The Projection Booth26 Nov 2025

Episode 774: Cop (1988)

Noirvember closes with James B. Harris’s Cop (1988)—the first time James Ellroy’s feverish fiction hit the big screen. Mike teams with Andrew Nette and Rod Lott for a deep read of Harris’s adaptation, where James Woods’s unhinged Detective Lloyd Hopkins hunts a killer across eighteen years of buried violence.

The trio digs into Ellroy’s original novel Blood on the Moon and the wilder, abandoned incarnation that came before it—L.A. Death Trip, the unsold, manuscript that first birthed Hopkins. Using material from Ellroy’s own accounts and critical studies (including the brute-force early drafts, the rewrites demanded by Otto Penzler and Nat Sobel, and the shift to publishable structure), the conversation maps how a doomed finale turned into a tight serial-killer pursuit.

The episode also features a new interview with James B. Harris, who breaks down the challenges of translating Ellroy’s structure, keeping Hopkins’s mania intact, and staying faithful to the narrative rhythms of the novel. What emerges is a portrait of a filmmaker wrestling with source material born in chaos—reforged into the dark, abrasive thriller that helped spark decades of Ellroy adaptations.

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

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1000)

Special Report: Silver Star (2024)

When a bank robbery goes sideways, two strangers find themselves bound together on the road — Billie (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson), whose desperation brought her to the bank in the first place, and Franny...

10 Apr 23min

Special Report: The Life of Singleton

John Singleton was twenty-three when he wrote Boyz N the Hood and twenty-four when it made him the first Black filmmaker and youngest person ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. Rel...

9 Apr 43min

Episode 795: Some Like it Hot (1959)

Comedy Month continues as Mike talks with co-hosts Keith Gordon and Heidi Honeycutt about Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959).Chicago, 1929. Musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are ...

8 Apr 2h 21min

Special Report: When the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor

Released in 1978 and directed by John Landis, National Lampoon's Animal House follows the anarchic members of Delta House fraternity at Faber College as they wage war against pompous Dean Wormer (John...

7 Apr 27min

Special Report: Bryan Parker on Scarpetta (2026)

Mike talks with Sound Designer Bryan Parker about his work from his early days on Reality TV to his current jobs on The Pitt and Scarpetta. Parker describes how he works with his peers and creative pa...

6 Apr 39min

Special Report: Sonny Atkins on undertone (2025)

Evy (Nina Kiri) hosts a paranormal podcast from her childhood home, where she has returned to care for her dying mother. A skeptic to her co-host Justin's (Adam DiMarco) true believer, she keeps the s...

3 Apr 23min

Special Report: The Serpent's Skin (2025)

Alice Maio Mackay made her first feature film at 16. By 20, she had six. The latest, The Serpent's Skin, follows Anna, a young trans woman who flees her transphobic hometown and falls for Gen, a goth ...

3 Apr 17min

Episode 793: The Good Fairy (1935)

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 mor...

2 Apr 1h 44min