The Projection Booth

Alfred Hitchcock remains cinema's Master of Suspense a century after directing his first film, but decades of biography have blurred the line between the man and the myth. Mike talks with author Tony Lee Moral about his sixth Hitchcock book, A Century of Hitchcock, and the archival discovery that reshaped it: a 36-page 1980 transcript of biographer Donald Spoto's own interview with Tippi Hedren.

Moral traces how Spoto's personal grievances against Hitchcock — including being routinely ignored by name and bitten by the director's West Highland terrier — colored The Darkside of Genius and shaped decades of tabloid narrative. Drawing on new interviews with secretaries, screenwriters, and script supervisors who worked alongside Hitchcock, Moral makes the case for reexamining the record on Hitchcock's treatment of women, from Tippi Hedren's shifting accounts to the making of The Birds and Marnie.

The conversation also revisits The Pleasure Garden on its hundredth anniversary, Hitchcock's collaboration with Salvador Dalí on Spellbound, and what a possible sixth Hitchcock book might hold. Find Tony Lee Moral's book and more of his work at tonyleemoralbooks.com.

Buy the book at: https://amzn.to/4fvEBKG 

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Nick Taylor built The Nick Taylor Horror Show by asking filmmakers how they actually got their movies made — an unofficial film school he later put to use directing his own feature. Mike talks with Taylor about turning that same curiosity on Steve Johnson, the special makeup effects legend behind Slimer, the Fright Night vampires, and the Howling werewolves, and a childhood hero whose success validated Taylor's own outsider love of monsters.

Taylor traces the six-year odyssey of Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson, from meeting Johnson at Monsterpalooza through the funding struggles of an unapologetically niche passion project. He discusses narrowing the film's circle of interview subjects to people who truly knew Johnson — including John Landis and Linnea Quigley — over chasing bigger names, and how editor Joe Krings kept the project's fan enthusiasm in check.

The conversation closes with Rubberhead's Fantasia Festival world premiere and where to catch it. Follow Taylor on Instagram at @iamnicktaylor or visit americannightmare.co for updates.
 

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

Roland Klick's Deadlock (1970) strips the spaghetti western down to its bones — no horses, no heroism, just three men and a suitcase in the Negev. When the wounded Kid (Marquard Bohm) staggers out of the desert clutching stolen cash, Charles Dump (Mario Adorf) sees an opportunity. When the cold-eyed Mr. Sunshine (Anthony Dawson) arrives to collect, the triangle tightens. Klick shoots it all like a fever dream, backed by a Can soundtrack that makes the heat feel alive.

Jessica Shires, and Spencer Parsons join Mike to dig into this criminally underseen West German neo-western — its debt to Leone, its surreal humor, its nihilist gut-punch of an ending, and why it deserves to stand alongside the genre's best.

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

Vengeance never ends — that's the warning Manuel issues early in Robert Hossein's 1969 Cemetery Without Crosses, and the film spends the next ninety minutes proving him right. When the widow Maria hires the black-gloved, spiritually exhausted gunslinger to avenge her husband's murder at the hands of the powerful Rogers family, she sets in motion a cycle of brutality that punishes the innocent alongside the guilty.

Mike talks with co-hosts Oren Shai and Professor Richard Edwards about this French-Italian-Spanish production, one of the most melancholy and formally rigorous Euro-Westerns ever made. Topics include Hossein's rejection by the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd and his debt to  fatalism, the Leone connection, Michèle Mercier's turn as one of the genre's strongest female leads, Scott Walker's haunting title song, and where the film belongs in the canon alongside The Great Silence and The Wild Bunch. 

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

Thirty years ago, Saturday Night Live's "It's Pat" turned gender ambiguity into a recurring punchline. Today, the question of what to do with that legacy — and who gets to answer it — is anything but simple.

Mike talks with director Ro Haber about We Are Pat, their feature documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it earned a Special Jury Mention for Best New Documentary Director. The film follows a cohort of trans and non-binary comedians as they reimagine and rewrite the original Pat sketches, using camp and humor to reclaim a character whose popularity once hinged on making others uncomfortable. Julia Sweeney (Pat herself) joins the conversation, along with contributors including Molly Kearney, Murray Hill, Nori Reed, and Sabrina Wu.

Haber and Mike dig into how comedy functions as both a tool of oppression and a radical force for change, and wrestle with the harder questions the film poses: how does art age, and can narratives that once mocked us be genuinely reclaimed? We Are Pat is now streaming on Prime Video and available to rent or buy on Fandango at Home. Follow the film on Instagram at @wearepatdoc.

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