The Projection Booth

Gregg Allman lived inside the central contradiction of American music — a white Southern kid who built his art on the blues, fled his demons while pouring them into song, and emerged as one of rock's most essential voices. Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul traces that journey from a childhood shattered by his father's murder to the soulful authority the Allman Brothers Band carved out through relentless touring and hard-won survival.

Mike talks with director James Keach — whose previous documentary Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me earned an Oscar nomination — and producer Michael Lehman, Allman's longtime manager, about the making of an honest film about a complicated man. They discuss the archival footage, the band's quietly radical racial politics, and the personal losses — Duane's death, the addiction years, the very public marriage to Cher — that gave the music its weight.

Gregg Allman: The Music of My Soul opens in theaters June 17, 2026.

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Rob St. Mary and Rob Spencer join Mike to dig into Proyas's tale of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who wakes in a cheap hotel room with no memory, a dead body nearby, and a city that refuses to add up. Detective Bumstead (William Hurt) closes in while the pale, bald Strangers rearrange reality every time the clocks stop — building a world that is simultaneously a locked-room mystery, a Philip K. Dick nightmare, a Kafka story with a superhero ending, and a filmmaker's self-portrait: the Strangers as producers, Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) as the compromised writer, and Murdoch as the protagonist who tears through the painted backdrop and seizes the apparatus.

The conversation covers the film's screenplay stages and two finished cuts, the studio-mandated voice-over that Proyas spent a decade trying to undo, and Roger Ebert's role as the mechanism of the film's survival. Mike and the Robs also place Dark City within the remarkable 1998–99 cluster of simulated-world films — The Truman Show, The Matrix, eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor — and examine what it means that Murdoch's triumphant ending leaves the city still a construct, still running on hidden machinery, with only the god changed.

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Mike and Aaron Carruthers kick off Sci-Fi June with William Dear's time-travel oddity Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, in which motocross racer Lyle Swann (Fred Ward) accidentally blasts a century into the past and spends the entire film completely unaware that he's done it. That central gag — a fish out of water who doesn't know he's a fish — drives most of the conversation, along with the film's quietly clever paradox, its improbably stacked character cast, and the eclectic score produced by former Monkee Mike Nesmith.

Mike and Aaron dig into what makes Fred Ward's performance work, why Belinda Bauer's Claire registers as the true power center of her frontier town, and how Peter Coyote earns his villain credentials in a single scene. They also talk through Dear's resourceful low-budget filmmaking — shooting in desert locations, strapping cameras to bikes, hiring a second unit team for five grand — and the director's personal connections to early Sam Raimi and the Michigan indie scene, including The Northville Cemetery Massacre.

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Kenji Tanigaki is anything but furious when he discusses his latest film, The Furious (2025). The film stars Xie Miao and Joe Taslim as two men united by a common enemy - child trafficking. The movie combines pathos with some breath-taking fight scenes in a film reminiscent of The Raid, Taken, and John Wick. 

Check local listings for where The Furious is playing near you.

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Mike welcomes Andrew Nette and Jedidiah Ayres back to dissect Dark of the Sun (1968), a brutal, kinetic men‑on‑a‑mission film whose pulp thrills sit atop a surprisingly rich political and historical foundation. The trio digs into the movie’s Cold War backdrop, its depiction of the Congo Crisis, and the real mercenaries who inspired characters like Curry and the sadistic Henlein — from “Mad” Mike Hoare to Siegfried “Congo” Müller, whose Iron Cross‑wearing exploits echo through the film. They explore Jack Cardiff’s muscular direction, the film’s obsession with logistics, its uneasy colonial gaze, and how Rod Taylor and Jim Brown anchor a story that veers from heist film to war movie to moral reckoning. 

Chainsaws, trains, diamonds, and geopolitics collide in one of the wildest action films of the 1960s.

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