{"podcast":{"title":"The Projection Booth","slug":"the-projection-booth-407558","podcast_index_feed_id":407558,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/5513239/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://www.projectionboothpodcast.com","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/d20d0731450590f8bce760b347a9ee76.jpg","author":"The Projection Booth","episode_count":1000,"summary":"The Projection Booth features discussions of films from a wide variety of genres with in-depth critical analysis while regularly attracting special guest talent eager to discuss their past gems. The podcast has been recognized as a premier film podcast by The A.V. Club, IndieWire, Entertainment Weekly, and Filmmaker Magazine. Visit http://www.projectionboothpodcast.com Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support .","last_synced_at":"2026-07-24T18:18:26.593435+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-407558"},"episode":{"title":"Episode 804: Dark City (1998)","slug":"episode-804-dark-city-1998","published_at":"2026-06-17T07:00:03+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-407558/episode-804-dark-city-1998","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-407558","url":"https://www.projectionboothpodcast.com/2026/06/episode-804-dark-city-1998.html","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/https://op3.dev/e/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/72527420/ep804_dark_city.mp3","summary":"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. 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","meta_description":"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 bo…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":6389,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-projection-booth-407558/episodes/episode-804-dark-city-1998/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-407558/episode-804-dark-city-1998.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}