Payphone Scene from “Blue Thunder”

A couple of interesting ephemeral telephonic flourishes occur in this short scene from “Blue Thunder”, a 1983 film starring Roy Scheider as Frank Murphy. With police in pursuit Murphy ducks into a convenience store parking lot to make a call.

What’s interesting here isn’t so much that it’s a payphone but the manner in which Murphy gains remote access to his answering machine messages. He holds a beeper-like device up to the handset’s mouthpiece, the beeper acting as a sort of magic wand. This once-mundane behavior would not be recognized by many people today, but it was how people accessed answering machine messages remotely before “beeperless” machines were introduced, allowing remote access via passcode.

If you ask me the beeper method was insecure. If someone stole the beeper and knew your phone number all they had to do was call to get into your stuff. The numeric passcodes introduced in later answering machines were not much better in that realm, with paltry two-digit passcodes that virtually anyone who knew what they were doing could eventually guess.

After some poking around I think it’s safe to conclude that the number Murphy calls in “Blue Thunder” connects to a Phone-Mate Remote 930 Answering Machine, seen in this advertisement with a beeper device that looks about as much like the one Murphy uses as one can tell given the level of visual detail in the film clip.

A clearer image of the beeper comes from an image I borrowed from this eBay listing for a real live working Remote 930:

Another ephemeral flourish is the two bells that ring after Murphy deposits the coin. I don’t remember payphones doing that upon coin deposit but such a fleeting sound could well have been lost on me. If it’s a sound effect added by the filmmakers it’s a nice touch.