The Projection Booth

Few bands burned brighter—or more colorfully—than Culture Club, and director Alison Ellwood joins Mike to unpack the making of her acclaimed documentary Boy George & Culture Club. From the group's improbable formation and meteoric rise to the personal relationships, creative tensions, and heartbreak that shaped their music, Ellwood reveals how she crafted an intimate portrait using the voices of Boy George, Jon Moss, Mikey Craig, and Roy Hay.

The conversation explores the joy and challenge of building music documentaries, why some stories are best told by the artists themselves, and how editing ultimately discovers a film's true shape. Ellwood also discusses Culture Club's unforgettable MTV presence, Boy George's groundbreaking public persona, the band's deep catalog beyond the hits, and the electric response to the documentary's Tribeca premiere. It's a lively look at the magic of collaboration, the power of pop music, and the enduring legacy of one of the 1980s' most iconic bands.

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What kind of man doesn't drink, avoids women, and prefers the company of other strange men in the park? Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) plays the alien-infiltration premise with surprising melancholy and remarkable restraint for a film with such a lurid title. Mike, Bill Ackerman, and Ben Buckingham dig into the film's overlapping readings — Cold War paranoia, the Lavender Scare, queer coding, and a feminist critique the film simultaneously makes and undermines.

They also take on the 1998 UPN TV remake directed by Nancy Malone and Rand Ravich's The Astronaut's Wife (1999), tracing how the same essential story mutates across four decades of American anxiety.

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Editor Sarah Affleck pulls back the curtain on one of filmmaking's most invisible—and essential—arts. From cutting reality television to shaping animated features at LAIKA and Pixar, Affleck traces her journey through the editing room while explaining why animation offers creative possibilities unlike any other medium.

The conversation dives into her work on the acclaimed animated short Dear Upstairs Neighbors, exploring its painterly visual style, frantic creative energy, and the year-and-a-half process of transforming storyboards into a finished film. Along the way, Affleck discusses her love of Adobe Premiere, the unique relationship between editor and director, her unexpected stint editing The Brain That Wouldn't Die, and the challenge of finding the perfect comedic and emotional beats.

She also reflects on the film's sold-out premiere at Tribeca, the painstaking craft behind every minute of animation, and her upcoming directorial project, Nurture. It's a fascinating look at storytelling from the perspective of the person who helps every film find its rhythm, voice, and soul.

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Gregg Allman lived inside the central contradiction of American music — a white Southern kid who built his art on the blues, fled his demons while pouring them into song, and emerged as one of rock's most essential voices. Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul traces that journey from a childhood shattered by his father's murder to the soulful authority the Allman Brothers Band carved out through relentless touring and hard-won survival.

Mike talks with director James Keach — whose previous documentary Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me earned an Oscar nomination — and producer Michael Lehman, Allman's longtime manager, about the making of an honest film about a complicated man. They discuss the archival footage, the band's quietly radical racial politics, and the personal losses — Duane's death, the addiction years, the very public marriage to Cher — that gave the music its weight.

Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul opens in theaters June 17, 2026.

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Rob St. Mary and Rob Spencer join Mike to dig into Proyas's tale of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who wakes in a cheap hotel room with no memory, a dead body nearby, and a city that refuses to add up. Detective Bumstead (William Hurt) closes in while the pale, bald Strangers rearrange reality every time the clocks stop — building a world that is simultaneously a locked-room mystery, a Philip K. Dick nightmare, a Kafka story with a superhero ending, and a filmmaker's self-portrait: the Strangers as producers, Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) as the compromised writer, and Murdoch as the protagonist who tears through the painted backdrop and seizes the apparatus.

The conversation covers the film's screenplay stages and two finished cuts, the studio-mandated voice-over that Proyas spent a decade trying to undo, and Roger Ebert's role as the mechanism of the film's survival. Mike and the Robs also place Dark City within the remarkable 1998–99 cluster of simulated-world films — The Truman Show, The Matrix, eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor — and examine what it means that Murdoch's triumphant ending leaves the city still a construct, still running on hidden machinery, with only the god changed.

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