Phone Booth Scene From “Witness” (1985)

A website visitor directed me to this phone booth scene from the 1985 film Witness, starring Harrison Ford. Ford is seen using a payphone in a phone booth at WL Zimmerman’s store (now Lestz Wholesale) in Lancaster County, PA.

https://youtu.be/kiKTfMoNAOs

What makes this scene different from most is that the phone booth was not a prop but a real world structure that still stands today, 36 years later. The payphone within, today owned by Frontier Communications, still works.

I could not find an abundantly clear shot of the phone booth today but you can definitely see it a little left of dead center in this Streetview image, which hilariously adds an enormous extra E to what Streetview says is the “ZIMMEERMENS” sign:

I try to post phone booths and payphone scenes from movies and television when either no one else has posted them, or if there is something particularly unusual or interesting about them. “Unusual or interesting” could mean there is a payphone goof, or it might mean that a payphone or booth seen in a film was, in fact, an actual working phone and not a prop, as in the above example from Witness.

No one, as far as I could tell, had posted the phone booth scene from 2020’s One Night in Miami, which I shared last week.

Others may have posted the payphone scene from Little Miss Sunshine but I don’t see where anyone called out Greg Kinnear for only dialing 5 or 6 numbers on that payphone when at minimum he would have had to dial 7, more likely 10 digits for long distance.

In a similarly retentive analysis I question how Robert Redford, in Three Days of the Condor, would have reached the headquarters of a CIA-within-the-CIA by dialing what appeared to be 911, or how he reached anyone at all dialing a number starting with “111-222”.

This phone booth scene in Witness doesn’t leave much to scrutinize in terms of how the phone is used. It is of interest more for its use of a real world phone booth, and for the fact that that phone booth still exists today, dial tone humming alive and well in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.