Payphone Scene From “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006)

I have not found any interesting payphone scenes from movies lately, but thought this one was worth a look for the subtle payphone goof most viewers would probably not catch.

I surgically excised out a subplot involving pornographic magazines to focus only on Greg Kinnear’s interaction with the payphone. This scene illustrates what happens when you lose cell phone signal on the highway. You make a beeline for the nearest payphone. These days that payphone would be pretty hard if not impossible to find.

The payphone goof in this scene is that after depositing a coin Greg Kinnear appears to dial only 5 or maybe 6 numbers on the keypad. That will not connect to anything. As for the coin deposit this call would have been long distance, requiring at least 75¢ deposit, if not as much as $1. He only deposited one coin.

Clearly what Hollywood needs is a little more payphone authenticity.

Everything else you need to know about this scene is found at IAMNOTASTALKER.com, where Lindsay Blake points out that the payphone used is a prop, even though there were two real-world phone booths on the property that could have been used. The real-world gas station was, according to IAMNOTASTALKER, a Chevron, located at 24518 Lyons Avenue in Newhall, California.

I have a several Newhall, California, payphone locations listed here. None of them match that exact address but one comes tantalizingly close. There used to be a payphone at a Valencia Shell station at 24062 Lyons Ave.

REAL PAYPHONES IN THE MOVIES

Offhand I can only think one instance where I was able to definitively identify the location of a real-world payphone used in a movie or on television. That would have been Party Monster, in which Macauley Culkin uses a Telebeam payphone formerly located on Broadway near Crescent Street in Astoria. You can still see vestiges of that payphone today, as I wrote in October.

Another interesting connection to a real world payphone, this one from television, is that one of the payphones used in Breaking Bad is listed on this website, although I am not sure what to make of the location information shown.

505-256-9927 was, according to my data, the number of a payphone at a Suds Shed Car Wash on Carlisle Boulevard in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This was the phone Brian Cranston and Aaron Paul invited their fans to call while they were standing by so they (the fans) could ask them anything. This photo shows both actors taking payphone calls with a Suds Shed Car Wash sign behind them.

But other than that and the 505-256-9927 listing on this site I find no trace of a car wash by that name in Albuquerque, nor do I find trace of the 4127 Carlisle Boulevard NE street address. Most of my payphone data came from private investigators and telco insiders, and dates from long before Breaking Bad was created.

It is puzzling but at the risk of going down a Breaking Bad rabbit hole it’s not something I intend to spend time researching.