The Projection Booth

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 shaped the remarkable performances of young actors Ong Xuan Jing and Sydney Wong. She also discusses Singapore’s chewing-gum ban, hearing an audience member weep at the film’s Rotterdam world premiere, and cinema’s power to assure people from broken families that they are not alone.

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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 eighteen more and amassed six hundred pieces of archival material.

They talk about the trust the surviving Reefers placed in them, editor Richard Lowe (Muscle Shoals) and archival producer Adam Lawrence sorting through decades of footage, the Key West and Santa Barbara premieres — the latter a nearly two-hundred-seat sellout — and what it was like watching Jimmy Buffett's own sisters sit in the audience for an early screening. They also get into Key West itself as a magnet for outsized characters, name-checking longtime local artist David Wegman along the way.

Narrated by Jeff Bridges, Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers opens in theaters nationwide September 5th — Jimmy Buffett Day — through the end of October, before heading to digital. Showtimes and city listings are at occupationalhazardfilm.com.

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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 disappeared as Tombstone transformed from a sprawling historical epic into the lean, quotable film audiences know today.

They also examine the movie’s version of the Earp legend, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt’s vendetta ride, Doc’s showdown with Johnny Ringo, and how Tombstone stacks up against My Darling Clementine, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Kevin Costner’s competing Wyatt Earp.

Joining the episode is Thordur O. Thordarson of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, whose collection includes a replica of Doc Holliday’s unusually distinctive cane.

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

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 Portland and back, during which the idea for a buddy story about Shy (Howard) and Valentine (Dodge) started to take shape.

They talk about writing the script out of their own friendship rather than research, shooting for thirty days on dot-com money borrowed from newly flush friends, and staffing the crew almost entirely with fellow San Francisco artists and musicians. They also get into the year-long restoration process — producer Steak House rebuilding the film from raw footage into an entirely new timeline — and why a movie about two "outsiders of the outsiders" still doesn't feel dated twenty-five years later.

By Hook or By Crook is currently playing in select theaters and available on-demand from Altered Innocence, with a Blu-ray and DVD — featuring a new commentary track with Dodge, Howard, and Steak House — arriving October 13th.

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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 cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn).

She talks about landing at Fantasia and getting matched with producers at Umbrella Entertainment and Shudder, shooting in a wintry Adelaide with a cast and crew she'd mostly never met — including Bailey Spalding as Penny and Alexandra Jensen as Amy — cutting six pages from the third act mid-shoot after a scheduling error, and how filming in continuity meant her editor could hand back a rough cut every single morning. She also gets into the soundtrack, built around Aussie rock touchstones like AC/DC and The Angels' "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again," an in-joke for anyone who grew up in an Australian pub.

Then there's Fantasia itself, where a scene involving a kitchen appliance made an audience member pass out mid-screening. Penny Lane Is Dead is streaming now, exclusively on Shudder.

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