Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: ssc-vax!clark@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Roger Clark Swann) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Phones in the Movies Message-ID: Date: 11 Nov 89 20:13:08 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Organization: Boeing Aerospace & Electronics, Seattle WA Lines: 32 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 507, message 2 of 8 I caught a couple of movies this past week on the local movie channel that are of interest to this group... The first one was Blade Runner with Harrison Ford. There is a bar seen where Harrison Ford makes a phone call from a pay station and of course it is a picture phone with a CRT on the upper part of the panel and a kaypad that looked like a touchpad ( microwave oven style ). There was no hand set, just some kind of speakerphone. No money (coins) of course, he pushed a card through a reader I think. The kicker was the placard that said "VID PHONE" with the BELL SYSTEM (TM) - the outline of a bell inside a circle. No AOS stuff here.... The second flick was Jigsaw with Harry Guardino and Bradford Dillman, ( 1968 ). This is a murder mystery involving some "Doctors" at a think tank "institute". The set designer must have been NUTS about card dialers, they were everwhere. Two strange things: they never used the card dial function, they just used the things like a standard 2500 style phone when placing a call. The other strange thing was that these phones were all equipped with WECO speakerphone boxes that were never used. Instead they had these tacky, low-tech multi-pushbutton intercom boxes that were used to communicate between offices. One of the shows that I remember as doing a good job with the phone equipment was the NBC Mystery Movie, Name of the Game. The Howard Publications building had all the latest WECO phone toys, speaker- phones, card dailers, you name it. And the best part was that they USED them! The writers actually included these toys in the script. Roger Swann | uucp: uw-beaver!ssc-vax!clark @ | The Boeing Company |