The Projection Booth

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 the state government.

Moss and McBaine, the Boys State and Girls State team, describe tracking down Isseks, winning his trust over a twelve-course brunch, and the moment a crayon-drawn map of his gutted classroom convinced them to physically rebuild it on a Hollywood soundstage. They talk about editor Christopher Passig (Telemarketers) cutting the archive down from hundreds of hours, the ethics of dramatizing a documentary about documentary-making, and why they left the VHS's tracking lines and artifacts untouched rather than cleaning them up with AI.

They also get into what it meant to bring Isseks's original students — now in their fifties — back together decades later, a story one of them had never told before about his father, and how a film about a 1990s toxic-waste scandal ended up feeling, in Moss and McBaine's words, urgently "of the moment."


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.

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 developing long-running collaborations with composers including Jeff Russo. He explains how Alien: Earth balances the musical legacy of Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner with eerie new sounds created using contrabass flute, Aztec death whistle, and the specially built bass desmophone. The conversation also explores Schor’s work on Ripley, Fargo, and Cape Fear, the perils of falling in love with a temp track, and why giving music room to breathe can transform a story.

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.

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

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.

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 (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 (Michael Madsen).

Dahl and Warfield speak about the making of the film and the struggle to get their visions to screen.

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.

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 open mic fifteen years ago and spent years hearing him make the case; Olivas came aboard after directing Inky, his documentary on forgotten Hollywood ghostwriter Neil Gumbel, and dove into what turned out to be thousands of hours of archival footage. They talk assembling an unlikely roster of SNL alumni and insiders — Denny Dillon, Patrick Weathers, Hugh Fink, Tom "Bones" Malone — thanks to journalist Andy Haugland, tracking down the Del Close connection linking Butler to Hughes, and reuniting Weathers and songwriter Neil Levy on stage for the first time since 1983 at the film's sold-out 40th-anniversary premiere at the Quad Cinema. They also dig into Butler's late-life health struggles, his decades-long marriage to songwriting legend Beverly Ross ("Lollipop"), and why they think his story of scrappy, self-made outsider comedy is bigger than just one Ferris Bueller theory.

Visit https://savingferrisbutler.com/ to find out more.

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.

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 — dig into how a straightforward drama about a woman who says no to a camping-trip proposal picked up a bag of stolen money and a pair of outlaw lovers along the way, channeling Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy and the Wachowskis' Bound in equal measure. They talk shooting entirely outdoors with bear visits and mid-scene thunderstorms, assembling a cast led by Bethany Brown, Tandia Mercedes, Cody Kearsley, and Chris McNally, and getting the film made with Canada Council and Creative BC funding plus a lot of neighborly door-knocking. Recorded on the ground at the Fantasia International Film Festival, where A Safe Distance played its Canadian premiere after stops at SXSW, Frameline, and Phoenix Film Festival.

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.

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 talks about the spray-foam insulation that sparked the idea, shooting in a townhouse complex already vacated and slated for demolition, casting Stephen McHattie as an eccentric pet-shop owner who spends most of the film in a bathtub, writing with longtime collaborator Darcy Spidle, the drug that stiffens the tongue and mangles the voice, and scoring, editing, and sound-designing his own pictures. Plus the stolen $3,000 music video that turned him into a filmmaker in the first place.


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.

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 creature he grew up sensing in the shadows — then through a documentary career, a shoestring proof of concept that landed at Frontières during Cannes, and a 20-day Manitoba shoot with a largely Indigenous cast and crew that a blizzard couldn't stop. He also talks about making horror in the woods as a kid with DP Joey Forte, telling 70% of a story so the audience can author the rest, and bracing for Fantasia's meowing crowd. Is the monster ancestral, or inherited?

Find out more at https://www.michifkoonteur.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.

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 (and former member of the gang). When one of their own, Angel, is taken by Mexican warlord Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), the gang has to decide if they're going to abandon or rescue their comrade.

We have a plethora of interviews for this one with actress Lilia Castillo, actor Alfonso Arau (Herrera), screenwriter Walon Green, Kathryn Jones, author of Tall in the Saddle: The Life of Ben Johnson, Hollywood's Real Cowboy and Bill Mesce, author of The Wild Bunch: The American Classic That Changed Westerns Forever.

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.

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 unpack why this might be the best Holland Spider-Man yet, how Marisa Tomei's Aunt May keeps the franchise grounded, the Man-Spider mutation plot pulled from The Other, Jon Bernthal's Punisher partnership, and what a psychic rampage signals for the MCU's slow-building X-Men rollout. Spoilers arrive after the setup, alongside a debate over secret-identity fatigue and whether Marvel finally made a superhero movie about being a person rather than a franchise cog.

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.