The Projection Booth Podcast

Adapted by Preston Sturges from Ferenc Molnár's play and directed by William Wyler, The Good Fairy (1935) is a screwball fairy tale built on mistaken identities, comic misfortune, and the peculiar moral logic of someone who genuinely wants to do good but hasn't quite figured out how the world works.  

Luisa (Margaret Sullavan) has grown up knowing nothing of the world outside the orphanage walls. When she's finally released into Budapest society, she proves as well-meaning as she is naïve — and as prone to catastrophe as she is to kindness. A chance encounter with the wealthy and lecherous Konrad (Frank Morgan) sets off a chain of complications, chief among them the lie that she's already married. The problem is that she isn't, but she soon will be — to a bookish, bearded lawyer named Dr. Sporum (Herbert Marshall) who has no idea any of this is happening.

The film showcases the range of Margaret Sullavan's screen presence — radiant and funny and heartbreaking in equal measure — alongside Frank Morgan's gloriously stammering comic turn.

The episode also looks at the 1947 remake I'll Be Yours, starring Deanna Durbin, and the 1951 Broadway musical adaptation Make a Wish, with music by Hugh Martin and a book co-written by Sturges and Abe Burrows.

Mike talks with co-hosts Rahne Alexander and Federico Bertolini about Molnár, Wyler, Sturges, and the many lives of a very good fairy.

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Mike and Ben Buckingham take a look at Exposure 36, the 2022 film written and directed by Mackenzie G. Mauro. Charles Oudo stars as Cam, a photographer spending the last three days on Earth selling drugs and wandering the streets of New York City, encountering a colorful cast of characters along the way.

The apocalypse here is background noise rather than spectacle — a quiet, meditative film that doubles as something of a Rorschach test, with different viewers latching onto entirely different aspects of the story. Mike and Ben dig into the episodic, wandering narrative, the film's mysterious blue figures, its use of photography as a distancing mechanism, and the way the story shifts from meditative sci-fi into neo-noir thriller territory before it's all over. Mauro joins the show to discuss the film.

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Mike is joined by Payton McCarty-Simas and Rob St. Mary to dig into Fucktoys, the 2025 SXSW Special Jury Award winner written, directed by, and starring Annapurna Sriram. Sriram plays AP, a sex worker adrift in Trashtown — a candy-colored dystopia of industrial decay and pastel skies — after a swamp-dwelling tarot reader tells her a curse can be lifted for a thousand dollars and the sacrifice of a baby lamb. What follows is a picaresque night of surreal encounters, escalating absurdity, and a collision of intimacy, exploitation, and class in a pre-millennium alternate universe.

The gang explores the film's John Waters–adjacent sensibility and its candy-coated production design, debating whether the aggressive tonal shifts and theatrical performances sharpen the film's satirical edge or tip into pure indulgence. They also dig into what the curse might actually represent, how Sriram's central performance holds the chaos together, and where Fucktoys fits within a lineage of underground feminist and transgressive cinema.

Also featured is an interview with writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram. 

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

Mike sits down with filmmaker and archivist Mike Davis to discuss Dead, White & Blue — a gleefully subversive political satire assembled entirely from recycled public domain footage.

Davis, whose previous "green movies" include Sex Galaxy and President Wolfman, sifted through more than 300 films — predominantly training and educational films produced by the U.S. government, military, and law enforcement — to construct a comedy about the KKK's use of a shrink ray to retrieve an incriminating bullet from the body of a Black man shot by a racist white cop, while an Atlanta mayor goes missing and the U.S. military closes in. The result is a film that plays like found footage as social X-ray, with flat-affect dubbing, sly sight gags, and a retro visual texture that doubles as pointed commentary.

Mike and Davis dig into the art and obsession of the "green movie" — a tradition running from J-Men Forever to Kung Pow! Enter the Fist — and what it takes to build a coherent (or deliberately incoherent) narrative from hundreds of forgotten films. They discuss the particular satirical charge of repurposing government and law enforcement footage, why race relations make for such rich — and risky — comedic territory, and what drives a filmmaker to spend years hunting through public domain archives instead of just making a movie the normal way.

Find out more at https://stag-films.com/ 

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Mike sits down with director Stephanie Laing to discuss Tow — a true-story drama about one woman's year-long legal war against a predatory towing company and the system behind it.

Amanda Ogle (Rose Byrne) is living in her 1991 Toyota Camry on the streets of Seattle when the car — her only lifeline — gets impounded, leaving her with a bill for $21,634 she has no hope of paying. What follows is battle for dignity against an indifferent bureaucracy, with support from a pro bono lawyer (Dominic Sessa) and a shelter manager (Octavia Spencer) who believes in her. Laing, a veteran of Palm Royale and Physical, brings an empathetic eye to the material without flinching from the grinding reality of homelessness and addiction.

Mike and Laing discuss adapting a real person's story, the challenge of making systemic failure feel intimate, and what drew her from television to the feature format.

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