The Projection Booth

Alicia Malone has spent years watching screwball comedies and noir thrillers for Turner Classic Movies — now she's put herself inside one. The TCM host talks with Mike White about Murder at the Movies: A Movie Palace Mystery, her first novel and the first fiction title TCM and Running Press have ever published.

Malone traces the book back to an accidental pitch over coffee with her editor, Cindy Sipala, and to her own fantasy of running a theater — the inspiration behind Audrey Sullivan, the Los Angeles transplant who inherits her grandmother's movie palace on a fictional Maine island only to find a body in the aisle after a Hitchcock screening goes wrong. Malone talks about disciplining herself to a deadline and a word count, getting early notes from noir historian Eddie Muller, and loading the book with classic-film Easter eggs for TCM viewers to spot.

She and Mike also cover her favorite cozy-mystery writers, from Lorna Barrett's Book Town series to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, the already-underway sequel (A Killer in the Credits), and how she splits her time between the novels and her TCM, The Gilded Age, and Reel Destinations work. Murder at the Movies is out October 6th from Running Press.

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Music-video veteran Chris Marrs Piliero (The Black Keys, Kesha, Ariana Grande) traces his feature debut, Appofeniacs, to two obsessions: the ease of deepfake manipulation, and apophenia — our compulsion to find connections in things that aren't actually connected. He tells Mike White how fan theories about his own music videos (imagined hidden messages, imagined Illuminati symbolism) convinced him the premise had teeth: a small, trivial fake video of a friend can chain-react into real violence.

Piliero also walks through the guerrilla reality of self-financing a feature that refuses to stay in one location — rewriting scenes around which of his friends' apartments and neighborhood businesses (a coffee shop, a smoke shop) he could talk his way into — and premiering the deepfake-horror film at Fantastic Fest and FrightFest to crowds cheering the gore.

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"What if Sorcerer was a creature feature?" That question is what unlocked Beware Boiúna for director Mike P. Nelson, who tells Mike White how William Friedkin's doomed-expedition structure — immerse the audience in an environment, let it become a character, then release the beast — became his blueprint after he initially turned down a "giant snake movie" pitch from producers Jeremy Bolt and Robert Kulzer.

Nelson details the real jungle: flooded sets, a tarantula bite, a broken bone, and a shoot on a moving river boat that rewrote the schedule daily, plus the VFX philosophy of showing the title creature only through the narrowest slivers of frame so her scale registers even half-glimpsed. Stars Jessica Rothe (Alli) and Kiana Madeira (Lena) join for a separate conversation about shooting on the actual Amazon River instead of faking it on a soundstage, the poisonous dart frog that turned up on a cast chair, the snake wrangler who cleared every space before a take, and finally seeing the finished film with an audience at Fantastic Fest.

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Nancy Kwan talks with Mike about The World of Nancy Kwan, her new memoir written with Deborah Davis and a foreword by her nephew Kevin Kwan. Kwan revisits how she landed The World of Suzie Wong almost by accident, tagging along to watch her favorite Hong Kong actresses screen-test before a casting director pulled her in front of the camera, which led to a Hollywood contract, acting lessons with Jeff Corey, and a national tour of the stage production after France Nuyen won the film role.

They dig into working with William Holden on Suzie Wong, the yellow cheongsam that made her a fashion sensation, Flower Drum Song's ensemble of Miyoshi Umeki, James Shigeta, and Jack Soo under choreographer Hermes Pan, and being directed by her husband on Walking the Edge. Kwan also talks about her friendship with Bruce Lee, their $10 bet over Kung Fu, and Asian representation in Hollywood then and now.

The World of Nancy Kwan is out now.

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

When their mother goes unresponsive, Anna (Anna Sargent) calls for help and no one quite listens. Writer-director Liz Sargent built Take Me Home (2026) around her own sister, a woman with a cognitive disability, and made her the hero instead of the burden. Mike talks with Sargent as the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner opens in theaters via Willa.

Sargent traces her path from modern dance and experimental theater to a Mike Figgis-mentored short shot days before she met her biological mother in Korea. She explains how the Take Me Home short went from diary entry to Sundance and the White House, why structured improv gave Anna ownership of every line, and how Emily (Ali Ahn) and parents Bob (Victor Slezak) and Joan (Marceline Hugot) grew beyond the real family. Plus: Anna kicking her sister out of press junkets, and a Long Duk Dong pitch born mid-interview.

Learn more at takemehomefilm.com and follow @take_me_home_film and @annasargentofficial.

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