Payphone Scene from “Fools Rush In” (1997)

I spotted this payphone scene from “Fools Rush In”, the 1997 romantic comedy in which Isabel Fuentes (Salma Hayek) and Alex Whitman (Matthew Perry) sustain a stormy relationship built on lies.

They meet at the payphone inside a restaurant, where Alex encounters Isabel talking to her friend Lanie. Isabel is delivering to Lanie a proposed break-up speech she intends to deliver to Chuy, her current suitor.

Isabel’s first words to Alex are a lie that gets her to the head of the long line for the bathroom. After that she delivers another lie, responding to someone who complained that Alex let her get to the head of the line that Alex was a priest, so leave the holy man alone.

From then on the lies come from both sides, things get complicated and hilarity, of course, ensues.

I might have spotted a little payphone goof I bet no one else has ever noticed: She hangs up the phone and it sounds to me like the coin she deposited (before she appeared on screen) came back out into the coin return chamber. If she had actually been talking to somebody that would not happen in reality, unless the phone malfunctioned.

This appears to have been a real-world payphone, with branding for AT&T long distance service on the coin vault. If I knew the name and location of the restaurant in this scene I’d be interested to see if the payphone’s number appeared on the old Las Vegas payphone locations page, or the even older Nevada payphone locations page.

I searched around for this movie’s filming locations and found plenty, but no source I could find included the name of this place. Mining this scene itself for identifying information on the wall posters turned up nothing, at least not that I can detect.