The Projection Booth

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 stepping behind the camera himself for six scenes when the shoot ran out of money.

He talks about the film's ballooning budget (from a planned $500,000 to $2 million), the two-year in-house edit at his own Cookies offices, scrapping and re-recording the score until it felt right, and the wild disparity between a quiet industry screening at Lionsgate and the 640-person standing ovation at Oakland's Grand Lake Theater.

Splash City is now available to rent or buy on digital and VOD, following a limited theatrical run and a cross-country tour-bus screening tour. Berner also previews his next project, Pax, a Bay Area marijuana-trafficking film. Follow the film @SplashCityMovie and Berner @Berner415 on Instagram.

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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."

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

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.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

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

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

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 (Michael Madsen).

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

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth