dear Abby column that set the project off. Benitz explains why he broke Ken Burns's rule by putting actors on screen, even though Burns's Better Angels Society helped sponsor the film.
They also dig into a Pearl Harbor sailor's letter held back for a year by censorship, Laura Dern's laryngitis the night before her studio session, a first cut of over three hours trimmed to ninety minutes, and a Japanese woman's apology, with a thousand folded cranes, to a family killed by a balloon bomb. Why do the funny letters matter as much as the harrowing ones?
Follow Behind the Lines on Instagram and visit the film's official website.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Sheepwell (2026)
Three people, one conversation, ninety minutes: that was the stage play Sheepwell. Now it's a feature film, and it's heading to the Austin Film Festival as a fresh voice in a very crowded field.This Special …
Show notes
Three people, one conversation, ninety minutes: that was the stage play Sheepwell. Now it's a feature film, and it's heading to the Austin Film Festival as a fresh voice in a very crowded field.
This Special Report brings Mike White together with Sheepwell (2026) co-writer and producer Danielle DeMatteo, producer and star Lauren Elizabeth Harris, and actor Mark Ryan Anderson. DeMatteo founded the nonprofit SheNYC Arts, which first staged the play at its Off-Broadway festival. Harris runs Pathway Pictures.
They dig into the hard part of adaptation: turning characters who only get talked about into people you can see, and building two roles that never existed in the original play. They trace how a staffer's insistent phone call put the script on DeMatteo's desk, why producing makes Harris a better actor, what Anderson found stepping into a close-knit set late in the shoot, and what Harris hopes women will see in her character. They close with Austin plans and what each guest tackles next.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 825: Phantom Lady (1944)
The one woman who can clear an innocent man has vanished, and nobody who saw her will admit it. Noirvember continues with Phantom Lady (1944), Robert Siodmak's adaptation of the Cornell Woolrich novel …
Show notes
The one woman who can clear an innocent man has vanished, and nobody who saw her will admit it. Noirvember continues with Phantom Lady (1944), Robert Siodmak's adaptation of the Cornell Woolrich novel, published as William Irish, and the first film produced by Hitchcock veteran Joan Harrison. Alan Curtis is the man convicted of strangling his wife; Ella Raines is the secretary who turns detective; Franchot Tone is the friend who joins her search for all the wrong reasons.
Rahne Alexander and Earl Jackson join Mike to follow an outrageous hat from a bar to a milliner's shop, and to marvel at Elisha Cook Jr.'s drum solo, the closest thing to a sex scene 1944 allowed. Earl lays out how much darker Woolrich's novel runs and traces Siodmak's style back to his Weimar films. Rahne makes the case for a queer camp remake. Along the way: closed doors, a trial told in shorthand, echoes of The Big Clock (1948) and Black Angel (1946), and a happy ending that sounds like a life sentence.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Dissociated Me (2026)
What happens when a filmmaker can't make the movie of her own life? Janaé Rachel Ballot tried to write a biopic about herself, ran into dissociative episodes and flashbacks, and started shooting without a …
Show notes
What happens when a filmmaker can't make the movie of her own life? Janaé Rachel Ballot tried to write a biopic about herself, ran into dissociative episodes and flashbacks, and started shooting without a script instead. The result is Dissociated Me (2026), a comedy about trauma that she calls an anti-biopic and an anti-therapy film. Mike White talks with its writer and director right after its world premiere at the Reykjavik International Film Festival.
Ballot grew up in a Hollywood family, and the film opens with a song and dance act drawn from her own childhood of dance and pageants. She explains why she rebelled against the family business, how years of feature development taught her she had been producing all along, and why a biopic of Anthony Perkins gave way to her own story. Her pandemic-era short Managed was her first step into directing.
Then came the accident: a car hit Ballot the day before a shoot she had been waiting for, and the footage filmed in the trauma unit ended up in the movie. The two talk about how much is act and how much is real, a cast playing heightened versions of themselves, and editing a film about dissociation without stylistic tricks.
Mike also sets the film beside You Can See Everything (2026), another recent picture asking what is true and what is an act. Where does the performance end and the person begin?
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Sudden Flicker (2026)
Film history may be heading toward its own ending, and David Thomson wants to look at the whole thing while there is still something to see. The critic and historian behind Rosebud joins Mike White for a …
Show notes
Film history may be heading toward its own ending, and David Thomson wants to look at the whole thing while there is still something to see. The critic and historian behind Rosebud joins Mike White for a Projection Booth Special Report on his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, a revisionist history of the movies that took about three years to write.
Thomson traces his obsession to a childhood screening of Henry V (1944), where a dissolve from sleeping page boys to flames lodged in his head for good. He explains why he gave up a place at Oxford for film school in 1960, remembers the time Citizen Kane (1941) played to an empty house and Orson Welles had almost no scholarship behind him, and weighs Pauline Kael's attack on the film.
Then the talk turns to where the medium is headed: photography giving way to electronic images and AI, editing as film's most decisive tool, and why Thomson calls Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) a hollow sham that may age like The Sound of Music (1965). He also makes the case that The Godfather (1972) still shapes how power looks on camera, and previews his next book, on Mickey Mouse.
What happens to movies when the picture stops being a photograph?
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Spectacular Optical
Kier-La Janisse wanted to be a film programmer. Instead she became a publisher and a filmmaker, because the festival that gave her a website in 2011 handed it over when it stopped reaching Quebec audiences. She …
Show notes
Kier-La Janisse wanted to be a film programmer. Instead she became a publisher and a filmmaker, because the festival that gave her a website in 2011 handed it over when it stopped reaching Quebec audiences. She turned that domain into Spectacular Optical, a book imprint that started in 2014 with Kid Power, partly because Canadian grants were easier to win for books than for magazines. Janisse joins Mike for a freewheeling walk through the catalogue: the anthology model that lets a book come together fast, Satanic Panic and the care it took not to hurt real people, why Kid Power sat unsold until everyone rediscovered weird kids' movies, the 2017 pair The Yuletide Terror and The Lost Girls, the Jean Rollin book that sold out, and Truth & Soul: A Robert Downey Sr. Reader, the book she co-edited with Clint Enns because a hole needed filling. She also previews Sharp Edges, a book for Severin Films' 20th anniversary, and explains how a woman who never wanted to make movies keeps making them for Severin. Her work lives at spectacularoptical.com.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 824: Invention for Destruction (1958)
A world drawn in cross-hatched lines: water, ships and faces all look like Victorian engravings come to life. Czechtember 2026 opens with Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction (1958), released in America as …
Show notes
A world drawn in cross-hatched lines: water, ships and faces all look like Victorian engravings come to life. Czechtember 2026 opens with Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction (1958), released in America as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, as Mike welcomes back Jonathan Owen and Professor Earl Jackson.
Freely adapted from Verne's Facing the Fat, the film follows young engineer Simon Hart and Professor Roch, whose world-changing explosive lures the genteel pirate Count Artigas to a hollow volcano. Mike, Jonathan and Earl unpack Zeman's trickery: matte paintings, forced perspective, puppets, glass rippled frame by frame. They trace how Zeman strips out Verne's colonialism, the Cold War hunt for scientists humming underneath, and the real inventor who sued Verne. Along the way: Méliès, Guy Maddin and Hundreds of Beavers (2022).
Can spectacle this dense leave room for criticism, or is “wow” the most honest response?
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: I See the Demon (2025)
A birthday party, a rented house and a person you only thought you knew: I See the Demon (2025) turns a breach of trust into sci-fi horror.This is a Special Report on a new voice and a festival film. First-time …
Show notes
A birthday party, a rented house and a person you only thought you knew: I See the Demon (2025) turns a breach of trust into sci-fi horror.
This is a Special Report on a new voice and a festival film. First-time feature director Jacob Lees Johnson joins Mike White to talk about the movie that premiered at Cinequest in San Jose, then played Grimmfest in the UK and FilmQuest in Utah. It stars Jon Heder and Alex Zollicoffer, and it is now on VOD.
Lees Johnson explains where the sci-fi ideas came from, why the relationships are the real heart of the film, and how a first AD's blunt note sent the script back for a rewrite. He talks about shooting in ten days in a real house in Provo, cutting the film himself in Premiere, and living with one round of early test screenings. He also names the folk horror he wants to make next, and a dream take on the Sleepy Hollow legend.
Follow Lees Johnson on Instagram at @sir_lees.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 823: The End of Man (1971)
A naked man walks out of the sea and into São Paulo, and nobody can agree whether he's the Messiah or a naughty boy with a beard. José Mojica Marins, best known as Coffin Joe, kicks off Shocktober 2026 with The …
Show notes
A naked man walks out of the sea and into São Paulo, and nobody can agree whether he's the Messiah or a naughty boy with a beard. José Mojica Marins, best known as Coffin Joe, kicks off Shocktober 2026 with The End of Man (1971), a strange, scrappy sermon.
Mike White, Rob St. Mary and Ben Buckingham dig into Finis Hominis: the head-in, tail-away walks that carry Mojica from scene to scene, an ending that jabs Catholic society in the eye, echoes of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, and the follow-up, When the Gods Fall Asleep (1972). They also talk about Mojica's death in 2020.
Then Mike talks with André Barcinski, co-director of Coffin Joe: The Strange World of Jose Mojica Marins (2001), about visiting Mojica in São Paulo, the dictatorship years, Cinema Novo, and a man who was never allowed to stop being his character.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Joe Lansdale (2026)
Joe R. Lansdale writes like everybody he knows is dead, and Hollywood has been trying to catch up with him ever since. The Texas storyteller joins Mike for a Projection Booth Special Report that runs from …
Show notes
Joe R. Lansdale writes like everybody he knows is dead, and Hollywood has been trying to catch up with him ever since. The Texas storyteller joins Mike for a Projection Booth Special Report that runs from Batman comics to the movies he hopes to make next.
Lansdale, the author behind Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), argues the film needs no sequel: Bruce Campbell is that part. He explains why The Drive-In has been optioned again and again and never filmed, why he calls Hollywood a sack of weasels while happily cashing the checks, and how a screenplay for Ridley Scott paid for his house.
There is more: a four-year-old's love of Batman and the story "Subway Jack"; why he ended Hap and Leonard after 15 novels; his friendship with Bill Paxton, who sent him Frailty (2001) and optioned The Bottoms; Howard Waldrop adaptations, one starring and directed by Vincent D'Onofrio; and The Projectionist, the film he hopes to direct next year. He also talks Texas, genre, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a daily three-hour writing habit.
Visit Joe Lansdale's official website at https://www.joerlansdale.com/
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 822: Spartan (2004)
David Mamet strips the political thriller down until almost nothing is left, and the gaps are the point. Spartan (2004) sends Val Kilmer's Robert Scott after the president's missing daughter, through a cover-up …
Show notes
David Mamet strips the political thriller down until almost nothing is left, and the gaps are the point. Spartan (2004) sends Val Kilmer's Robert Scott after the president's missing daughter, through a cover-up told in clipped, half-finished sentences.
Mike White, Jedidiah Ayres and Andrew Nette wrap up Valhalla, spoilers included. Is this the backstory of a long-running series hero in the Jack Reacher mold? Does Mamet's compression make the film or leave holes? They trace its pulp men's-adventure DNA, its post-9/11 Dubai slavers, and a president whose worst problem now looks quaint. Then comes Kilmer's no-nonsense performance, the lines they quote, the clunkers, and where it stands beside Heist (2001) and Ronin (1998).
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Do You Want To Play? (2026)
What if the Ouija board were an app, and the app were hungry? Do You Want to Play? (2026), a new horror film fresh from its world premiere at Tubi FrightFest, turns the spirit board into an algorithm and lets a …
Show notes
What if the Ouija board were an app, and the app were hungry? Do You Want to Play? (2026), a new horror film fresh from its world premiere at Tubi FrightFest, turns the spirit board into an algorithm and lets a serial killer's demon climb inside a teenager through her phone.
Writer-director Nick Lyon joins Mike White with Ricco Ross, the Aliens (1986) veteran who plays Scary Gary, a priest turned YouTuber. Lyon traces the film to a Ouija script he wrote years ago, before the Ouija movies beat him to the board, and to the invented Demon Board at its center. Ross explains how he built Gary from the outside in: darker eyes, an island-tinged accent, and a reverence for the priest in The Exorcist (1973). The two recall an improvised exorcism, Latin lines and no stunt rigs, and why Ross trusts a director who lets him fail. Lyon also explains how casting Quinn Aune made him rewrite the script around her, why a small-budget horror film takes years to fund, and why he is weighing self-distribution against a big distributor.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 821: Moontide (1942)
Is Moontide (1942) film noir, or a dockside melodrama with a hangover? Mike White, Heidi Honeycutt and Jedidiah Ayres take on Noirvember's strangest Hollywood experiment: 20th Century Fox's bid to turn French …
Show notes
Is Moontide (1942) film noir, or a dockside melodrama with a hangover? Mike White, Heidi Honeycutt and Jedidiah Ayres take on Noirvember's strangest Hollywood experiment: 20th Century Fox's bid to turn French star Jean Gabin into a leading man.
Archie Mayo directed after Fritz Lang shot three weeks and quit. Gabin wakes from a blackout unsure whether he killed a man, Ida Lupino walks into the surf, and Claude Rains and Thomas Mitchell circle them. The panel weighs Lupino's performance, Salvador Dalí's mostly vanished dream sequence, the film's kinship with Out of the Fog (1941) and Port of Shadows (1938), and Willard Robertson's novel. Plus: why Bobo?
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Stranded on Earth (2026)
Before E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) there was Night Skies, a rural alien-horror movie that Steven Spielberg developed, spent roughly $700,000 on, and walked away from.Max Evry, author of A Masterpiece in …
Show notes
Before E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) there was Night Skies, a rural alien-horror movie that Steven Spielberg developed, spent roughly $700,000 on, and walked away from.
Max Evry, author of A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune, returns to The Projection Booth to talk about his new book, Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, out October 27 from 1984 Publishing. A new book, a new look at old Spielberg.
Mike White and Evry dig into:
Why Spielberg traded a sinister project for a personal story about a lonely kid and an alien, and how the friendship at the heart of Night Skies became the whole of E.T.
The Rick Baker saga: his working aliens, the blowup that sent Spielberg to Carlo Rambaldi, and how much of the creature came from Baker.
Ron Cobb, John Sayles, Tobe Hooper and the myths the book corrects.
After School, the R-rated middle-school comedy from Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis.
How ideas migrated into Poltergeist (1982) and Gremlins (1984), and whether Night Skies could work after Disclosure Day (2026).
If Spielberg never lets a good idea die, what happens when someone writes down where they went?
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story (2026)
For five seconds of live television, Sammy Petrillo popped out of a crib beside Jerry Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour, the two pulling the same moronic face, and those five seconds shaped the rest of his life …
Show notes
For five seconds of live television, Sammy Petrillo popped out of a crib beside Jerry Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour, the two pulling the same moronic face, and those five seconds shaped the rest of his life. WFMU's Dave "the Spazz" Abramson spent nearly two decades chasing the man behind the face for Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story, his new biography from Feral House. He tells Mike how it started: an 11-year-old reading one paragraph about Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), with Petrillo and Duke Mitchell as a knockoff Martin and Lewis; a punk single by his band The Sea Monkeys; a 1992 radio interview; and a blog comment war between Sammy and the son who says his father went out for cigarettes and never came back. Abramson worked it like a cold case, racing to reach sources in their 90s, and with help from cover artist Drew Friedman and foreword writer Scott Alexander got Jerry Lewis himself on the record. They dig into a Rashomon life: Doris Wishman's Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972), cable TV shows years before anyone had cable, film reels lost to unpaid storage bills, Barbara Loden's anonymous turn on the record All About Cleopatra, and why imitating Lewis, of all people, was a blessing and a curse. Plus: the original negative of Brooklyn Gorilla has resurfaced, and the 4K restoration screens at Nitehawk Prospect Park on November 12 and at the American Cinematheque's Los Feliz 3 on November 15.
Get the book, and sign up for news of the screenings, at Feral House.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Cruel Love (2026)
She has already buried her husband. Then a charming stranger comes to her aid during a robbery, and she lets him in. That's when the con begins. Cruel Love (2026), Nick Lyon's new thriller, now streaming, turns …
Show notes
She has already buried her husband. Then a charming stranger comes to her aid during a robbery, and she lets him in. That's when the con begins. Cruel Love (2026), Nick Lyon's new thriller, now streaming, turns real marriage fraud into what star Elisabeth Harnois calls "a cautionary tale with an element of emotional horror." Lyon tells Mike how he and the late Christian Oliver made it their first co-production, how Ron Peer's twist-and-turn script grew out of real cons that exploit fiancé visas and even the Violence Against Women Act, and why he added a rainy Los Angeles opening in post to set a modern noir mood. Detroit-born Harnois builds Julia from grief: a woman who lost the love of her life before the movie starts and decides to trust again. Bai Ling, who tells reporters she landed from the moon, plays Mei Li, a role first written as a Russian named Lyudmila; Lyon's only job, he says, was pulling her back a little. A friendly argument breaks out over half a shot that didn't make the cut, and Lyon explains why even a favorite moment sometimes has to go. Oliver died in January 2024, before the film's release, and Harnois hopes it brings new eyes to his work. Plus: Lyon's FrightFest horror film Do You Want to Play? (2026), his next, about Arctic ice cores hiding insects you don't want on your spine, and Bai Ling's directing debut, My Quarantine Romance with Toilet Paper, in which she plays Charlie Chaplin.
Follow Cruel Love on Instagram and rent or buy it from the film's official website.
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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 820: Getting Straight (2026)
Why did the one campus-protest picture that drew a crowd end up forgotten? Mike White, Andras Jones and Bill Ackerman reopen Getting Straight (1970), Richard Rush's comedy about a Vietnam veteran, played by …
Show notes
Why did the one campus-protest picture that drew a crowd end up forgotten? Mike White, Andras Jones and Bill Ackerman reopen Getting Straight (1970), Richard Rush's comedy about a Vietnam veteran, played by Elliott Gould, who is trying to finish his teaching degree while the faculty makes it hard and campus unrest makes it harder. Candice Bergen plays his girlfriend, Jan.
The panel digs into Gould's all-in performance, Rush's long-lens, rack-focus style on a glass-walled campus, Jeannie Berlin's scenes, and what the film keeps and drops from the novel. They test it against The Graduate (1967) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), and ask whether Hollywood would make political youth films now.
Then director Richard Rush joins Mike to talk about winning over Columbia, working with Gould, and shooting in widescreen.
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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Restoration at Grayson Manor (2026)
A hedonistic heir loses his hands, so his mother buys him new ones wired to his subconscious. Big mistake: his subconscious is a nasty place. The Restoration at Grayson Manor (2025), Glenn McQuaid's new Irish …
Show notes
A hedonistic heir loses his hands, so his mother buys him new ones wired to his subconscious. Big mistake: his subconscious is a nasty place. The Restoration at Grayson Manor (2025), Glenn McQuaid's new Irish horror film, premiered at Fantastic Fest and pits Chris Colfer against Alice Krige, the Borg Queen herself, in a crumbling estate where mother and son know exactly where to cut. McQuaid, a Glass Eye Pix veteran and the director of I Sell the Dead (2008), tells Mike how a YouTube video of an amputee moving a prosthetic with his mind sparked the idea, and how The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), watched with his dad, kept a creepy hand on his tail all through childhood. He and co-writer Clay McLeod Chapman turned the killer-hand movie queer, a story of bodily autonomy and the paranoia of growing up in a straight world, and kept the family's cruelty fun with cues from Tennessee Williams, The Lion in Winter (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971), and one rule: say the nastiest lines deadpan. Krige thanked him afterward; nobody had ever asked her to do comedy before. And the young local hired to play the hands? He ended up co-writing the score. Catch it in US theaters from Chroma or on Shudder from December 1.
Follow Glenn McQuaid on Instagram and find screenings on the film's official page.
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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Kung Fu Deadly (2026)
Chinese hopping vampires have invaded Dublin. Kung Fu Deadly (2026), a martial arts horror comedy that had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and plays Sitges next, sends two inept exterminators, Danny …
Show notes
Chinese hopping vampires have invaded Dublin. Kung Fu Deadly (2026), a martial arts horror comedy that had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and plays Sitges next, sends two inept exterminators, Danny (Steven He) and Frank (Michael Tient), after a swarm of jiangshi, with Lian (Gemma Chua-Tran) as their reluctant ally. Writer-producer Paddy McDonald, who produced Predestination (2014), needed 12 and a half years and roughly 30 drafts to get it made; BAFTA-winning director Fergal Costello finally cracked it.
Mike talks with both about the Mr. Vampire (1985) and Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980) obsessions behind the monsters, a Zoom chemistry read that made two leads click instantly, iPhone previs for the fight scenes, John Carpenter widescreen framing from Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and Costello's next film, a vampire movie shooting in November.
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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 818: Cat People (1982)
At a Westwood preview, a teenage girl turned to her friend: "Oh, my God." Paul Schrader turned to Jerry Bruckheimer: "I think maybe we went a little far." Schrader took Cat People (1982) as a for-hire genre …
Show notes
At a Westwood preview, a teenage girl turned to her friend: "Oh, my God." Paul Schrader turned to Jerry Bruckheimer: "I think maybe we went a little far." Schrader took Cat People (1982) as a for-hire genre job, and it turned out as personal as anything he ever made. For Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Josh Hadley and Heather Drain follow Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell into a New Orleans thick with humidity, incest and a Giorgio Moroder score. They set Alan Ormsby's very different script against what reached the screen, dig into Ferdinando Scarfiotti's Italian look, the dubbed dialogue and the mountain lions dyed black, and measure it all against Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton's Cat People (1942). Then Schrader himself explains the burning-house ending he threw out, why Bowie's song waits for the end credits, why he wishes he had changed the title, and how falling for his star ended his studio days.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Welcome to Dolly's House (2026)
What happens when your online avatar starts living a life of its own? Welcome to Dolly's House (2026), a Taiwanese animated feature chosen to open Annecy's Contrechamp section, drops a YouTuber into the home of …
Show notes
What happens when your online avatar starts living a life of its own? Welcome to Dolly's House (2026), a Taiwanese animated feature chosen to open Annecy's Contrechamp section, drops a YouTuber into the home of Madame Dolly, a sorceress who has lived for two millennia, and a house full of dolls. Seven YCH directs with Rady Fu and Tree Muta, blending live-action motion capture with 2D animation.
Mike talks with Seven about the ancient Chinese anthology Taiping Guangji that inspired the sorceress, an idea 25 years in the making that moved from live action to animation when costs soared, how rotoscoping cut time by half and expenses by 30 percent, actors performing every role twice, once on a bare warehouse stage and again in the dubbing booth, Taipei landmarks that became Dolly's house, and a sequel following the mysterious Catherine.
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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026)
Barbarians lose their heads, monsters lose their guts, and not one actor ever set foot on the set: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026) is a blood-soaked sword-and-sorcery quest performed entirely by puppets …
Show notes
Barbarians lose their heads, monsters lose their guts, and not one actor ever set foot on the set: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026) is a blood-soaked sword-and-sorcery quest performed entirely by puppets, built in a family garage in Belleville, Ontario. Director Mason Newton DeRushie's feature debut had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest before heading to Australia's Monster Fest. Mason and his father, production designer Jason Derushie, join Mike to tell how a family raised on special makeup effects set out to bring back the '80s barbarian movie. They explain why a pandemic and a crowdfunding campaign pointed them toward puppets, how a list of ten creatures they wanted to see wrote the story, and how couch foam, chicken wire, old bedsheets and about $6,000 in spray foam became the caves. The puppet cast runs past 60 characters, from tiny insects to huge beasts, and the voice cast, led by Timothy Paul McCarthy and Ry Barrett of In a Violent Nature (2024), never saw one of them: the puppets were shot first and the voices recorded in two days afterward. Their touchstones run from Meet the Feebles (1989) to The Dark Crystal (1982). And the surviving puppets? Wet mattress foam is hard to dry, so they live in an airtight container, where nobody has to smell them.
Follow the film on Instagram and North Blood Films on Facebook.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Best Served Cold (2026)
Why would a 1977 revenge movie vanish for decades while cult-film obsessives begged to see it? Best Served Cold (2026), the new documentary from writer-director Eric Zaldivar and producers Mike Malloy and John …
Show notes
Why would a 1977 revenge movie vanish for decades while cult-film obsessives begged to see it? Best Served Cold (2026), the new documentary from writer-director Eric Zaldivar and producers Mike Malloy and John Joseph Dunn, chases The Farmer (1977) from a Columbia release nobody could find to a gray-market YouTube upload that finally forced Code Red's hand. It had its world premiere at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival in Fort Lauderdale. The filmmakers join Mike to talk about a 40-minute YouTube short that grew into a feature, star and producer Gary Conway's stories, George Memmoli's on-set accident, Johnny Popwell's run-in with the law, Paul Schrader's interview after a year of agent runaround, and a cut chapter on the returning-veteran films that ties The Farmer to Rolling Thunder (1977). A bonus conversation recorded years ago adds the hunters' side: John Schuster and John Santo on how a trailer on a Hell's Ground (2007) DVD sent them searching collectors, archives and Columbia's lawyers, down a rights tangle that runs to Sylvester Stallone's Over the Top (1987).
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Sell Your House (2026)
What does it cost to help a friend make his movie? For James Claeys, the answer was his house. Sell Your House (2026), co-directed by Eric Foss and Brandon Pickering, follows the making of The Last Stop in Yuma …
Show notes
What does it cost to help a friend make his movie? For James Claeys, the answer was his house. Sell Your House (2026), co-directed by Eric Foss and Brandon Pickering, follows the making of The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023), Francis Galluppi's debut feature, and the years of debt, freak storms and distribution dead ends that came after. It had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Foss and Pickering join Mike to talk about how a behind-the-scenes shoot titled Hire Your Friends became a feature (it took Richard Brake telling Foss to do it), how two filmmakers who have worked together for years edited it with no money and no editor, why Pickering lost a bunch of money for four years, the scene where James walks out of an interview, and why the story cannot end until they find out whether he gets his house back. No spoilers.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Episode 817: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)
A gravedigger shoots the dead a second time, his assistant answers every question with a single syllable, and the woman he loves keeps coming back as someone new: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), released in the US …
Show notes
A gravedigger shoots the dead a second time, his assistant answers every question with a single syllable, and the woman he loves keeps coming back as someone new: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), released in the US as Cemetery Man, is a horror comedy that refuses to explain itself, and that refusal is the point. To close Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Heather Drain and Rob Spencer take on Michele Soavi's dream-logic zombie romance, starring Rupert Everett. Is it a coma dream, a killer's solipsistic breakdown, or a joke about the death of love? They track how Anna Falchi's returns speed up, how Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog world seeps in, what Soavi's Stage Fright (1987) and The Sect (1991) promise, and the Psychomania (1973) motorcycle that roars out of a grave. They also meet François Hadji-Lazaro, the actor behind Gnaghi, and his band Les Garçons Bouchers.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.Special Report: Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026)
Two adult film stars run a cross-country crime spree, robbing porn theaters to fund a getaway to France, and the real question isn't whether they survive but whether they stay together. Hell's No Place for a …
Show notes
Two adult film stars run a cross-country crime spree, robbing porn theaters to fund a getaway to France, and the real question isn't whether they survive but whether they stay together. Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026) is a new Texas-made road romance from writer-director Seth Magana, shot on one lens with his own money and headed for a November 17 premiere at Laemmle NoHo 7 before a theater-by-theater tour. Seth joins Mike to talk about why Bonnie and Clyde (1967), True Romance (1993) and Queen & Slim (2019) left room for a love story, the Warren Oates Dillinger (1973) soundtrack inside the film's theaters, lessons from The American Friend (1977) and Sam Peckinpah, a shootout co-directed by the still photographer, and a two-week editing trip to France.
Follow 42nd Street Pictures on Instagram and get tickets for the November 17 premiere.
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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.
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