Payphone Scene from “Before We Go” (2014)

I spotted this interesting payphone scene from the 2014 film “Before We Go”, starring Chris Evans and Alice Eve. In it Evans describes “Recalling 1993“, a payphone-based art project active in New York in 2013, the year this film was made.

Evans’ character says “A few years ago they turned all these public payphones into time machines. You pick one up, dial ‘1993’, and a New Yorker would come on and tell you exactly what was happening on that corner 20 years ago. It was funny.”

As I observed at the time, that description, which circulated widely in 2013, differed markedly from the experience of actually calling “Recalling 1993” from a payphone. The project had all the glitches one might expect for a payphone-based pursuit, if anyone involved ever actually used payphones.

The call was supposed to be toll-free but many phones had not yet been programmed to recognize 855, a relatively new exchange at the time, as toll-free. This led to automated voices telling me to deposit $1, or 75¢, and when I did deposit coins the call would not go through.

I also didn’t find much in the way of the hyperlocal stories telling me “exactly what was happening on that corner 20 years ago.” I think only one recording hit the mark, heard from a Times Square payphone, in which someone talked about the Disneyfication of the area.

But as I said in 2013: “Upper East Side payphones linked to stories about the meatpacking district while Midtown phones carried accounts of the World Trade Center bombing.”

As one who knows from experience, any pursuit which relies on a functioning network of public telephones is imperiled from the start, and while “Recalling 1993” proved this truth I can certainly sympathize. What bothered me at the time was the quantity of glowing reviews from people who never actually experienced the project, and its enduring reputation as a successful and ingenious use of payphones.

Are These Phones Props?

Payphones made a few other passing appearances in ‘Before We Go”, as they might, since neither character in the film had a cell phone. The above scene goes on a bit of a flight of fancy, with the “calling your younger self” thing, but earlier in the film Alice Eve’s character was seen making a legitimate phone call.

It makes me ask if this is the most recently made film set in the then-present day in which payphones appear without any pretense, as a real-world object.

Coincidentally a reader of this site emailed last week to ask if I had any idea about that, and his question came soon after I just happened to have found this scene. The correspondent was prompted by appearance of payphones in the 2008 film “Wendy and Lucy”, which I have not seen.

I am reasonably certain the phone in the above scene is a prop, and not a real-world device. The blue and white placard just above the handset looks identical to the one seen on payphone.com’s Elcotel series of phones. I can’t tell exactly where this was filmed so cannot summon Streetview’s imagery.

New York Telephone?

Near the end of the film comes this puzzlingly anachronistic appearance of a New York Telephone branded payphone. Set at Grand Central Terminal, and assuming this was actually filmed there, I can say with certainty that in 2013 or 2014 there were no phones at the terminal that looked anything like this, or that bore the “New York Telephone” brand that had been retired January 1, 1994. You do still spot the NYNEX logo here or there but not like this.

I don’t begrudge set designers for wanting to use a prop phone when dozens of authentic payphones at the Terminal could have been used. But the “New York Telephone” branded enclosure is a bit of a fail. I don’t think you would ever see a payphone that looked anything like that in New York in 2013, and certainly not at Grand Central Terminal. If some kind of inside joke is in play here it is lost on me.