Phone Booth (2003) on Netflix
Publicist Stu Shepard uses a phone booth to call a woman he is seeing behind his wife's back. A stranger calls the booth and warns that hanging up will get him shot.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.1/10304,101 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes72%
Trailer
Plot summary
Stu Shepard is a public relations man in New York who has been setting up a meeting with Pamela McFadden, a client, without his wife Kelly finding out. He places the call from a public phone booth in Times Square so Kelly will not see the number. A pizza delivery man appears with an order Stu never placed, and Stu waves him off. When Stu finishes and hangs up, the phone rings. The voice on the line knows his name, his wife and his plans, and warns that leaving the booth will get him shot. Two people before him were offered the same chance to admit their wrongdoing and refused. Stu is told to come clean to Kelly and Pamela.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Phone Booth (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In the 1960s Larry Cohen pitched Alfred Hitchcock a film set entirely inside a phone booth in real time. Hitchcock liked it, but they could not explain why the action had to stay in one place; Cohen found the answer, a sniper holding the hero in the booth, in the late 1990s, two decades after Hitchcock's death.
- Ron Eldard played The Caller during filming, performing from a window across the street from Colin Farrell's phone booth. He was recast with Kiefer Sutherland, who rerecorded all of The Caller's lines, after Larry Cohen told Joel Schumacher that Eldard's voice lacked the mesmerizing tone Cohen wanted.
- Principal photography was completed in ten days, with two more days of establishing shots, pickups and re-shoots. The pace was helped by "French hours", which skips the usual one-hour lunch shutdown in exchange for making food available throughout the shooting day.
- Phone Booth was due in US cinemas on November 15, 2002, but the October 2002 Beltway sniper attacks around Washington, D.C. prompted 20th Century Fox to push the release back to April 4, 2003.
- Dolce & Gabbana created the suit and shirt worn by Colin Farrell, but extra copies made for filming did not arrive until the last day of shooting. Because the film was shot chronologically the costume could take damage without slowing production, and costume designer Daniel Orlandi kept one copy as he and Farrell were the same size.
- Although Phone Booth is set in New York City, it was shot in downtown Los Angeles in front of what is now the CB1 Gallery, with LACMTA buses visible driving by. The phone booth stood at the corner of West 5th Street and Frank Court, a spot given away by the black gate in the background.
