Phone Booth Scene from Steven Spielberg’s “Duel” (1971)

My previous posting of the payphone scene from Dead Ringers was, I admit, pretty meh, at least taken on its own. The film is highly recommended, though, as is this one: Steven Spielberg’s Duel, the director’s first full-length film which aired on television in 1971. It is not a masterpiece but it’s a nice surprise if you think you already knew everything Spielberg has directed or been involved with. Duel stars Dennis Weaver, who finds himself being pursued by a faceless tanker truck driver. This scene finds Weaver stepping into a phone booth off the side of the road. He comments that a spider and snake pit is a “Weird place for a telephone booth.”

Not to take it too seriously but to me the scene evokes the Bigbee vs. Pacific Telephone & Telegraph case, which resulted from an incident where a man was severely injured when a drunk driver plowed into the phone booth he was using. The victim saw the car coming but was unable to escape in time because the phone booth had a defective door, a fact known to Pacific Telephone, the company which installed the booth.

The Bigbee case later became a poster child for frivolous lawsuits said to plague U.S. courts, a fact which left all parties involved utterly bewildered. For reasons others than I are more qualified to explain the frivolousness of the Higbee case is a myth perpetuated by the American Tort Reform Association with the backing of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan described it as “loony” that the victim in this case sued the makers of the phone booth. In fact Bigbee’s lawyers had legitimate reason to include the phone company in the lawsuit. Not only did Pacific Telephone know the booth had a defective door but they also knew it was on a dangerous location. Another booth on the same spot had been plowed down by a vehicle two years prior.

D’Amico & Pettinicchi, at damicopettinicchi.com, have a succinct debunking of the Bigbee phone booth myth, while Ruth Kwon’s analysis (pdf) is more comprehensive.