The Projection Booth

Mike talks with author Marcus Heslop about Frantastic!: The Amazing Story of Fran Fullenwider, the Plus-sized Pioneer, the first biography of the actress whose single wordless scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) made her a cult fixture despite a stranger, richer career about which most fans never knew.

Heslop, a secondary-school drama teacher in northeast England who works on his books during school holidays, built the biography largely from letters, scrapbooks, and photographs a stranger rescued from an abandoned Texas mansion in the 1990s and donated to the Museum of South Texas History — the same archive that lets him trace Fullenwider from a wealthy, closely chronicled Texas childhood through a brief but real Italian film boom, a four-year run with Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror world, and a death scene in House of the Spirits that got cut for time, which Heslop confirmed really existed by tracking down director Bille August himself. The book features new interviews with O’Brien, director Jim Sharman, costume designer Sue Blane, and Jeremy Irons.

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Mike talks with director Susanne Rostock about Following Harry (2025), which picks up where her 2011 Sundance opener Sing Your Song left off and follows Harry Belafonte through the last twelve years of his life as he tries to pass his activism on before running out of time.

Rostock and Belafonte shared an office for years — she’d hear his cane tapping down the hall every afternoon — and the access that grew out of that friendship put her camera in the room as Trayvon Martin’s killing, Ferguson, and the Women’s March unfolded around him. The film closes on Belafonte’s own account of a state trooper who, after witnessing the brotherly love Belafonte brought into a room in 1963, took the bullets out of his gun and said they could never go back in. Rostock, trained as an ethnographic filmmaker under Margaret Mead before an early detour into editing SNL-era shorts (including the Ruttles’ faux-blues number in All You Need Is Cash), shoots everything first and assembles the structure only once she has a mountain of footage to sort through.

This isn’t a legacy rewatch — the film is new, built from Rostock’s own archive of the last decade of Belafonte’s life, and arrives on VOD this week.

Visit the film’s official website for where to watch.

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Mike talks with director Tom Stern about Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025), a documentary built to recreate the derangement of a Butthole Surfers show and then quietly answer what made Gibby Haynes this way.

Stern first filmed the band at CBGB’s in 1986 and later folded their music into Freaked (1993); for this film he spent five years chasing an emotionally vulnerable interview with Haynes, finally landing one at a traumatic site in Dallas that unlocks the film’s whole throughline. Puppeteer Drew Massey built latex caricatures of the band to stage their own stories — Paul Leary secretly taping the riff that became “Graveyard,” Haynes charging a Nick Cave show naked — and the production’s own disaster became footage in the film’s climax, after Stern’s house, and the puppet studio inside it, burned down mid-shoot.

Premiering at South by Southwest and now rolling out through Alamo Drafthouse’s new Alamo Exclusives label, the film asks a band built on “no regrets” what regret actually means.

Visit the film’s official website for playdates and news on the upcoming Blu-ray.

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There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that 13-episode, genreless show, which folded William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Timothy Leary, and RuPaul into a one-airing-only collage that, Pellington argues, predicted how media actually works now. Mike talks with Pellington about licensing the surviving PAL masters back from MTV decades later, the pre-Avid tape editing that gave Buzz its frantic rhythm, how the show’s DNA resurfaces in U2’s Zoo TV Tour, and why — after Arlington Road (1999) and The Mothman Prophecies (2002) — he went looking for old footage instead of a script. The film is currently touring art-house screens, some with the multi-projector immersive setups Pellington built himself.

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What’s left to love once nature is gone? The Squirrel (2026) imagines a sterile future where animals have been engineered out of existence — until a lonely synthetic-pet designer finds the last living squirrel and breaks the rules to protect it. Now Finland’s Oscar entry, fresh off its international premiere at Fantastic Fest, it’s director Markus Lehmusruusu’s deadpan follow-up to Ricky Rapper and the Strongman (2019), Finland’s most-watched film that year. Mike talks with Lehmusruusu and lead actress Mimosa Willamo — who plays the government minder whose rigid world starts to crack — about shooting with four real, untrainable rescue squirrels on a sealed set, building the film’s antiseptic world with Berlin production designer Michael Randel, and a Japanese-speaking dog that wouldn’t take direction in any other language.

Visit the film’s official website.

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