The Projection Booth

Strip a soldier's letter of its name, date and salutation, and the sentiments barely change: scared kids who want to be home. That idea drives Behind the Lines (2024), a new documentary in which actors, letter in hand, read wartime letters and emails from World War III to Iraq and Afghanistan, set against archival footage.

Director John B. Benitz and Andrew Carroll, founder of the War Letters Project, join Mike White to trace how a stage play, If All the Sky Were Paper, became a film. Carroll recalls the house fire, a cousin's Buchenwald letter and the 1998 Dear Abby column that set the project off. Benitz explains why he broke Ken Burns's rule by putting actors on screen, even though Burns's Better Angels Society helped sponsor the film.

They also dig into a Pearl Harbor sailor's letter held back for a year by censorship, Laura Dern's laryngitis the night before her studio session, a first cut of over three hours trimmed to ninety minutes, and a Japanese woman's apology, with a thousand folded cranes, to a family killed by a balloon bomb. Why do the funny letters matter as much as the harrowing ones?

Follow Behind the Lines on Instagram and visit the film's official website.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Three people, one conversation, ninety minutes: that was the stage play Sheepwell. Now it's a feature film, and it's heading to the Austin Film Festival as a fresh voice in a very crowded field.

This Special Report brings Mike White together with Sheepwell (2026) co-writer and producer Danielle DeMatteo, producer and star Lauren Elizabeth Harris, and actor Mark Ryan Anderson. DeMatteo founded the nonprofit SheNYC Arts, which first staged the play at its Off-Broadway festival. Harris runs Pathway Pictures.

They dig into the hard part of adaptation: turning characters who only get talked about into people you can see, and building two roles that never existed in the original play. They trace how a staffer's insistent phone call put the script on DeMatteo's desk, why producing makes Harris a better actor, what Anderson found stepping into a close-knit set late in the shoot, and what Harris hopes women will see in her character. They close with Austin plans and what each guest tackles next.

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.

The one woman who can clear an innocent man has vanished, and nobody who saw her will admit it. November continues with Phantom Lady (1944), Robert Siodmak's adaptation of the Cornell Woolrich novel, published as William Irish, and the first film produced by Hitchcock veteran Joan Harrison. Alan Curtis is the man convicted of strangling his wife; Ella Raines is the secretary who turns detective; Franchot Tone is the friend who joins her search for all the wrong reasons.

Rahne Alexander and Earl Jackson join Mike to follow an outrageous hat from a bar to a milliner's shop, and to marvel at Elisha Cook Jr.'s drum solo, the closest thing to a sex scene 1944 allowed. Earl lays out how much darker Woolrich's novel runs and traces Siodmak's style back to his Weimar films. Rahne makes the case for a queer camp remake. Along the way: closed doors, a trial told in shorthand, echoes of The Big Clock (1948) and Black Angel (1946), and a happy ending that sounds like a life sentence.

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.

What happens when a filmmaker can't make the movie of her own life? Janaé Rachel Ballot tried to write a biopic about herself, ran into dissociative episodes and flashbacks, and started shooting without a script instead. The result is Dissociated Me (2026), a comedy about trauma that she calls an anti-biopic and an anti-therapy film. Mike White talks with its writer and director right after its world premiere at the Reykjavik International Film Festival.

Ballot grew up in a Hollywood family, and the film opens with a song and dance act drawn from her own childhood of dance and pageants. She explains why she rebelled against the family business, how years of feature development taught her she had been producing all along, and why a biopic of Anthony Perkins gave way to her own story. Her pandemic-era short Managed was her first step into directing.

Then came the accident: a car hit Ballot the day before a shoot she had been waiting for, and the footage filmed in the trauma unit ended up in the movie. The two talk about how much is act and how much is real, a cast playing heightened versions of themselves, and editing a film about dissociation without stylistic tricks.

Mike also sets the film beside You Can See Everything (2026), another recent picture asking what is true and what is an act. Where does the performance end and the person begin?

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.

Film history may be heading toward its own ending, and David Thomson wants to look at the whole thing while there is still something to see. The critic and historian behind Rosebud joins Mike White for a Projection Booth Special Report on his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, a revisionist history of the movies that took about three years to write.

Thomson traces his obsession to a childhood screening of Henry V (1944), where a dissolve from sleeping page boys to flames lodged in his head for good. He explains why he gave up a place at Oxford for film school in 1960, remembers the time Citizen Kane (1941) played to an empty house and Orson Welles had almost no scholarship behind him, and weighs Pauline Kael's attack on the film.

Then the talk turns to where the medium is headed: photography giving way to electronic images and AI, editing as film's most decisive tool, and why Thomson calls Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) a hollow sham that may age like The Sound of Music (1965). He also makes the case that The Godfather (1972) still shapes how power looks on camera, and previews his next book, on Mickey Mouse.

What happens to movies when the picture stops being a photograph?

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.