The Projection Booth

You don't usually think about the editor when a comedy lands its jokes, but editor Whit Conway is exactly why Never Change! moves the way it does. Mike talks with Conway about a career built on doing a little bit of everything — Chicago advertising work, Second City, SNL's pre-tape department, DP'ing for The Late Show, directing for Jimmy Kimmel Live! — and how that generalist grounding prepared him for this movie's absurd production math: shooting wrapped in late October 2025, and the finished film hit Hulu on June 17, 2026. Conway breaks down his years-long shorthand with director Marty Schousboe from three seasons of Joe Pera Talks With You, working alongside writer-star John Reynolds in the edit bay, the line-by-line organizational system that saved the cut, and the friends-and-family screening that reshaped the back half of the movie. He also gets into the one joke that made him nervous — the one where he says his own name out loud on camera.

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What if America's most famous uncaught serial killer was never one man at all? Eddie McNamara — former NYPD officer, 9/11 first responder, and author of Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer — joins Mike to argue the Zodiac wasn't a criminal mastermind but a myth stitched together from unrelated crimes, media hunger, and one compromised homicide detective. Drawing on police files, FBI records, court transcripts, and years of cold-calling witnesses, McNamara explains why Vallejo's own investigators never believed the first two murders were Zodiac's, digs into Dave Toschi's documented history of planting fan letters about himself in San Francisco papers, and reassesses Arthur Leigh Allen, the case's most famous suspect. He and Mike also cover the gulf between David Fincher's film and the real record, the glut of self-published theories clogging the true-crime shelf, and what it's like realizing you've stumbled onto an actual overlooked killer while debunking a fake one.

Find more at https://feralhouse.com/zodiactually/

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Donald Westlake — writing as Richard Stark — said only one movie made from a Parker novel "got the feeling right." That's John Flynn's The Outfit (1973), starring Robert Duvall as Earl Macklin, out of prison to find his brother murdered by the mob over a bank job. Rather than run, Macklin runs at them, hitting every vulnerable Outfit operation until they pay. Joe Don Baker and Karen Black co-star alongside a murderer's row of noir faces: Robert Ryan, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Timothy Carey, and Elisha Cook Jr.

Jedidiah Ayres and Gary Phillips join Mike to dig into Westlake's dual-track career, the Parker adaptations from Point Blank to Play Dirty, Flynn's flat-and-mean style, and the film's year-long crawl across America courtesy of MGM's "smiling cobra" James Aubrey. Released in celebration of Arrow Video's new Limited Edition Blu-ray — featuring a commentary track by Mike and Jedidiah.

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Alfred Hitchcock remains cinema's Master of Suspense a century after directing his first film, but decades of biography have blurred the line between the man and the myth. Mike talks with author Tony Lee Moral about his sixth Hitchcock book, A Century of Hitchcock, and the archival discovery that reshaped it: a 36-page 1980 transcript of biographer Donald Spoto's own interview with Tippi Hedren.

Moral traces how Spoto's personal grievances against Hitchcock — including being routinely ignored by name and bitten by the director's West Highland terrier — colored The Darkside of Genius and shaped decades of tabloid narrative. Drawing on new interviews with secretaries, screenwriters, and script supervisors who worked alongside Hitchcock, Moral makes the case for reexamining the record on Hitchcock's treatment of women, from Tippi Hedren's shifting accounts to the making of The Birds and Marnie.

The conversation also revisits The Pleasure Garden on its hundredth anniversary, Hitchcock's collaboration with Salvador Dalí on Spellbound, and what a possible sixth Hitchcock book might hold. Find Tony Lee Moral's book and more of his work at tonyleemoralbooks.com.

Buy the book at: https://amzn.to/4fvEBKG 

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

Nick Taylor built The Nick Taylor Horror Show by asking filmmakers how they actually got their movies made — an unofficial film school he later put to use directing his own feature. Mike talks with Taylor about turning that same curiosity on Steve Johnson, the special makeup effects legend behind Slimer, the Fright Night vampires, and the Howling werewolves, and a childhood hero whose success validated Taylor's own outsider love of monsters.

Taylor traces the six-year odyssey of Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson, from meeting Johnson at Monsterpalooza through the funding struggles of an unapologetically niche passion project. He discusses narrowing the film's circle of interview subjects to people who truly knew Johnson — including John Landis and Linnea Quigley — over chasing bigger names, and how editor Joe Krings kept the project's fan enthusiasm in check.

The conversation closes with Rubberhead's Fantasia Festival world premiere and where to catch it. Follow Taylor on Instagram at @iamnicktaylor or visit americannightmare.co for updates.
 

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