Metro Detroit Film Podcast Helps Bring Cult Films to the Big Screen

Nov. 15, 2012 - PRLog -- The Projection Booth podcast is teaming up with Tugg and The Maple Theater to bring cult and independent film to Metro Detroit.  

The Projection Booth  ( www.projection-booth.com ) will host a cult movie night at the renovated Maple Theater in West Bloomfield, MI on December 12, 2012. The first QWERTY, is a quirky indie flick about love and Scrabble that has played at film festivals in Nashville, Dallas, Seattle, and Kansas City. Roger Ebert calls the film “charming, winning and sweet.”  The film also recently won the Great Lakes Film Award at the East Lansing Film Festival.

"We hope that QWERTY is just the first in a long-running series," says Projection Booth co-host Mike White. "We're always trying to harvest the power of social media and that's crucial for this to work."  The screening will be made possible with Tugg, a web platform that allows film fans to set up screenings of a wide array of films at their local theater.  People can choose from the hundred of films which Tugg has available for booking; they choose the title, the date, and the theater.  If enough tickets for the screening are pre-sold, the event happens.  Otherwise, money is refunded an nothing occurs.  

"For QWERTY we need to sell 75 tickets," says White.  "We're hoping to stir interest with an episode about the film.  We're talking about word games, and interviewing QWERTY director Bill Sebastian and producer Nat Dykeman.  It's a fun movie and we're looking forward to sharing it with an audience."

Jeremy Mills, Social Media and Communications Director at the Maple Theater, describes the new Maple programming as, "a cable network model of regularly scheduled alternative programming.  For example, if you show up on Monday night, something from the golden age of Hollywood would be playing.  Tuesday might be shoestring Indie night. Wednesdays are a home for genre/cult/b-films and other oddities.  Saturday matinees would include at least one family classic.  Sundays will likely see us playing a ballet or opera during the day and hosting cocktail-friendly viewing sessions of prime time cable dramas during the evening."

"Genre, cult, and b-films are our bread and butter," says the Projection Booth's Rob St. Mary.  "It would be great to show the movies we talk about on the show, to share the experience of seeing films like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or World on a Wire."

The Maple Theater ( http://www.themapletheater.com ) reopened after nearly three months of renovations in October, 2012.  The theater, which showed independent and foreign films since 1974, closed its doors on July 22, 2012 to the dismay of Detroit area cineastes.  Renovations include new seats, a larger lobby area, Wi-Fi service, extended daytime hours, an improved coffee shop, and the availability of wine and Michigan-made brews.

Established in March 2011, The Projection Booth is a weekly podcast with new episodes available every Wednesday via iTunes or Stitcher. The podcast is also syndicated via Jackalope Radio ( http://jackaloperadio.com ) where it plays every Thursday at 7PM EST/6PM Central.

Pre-order tickets for the event at http://www.tugg.com/events/2268