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PODCAST

The Projection Booth

Weirding Way Media

The Projection Booth features discussions of films from a wide variety of genres with in-depth critical analysis while regularly attracting special guest talent eager to discuss their past gems. The podcast has been recognized as a premier film podcast by The A.V. Club, IndieWire, Entertainment Weekly, and Filmmaker Magazine. Visit http://www.projectionboothpodcast.comThe Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at weirdingwaymedia.com.Become a

tv & film film history

All Episodes

36:04

Special Report: Family (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/10/07

First-time writer-director Benjamin Finkel built Family (2026) out of his own childhood: his father died of cancer when Finkel was fourteen, and he spent the years afterward filling a script with "everything that was scary and interesting" to him. He tells Mike White how a screenwriting professor passed that script to a literary manager, how a self-shot fake trailer (made in the house he grew up in) landed Fifth Season as a studio partner, and how Ruth Wilson came aboard after one coffee and a phone

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19:20

Special Report: Never After Dark (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/10/06

Dave Boyle built Never After Dark (2026) around a lifelong passion for ghost stories and a desire to find something new in a "well-worn genre." He tells Mike White and co-star Moeka Hoshi about the sound design holding the film together: Japanese sound designer Natsuko Inoue (Godzilla Minus One, House of Ninjas), who handled all sound design and foley in Tokyo before flying to Los Angeles to mix at Warner Bros. with longtime American mixer Carlos, plus composer Jonathan Snipes — a deliberate pairing

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19:40

Special Report: The Deputy (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/10/06

First-time feature director Matt Sukkar cold-approached William H. Macy with a letter to land his Sheriff Krueger, then built The Deputy's tone around Scorsese's After Hours: "one bad decision leading you on the course of a night where the protagonist is trying to get things back to normal, and reality is becoming increasingly absurd the whole time." Adapted from Victor Gischler's novel — relocated from Oklahoma to Natchez, Mississippi, where Sukkar did a full dialect-and-reference pass on Carlo

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23:24

Special Report: Hellbilly Hollow (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/10/06

After getting killed off in John Carpenter's 2018 Halloween and walking that film's red carpet, musician-actor Kurt Deimer called his friend Kevin Wayne with a pitch: let's start our own horror franchise, the way Halloween launched Michael Myers. Wayne had already heard about a haunted attraction in Vincent, Alabama — Hellbilly Hollow — and the two built their new killers, hulking Bull (Deimer) and childlike, disfigured Tickles (Wayne, who also directs), around the real attraction's actual layout,

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130:30

Special Report: Digger (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/10/06

The Projection Booth and The Kulturecast cross the streams to dig into Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's bombastic, heavily spoiled satire starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon racing to convince the world he can fix the Arctic disaster he caused. Mike White and Chris Stachiw land on opposite sides of the "is it a $125 million folly or a willfully strange swing worth defending" debate, but agree the film's biggest surprise is its structural twist.They dig into the cast firing on all

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19:52

Special Report: Murder at the Movies (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/10/05

Alicia Malone has spent years watching screwball comedies and noir thrillers for Turner Classic Movies — now she's put herself inside one. The TCM host talks with Mike White about Murder at the Movies: A Movie Palace Mystery, her first novel and the first fiction title TCM and Running Press have ever published.Malone traces the book back to an accidental pitch over coffee with her editor, Cindy Sipala, and to her own fantasy of running a theater — the inspiration behind Audrey Sullivan, the Los

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20:14

Special Report: Appofeniacs (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/10/05

Music-video veteran Chris Marrs Piliero (The Black Keys, Kesha, Ariana Grande) traces his feature debut, Appofeniacs, to two obsessions: the ease of deepfake manipulation, and apophenia — our compulsion to find connections in things that aren't actually connected. He tells Mike White how fan theories about his own music videos (imagined hidden messages, imagined Illuminati symbolism) convinced him the premise had teeth: a small, trivial fake video of a friend can chain-react into real

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21:46

Special Report: Beware Boiúna (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/10/05

"What if Sorcerer was a creature feature?" That question is what unlocked Beware Boiúna for director Mike P. Nelson, who tells Mike White how William Friedkin's doomed-expedition structure — immerse the audience in an environment, let it become a character, then release the beast — became his blueprint after he initially turned down a "giant snake movie" pitch from producers Jeremy Bolt and Robert Kulzer.Nelson details the real jungle: flooded sets, a tarantula bite, a broken bone, and a shoot on a

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20:32

Special Report: The World of Nancy Kwan

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/28

Nancy Kwan talks with Mike about The World of Nancy Kwan, her new memoir written with Deborah Davis and a foreword by her nephew Kevin Kwan. Kwan revisits how she landed The World of Suzie Wong almost by accident, tagging along to watch her favorite Hong Kong actresses screen-test before a casting director pulled her in front of the camera, which led to a Hollywood contract, acting lessons with Jeff Corey, and a national tour of the stage production after France Nuyen won the film role.They dig into

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30:24

Special Report: Take Me Home (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/25

When their mother goes unresponsive, Anna (Anna Sargent) calls for help and no one quite listens. Writer-director Liz Sargent built Take Me Home (2026) around her own sister, a woman with a cognitive disability, and made her the hero instead of the burden. Mike talks with Sargent as the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner opens in theaters via Willa.Sargent traces her path from modern dance and experimental theater to a Mike Figgis-mentored short shot days before she met her biological

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34:04

Special Report: Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual...

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/25

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle join Mike for Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), third in their trilogy after Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure. Made with a Guggenheim grant, it grows from the 2020 CZU fire that forced the couple to evacuate their Santa Cruz Mountains home for two and a half months, turning a burn scar the size of Delaware into a portrait of a community, its goats, dog, and beloved peacock, that refused to

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38:48

Special Report: Digital Kitchen's Titles for Smoke...

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/25

Digital Kitchen's Mason Nicoll and Andrew "AJ" Julien talk with Mike about designing the Emmy-nominated title sequences for Spider-Noir and Smoke. They walk through the studio's pitch process, from log-line-only briefs to full pilot screenings, and how Spider-Noir's period-accurate 1931 noir look came from surrealist photography, Man Ray, Seconds, and a Lady from Shanghai homage they didn't know the show was making until after the fact.They dig into Smoke's objects-as-characters concept, physically

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23:27

Special Report: Girl in the Night (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/24

Rok (Urban Kuntarič), a lonely gas station clerk, steals a bicycle and ends up sidekick to its owner, The Girl (Lara Wolf), a blank-eyed, scarred vigilante who may or may not be a superhero. Luka Marčetić's Girl in the Night (2026) just took Best Picture in Fantastic Fest's Main Competition, and Mike talks with Marčetić and Wolf about the Slovenian deadpan charmer.Marčetić traces the film from a one-line logline and a scrapped romantic comedy to a tone shaped by Napoleon Dynamite, Yorgos Lanthimos,

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16:11

Special Report: Littermates (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/24

Sirens wail, smoke drifts past the hedgerows, and inside a tidy English cottage two grown adults earn "nifties" for good behavior. Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson's darkly comic feature debut, Littermates (2026), turns a vague apocalypse into a strange, tender story of siblinghood, and Mike talks with both directors about how they pulled it off.Friends since film school, the pair recount reverse-engineering the script around a borrowed country house and three performers they know best, including

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17:12

Special Report: Lou Ferrigno on Hard Redemption (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/24

Lou Ferrigno talks with Mike about Hard Redemption (2026), the martial-arts action thriller from director-writer-star Jino Kang and co-director Christine Lam. The film plays out a Die Hard-in-a-classroom premise: a GED teacher with a hidden past (Kang) has to fight off a San Francisco gang holding his students hostage, one grudge match at a time through the school's hallways to a gymnasium showdown.Ferrigno, best known as television's original Hulk, joins the cast in a supporting role opposite David

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11:38

Special Report: Sick (2026)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/23

Agata Trzebuchowska joins Mike for a Special Report on Sick (2026), her feature debut as writer and director, fresh off winning Best Director in Fantastic Fest's Next Wave competition. Sent to the Polish countryside to nurse their ailing grandmother (Monika Niemczyk), sixteen-year-old Maks (Konrad Kąkol) and his older sister Emma (Katarzyna Łubik) feel the summer heat bend their bond into something neither of them can name.Best known as the novice nun at the heart of Paweł Pawlikowski's

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140:28

Episode 815: The Salton Sea (2002)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/23

Rob St. Mary and Jedidiah Ayres join Mike for The Salton Sea (2002), D.J. Caruso's meth-fueled noir starring Val Kilmer in a dual role: junkie informant Danny Parker, who's secretly Tom Van Allen, a grieving trumpet player hunting the corrupt cops who murdered his wife. Chasing them drags Danny deep into the orbit of Pooh-Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), a nose-less speed freak who'll snort anything, and Jimmy the Finn (Peter Sarsgaard), closing in as his double life unravels.Screenwriter Tony Gayton and

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17:55

Special Report: What Happened to Doris?

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/22

Nick Simon talks with Mike about What Happened to Doris? (2026), his film revisiting the real case that inspired The Entity (1982). Doris Bither was a Culver City single mother whose reports of violent supernatural attacks drew paranormal investigators from UCLA and became one of the most documented hauntings in American history. Simon developed the project with the blessing of Doris's real son, Brian, adjusting details to honor her experience while centering the story on her fight to be believed

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49:50

Special Report: Peter M. Hoffman on Karmic Winds

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/21

Peter M. Hoffman talks with Mike about Karmic Winds: Reflections from the "Smartest Guy in Hollywood", his memoir written largely in pencil during an eight-month prison sentence for a tax-credit case a federal judge had already ruled legal. Hoffman traces his path from Yale tax law into the movie business, tax-engineering Superman for Alex Salkind, working with manager Albert Grossman, and untangling Dolly Parton's publishing split from Porter Wagoner so she could reclaim her catalog outright.They

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22:07

Special Report: Baby Doe (2025)

The Projection Booth ·

2026/09/20

Director Jessica Earnshaw talks with Mike about Baby Doe (2025), her documentary on Gail, tried decades after a newborn's 1993 death, and the phenomenon of pregnancy denial. Earnshaw traces her path from photojournalism, including a National Geographic essay on aging in prison, to her debut Jacinta, and how the film began with Emily Weaver's case before an appeals delay sent her searching for another, leading her to Gail.They dig into building trust as a nearly one-woman crew, archival footage

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