One Night in Miami (2020)
I’ve been sitting on most of these payphone scenes for a while, and got motivated to process and post them after unexpectedly encountering a phone booth in the film One Might In Miami, the 2020 film set largely in a 1964 motel room which hosts a fictional meeting of Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and James Browne. They discuss the civil rights movement and the parts they played in it. I started watching this film with no expectations, and found I could not look away. Just a damn good film. Get it on Amazon Prime.
https://youtu.be/2hmhhC2IsaA
I can find no complaint about the One Night in Miami phone booth scene in terms of authenticity, but it is pretty straightforward. Most of the routine behavior involved in making a call like this is left out. We see no coins deposited, no interactions with an operator (if there would have been any), or anything but the soft conversations.
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Like One Night in Miami I entered into this film with no expectations, although in this case I figured I’d probably hate it since I’d never even come close to warming up to Will Ferrell. Happy to say I was wrong in my expectations, Ferrell’s demeanor, a mix of wooden and stoner, fits this role perfectly, and the rest of the cast is also masterfully cast. The stories take occasional leaps of logic but none should mistake this for a docudrama. It is a thought-provoking ramble through the existentiæ of mortality and sanity.
The payphone scene clearly comes from the hand of someone who knew firsthand the erstwhile common dilemma of trying to find a working payphone when you really, really need one.
Someone needs a payphone, and fast. Office phones don’t work. Cell phone signal is down. Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell) needs to make a phone call. Wot to do?
He rushes outside, finding he can’t use the first phone nearby on account of it being monopolized by a payphone hog. I remember those days.
Another phone has no dial tone.
The next phone’s handset was “splattered with a fresh batch of mucous.”
Last one’s the charm. The call goes through, and the headgames Emme Thompson and Will Ferrell begin.
Are those payphones real, or props? They don’t look too terribly fake to me, with their 35¢ local call fare. Prop payphones from the mid-2000s would most likely have shown 25¢, ir any cost at all for a local call.
And also, great to hear the sound of Emma Thompson pounding out some text on an IBM Selectric typewriter.
This was a far more engaging and thought-provoking film than I would have expected of a Will Ferrell flick. Not a bad payphone scene, either.
Absence of Malice (1981)
Just a quick window into the days when journalists routinely used payphones as instruments for getting stories in to the editors desk.
https://youtu.be/55Qx0Ua17TE
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
The most substantive seeming of the payphone and phone booths scenes in this story would appear to be these two, from Robert Redford’s 1975 thriller Three Days of the Condor). The first booth appears to have been a real-world streetphone on 76th Street at Madison Avenue, an intersection at which 2 payphone stood as recently as a few years ago.
https://youtu.be/CU8d4ED56vY
Upon reaching this phone Redford appeared to have dialed 911, requiring no coin deposit. Having just discovered all his colleagues had been shot dead a call to 911 would make sense. But after dialing he is connected not to 911 but to “The Major”, who seems to be part of some kind of CIA within the CIA. I watched this film years ago but do not clearly recall all the plot lines, but in no circumstance (except the movies) does it seem like the CIA would have a 3-digit toll-free hotline such as Redford appeared to have accessed here.
The second phone booth scene from Three Days of the Condor opens with some flush imagery of the Twin Towers. Construction of those late towers would have finished not long before this movie was filmed.
Then we see Redford in a phone booth dialing a number that appears to start with “111-222”. In 1975, as is true to this day, there had never been a 111 area code, and since he was calling within the 5 boroughs he needn’t have dialed an area code anyway. Perhaps “111” was meant to be some kind of fictional CIA access code allowing Redford to get straight through to Central. Or maybe it’s just a goof.
While the first phone was likely a real-world street phone the number printed here, 212-555-9805, suggests but does not definitively say the booth is a prop.