The Projection Booth

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...

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, B...

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 untangl...

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 anot...

Director Lena Khan talks with Mike about Best of the Best (2026), her Bollywood-fusion dance comedy for Netflix from writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam. Khan traces her path from UCLA activism and music videos to her debut The Tiger Hunter, and how Minhaj and Venkataramanujam brought her on after asking for script notes and liking what she said. They dig into the rewrite process,...

Cassie Workman talks with Mike about her new horror-comedy series, Cassie Workman is Witchy AF, a puppet-and-drawings deep dive into occult history that plays, in Mike's words, like "a demented kid show." Workman traces her path from stand-up in Perth, Australia, and a run as head writer on The Aaron Chen Show, to fusing comedy and the occult into a series she finally pitched after years on the ba...

Failure becomes a creative strategy in Mooch, Jeff Ryan’s scrappy New Jersey crime comedy about a nearly thirty-year-old caddie who stumbles into private-eye work. Mike talks with the film’s writer, director, editor, and star about transforming a teenage insult into an intensely personal character, channeling Jim Carrey’s physical fearlessness and the Coen brothers’ off-kilter language, and buildi...

When government planning turns communities into maps and statistics, whose lives disappear from the page? Mike talks with director Casey Carter about To Use a Mountain, his visually arresting journey through six American sites considered for a permanent nuclear-waste repository. Carter traces the film from his study of photography, physics, and architecture to six years of fieldwork, relationship-...

A child’s inner life deserves to be taken seriously. Mike talks with writer-director Ang Geck Geck Priscilla about Ah Girl, her tender, funny feature debut set amid family fracture in 1994 Singapore. Ang traces the film’s decade-long path from painful autobiographical memories to a story of healing, explains how counseling transformed the script, and reveals how play, trust, and close observation...

John H. Cunningham and Ted E. Haynes talk with Mike about Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers, their documentary on the founding members of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band. The pair met at the Key West Film Festival and set out to make a short about steel guitarist Roger Bartlett; six interviews in, they knew they had a feature, and by the time they wrapped in April 2025 they'd shot eig...

Mike White is joined by El Goro and Jedidiah Ayres to discuss George P. Cosmatos’s 1993 Western, Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer in his career-defining turn as Doc Holliday. The conversation digs into Kevin Jarre’s ambitious original screenplay, his short-lived stint as director, Kurt Russell’s unusually hands-on role after Jarre was fired, and the material that disap...

Harry Dodge and Silas Howard talk with Mike about By Hook or By Crook, their 2001 queer-cinema landmark, now touring U.S. theaters and streaming on VOD in a new 4K restoration. The pair met working at a dyke-run cafe in late-1980s San Francisco, and trace the film's origin story to an absurdly literal turning point: Dodge getting a cigarette-littering ticket that forced a thirteen-hour drive to Po...

Mia-Kate Russell talks with Mike about Penny Lane Is Dead, her Ozploitation slasher debut, now streaming on Shudder. After twenty years as a film and TV makeup artist, Russell wrote and shot the film off the back of five self-funded shorts, drawing on her own delinquent 1980s Australian childhood and a long-held urge to put a genuinely awful teenage girl on screen — the impulse that became Penny's...

Berner talks with Mike about Splash City, the crime thriller he co-wrote, co-directed, produced, and financed himself — inspired by San Francisco's real-life "bipping" (smash-and-grab) epidemic. The Bay Area rapper and Cookies cannabis founder describes handing his own outline to co-writer David to build into a full screenplay, turning over most of the directing to his creative partner Alex, and s...

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine talk with Mike about Teenage Wasteland, their documentary premiering on Netflix September 4th. The film resurrects five hundred hours of decaying VHS tape shot between 1991 and 1997 by English teacher Fred Isseks and his Middletown, New York, students as they investigated a toxic dump — and stumbled into a conspiracy involving organized crime and cover-ups reaching th...

Music can build suspense, reveal emotion, and reshape a scene—but who ensures that it works in harmony with the picture? Mike talks with Emmy-winning music editor Ben Schor about the often-invisible craft of guiding a production’s score from the earliest temp tracks through recording and the final mix. Schor traces his path from singer-songwriter to film and television, beginning with Gigli and de...

Mike talks to director Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure) along with stars Andrzej Konopka and Noomi Rapace about their new film Hot Spot (2026). It's a dystopian detective story about where Djonny (Andrzej Konopka) investigates a murder at a refugee camp at the behest of a sentient A.I. where he encounters a witch named Rana (Noomi Rapace). Find out more at https://www.focusfeatures.com/hot-spot Bec...

Rob Spencer joins Mike and Jedidiah Ayres -- our full-time co-host for this Val-halla series -- as we discuss some Val Kilmer films. We start with the neo-noir Kill Me Again from 1989. Written by David Warfield and John Dahl (who also directed), it stars Kilmer as a private detective who's hired by the two-timing Fay (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) who's on the run from the psychotic Vince "Vega" Miller (...

DB Frick and director Julius Olivas talk with Mike about Saving Ferris Butler, their scrappy, sub-$30,000 documentary chasing down the wildest claim in comedy history: that Ferris Butler, a fired 1980-81 Saturday Night Live writer and the mind behind the underground cable-access sketch show Waste Meat News, is the real inspiration for John Hughes's Ferris Bueller. Frick met Butler at a New York op...

Gloria Mercer and Aidan West talk with Mike about A Safe Distance (2026), their scrappy, off-grid Canadian crime thriller that started as a pandemic-era proof-of-concept short and grew into a full-blown Bonnie-and-Clyde riff shot on borrowed forest properties outside Vancouver. Mercer directs and West writes, and the two — longtime collaborators since their Simon Fraser University film school days...

Director Seth A. Smith joins Mike for a Special Report from the Fantasia International Film Festival on Permanent Damage (2026), his fairy-tale crime comedy about escaped convict Tommy Gods (Calem MacDonald), who holes up in a condemned Halifax housing complex and falls for Joe (Olivia Scriven), niece of the brutal landlord (Stephen Dorff) whose "golden goose" the two of them plan to steal. Smith...

Writer-director Tim Riedel joins Mike for Ancestral Beasts (2026), a Red River Métis horror feature in which Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom) retreats to a remote family cabin after her mother's death and finds something in the woods that feeds on everything she won't face. Riedel traces the film back to his mother's Sixties Scoop childhood and her later borderline personality disorder diagnosis — the cre...

Rob St. Mary and Josh Hadley join Mike for The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah's blood-soaked western about Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his aging outlaws chasing one last job against Robert Ryan's bounty hunter, a former member of the gang. When Angel is captured by the Mexican warlord Mapache, the Bunch has to decide whether to ride away or ride back for him. We have a plethora of interview...

Spider-Man: Brand New Day argues a hero can be both the mask and the man, no universe reset required. Mike welcomes Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast for a crossover dissecting Destin Daniel Cretton's grounded, detective-flavored entry in the Tom Holland era, one that ditches multiverse noise for a genuine emotional throughline between Peter Parker and a scene-stealing Sadie Sink. Mike and Chris un...

How do you make a documentary about an artist so iconic she's practically wallpaper — flowers, bones, desert light, done to death? Filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner set out to demythologize Georgia O'Keeffe instead, and Mike sits down with the married directing team to talk about it. They trace the project from a small University of Virginia exhibit revealing O'Keeffe's forgotten Charl...