The Projection Booth

Failure becomes a creative strategy in Mooch, Jeff Ryan’s scrappy New Jersey crime comedy about a nearly thirty-year-old caddie who stumbles into private-eye work. Mike talks with the film’s writer, director, editor, and star about transforming a teenage insult into an intensely personal character, channeling Jim Carrey’s physical fearlessness and the Coen brothers’ off-kilter language, and building the story to an emo soundtrack. Ryan also gets candid about wearing too many hats, trusting cinematographer Kenneth Wales while acting, surviving a long postproduction, and answering festival rejection with the gleefully defiant Rejecta Film Festival. Sometimes the best way forward is to wear “loser” as a badge of honor.

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When government planning turns communities into maps and statistics, whose lives disappear from the page? Mike talks with director Casey Carter about To Use a Mountain, his visually arresting journey through six American sites considered for a permanent nuclear-waste repository. Carter traces the film from his study of photography, physics, and architecture to six years of fieldwork, relationship-building, cinematography, animation, and editing. He discusses the human stories missing from Department of Energy reports, the challenge of joining investigative rigor to landscape portraiture, and the radioactive dinosaur bones he encountered along the way. The result asks what it means for a place—and its people—to be deemed disposable.

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

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

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

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.

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