Cell phones have ruined movies. We’ve lost the moment where a character picks up the phone without knowing who's on the other end. Characters looking for a payphone that works, or making a call from a payphone just as a truck plows through it. Tracing calls! Phone taps! Answering machines that the character plays when they get home and the first message says, "Valerie, it's mom. I'm worried about you,” and then delivers exposition about how hard Valerie works and the toll it’s taken on her personal life. Busy signals. This.
So let's honor horror landlines with a look at...
It looks like a novelization of the 1982 movie known as Bells or Murder By Phone. The only problem is, this book came out in 1979. A mystery! Let us investigate: who is this Jon Messmann? He’s the pen name for Michael Butler & Dennis Shryack, the screenwriters of Murder By Phone! They’d also write screenplays for Clint Eastwood's The Gauntlet, James Brolin’s The Car, Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider, and Chuck Norris’s Code of Silence. On his own, Shryack would write Turner & Hooch, for which he received $1 million, the highest price paid for a screenplay up to that time. But where does that leave Phone Call with its publication date of 1979 and its movie coming out in 1982?
This is a sad case of premature novelization.
New York City. The Rotten Apple — where every bite contains a dirty worm. In a filthy subway station populated by human wreckage, sweet, fresh, young Laurie Thorner from South Dakota hears a payphone ringing and she takes her "farm-fed breasts" over to answer it because no one back home in South Dakota just lets a phone ring, for goodness sake. She picks it up and a mighty force melts the earpiece and sends her flying. Meanwhile, in a “decorator-designed” high rise, businessman Harvey Masterton makes the mistake of answering his own phone. The first call is a wrong number but the second blasts him through the window and sends him plummeting to earth, landing on a hotdog cart in a “sickening shower of blood, bone, sauerkraut, and frankfurters.”
Dateline: Millet, South Dakota. Meet Nate Bridger, consumer advocate, on his way to deliver the keynote lecture at an environmental symposium in New York City. Nate hates the way big business pollutes the land but he's a soft touch for the underdog and when a "gosh shucks" old farmer named Hubie comes by in his tractor and asks Nate to bring back his dead daughter Laurie Thorner's possessions from the big bad Apple, Nate makes it his mission to “maybe find a bit more about what happened.”
New York, New York! A place where “the slums and the ghettos were as pulsating as the glittering towers”! Where Nate winds up borrowing an apartment from wealthy South Dakota lady, Clarita Ray, who is so sexually forward you know she's up to no good. But fortunately her apartment on the Upper East Side is “neither feminine nor masculine” so Nate can stay there.
Nate goes to the cops to get Laurie's possessions and meets Lieutenant Anthony "Tony" Meara who says things like:
“Now you have anything else to say, talk fast. I’ve got forty-eight jackets on my case load. I’ve got a peptic ulcer, and outside there are seven million maniacs waiting for a chance to shoot my ass off because I wear a badge."
When Nate asks how Laurie died, Meara snarls, “Life. Life killed her. It’s terminal. It gets us all in the end.”
Nate isn’t having it: “Six months ago, we sent a lovely, sensitive, intelligent young woman to this town and now she’s dead and all you give a damn about is impressing me with your style. Well, it sucks. S-U-C-K-S, understand?”
Meara responds, "Take your fancy language and your consumer bullshit and shove them up your ass.”
These guys are so in love. In fact, after Nate discovers one of Laurie's melted earrings and the melted telephone receiver he and Meara develop affectionate nicknames for each other. Meara calls Nate “South Dakota” and “Sonuvabitch” and Nate calls Meara, “Lieutenant.”
Why does Nate care about what happened to Laurie? Because Nate is devoted to The Truth:
"There was an answer and he'd find it. He knew about pursuing truth: He'd made a life's work of it. It was a funny thing, truth. Sometimes events simply covered it up. Other times it seemed to hide itself. But mostly, men hid it away, camouflaged it, denied its existence. Sometimes they even did it for good, selfless reasons. Sometimes."
There are 8 million stories in the naked city and every single one of them is a cliche.
More people are getting zapped by their phones, including a fat Italian woman who runs a grocery store named Mama Rosa, and a cabbie with a Bronx accent and a bad attitude. Nate believes the phones are doing it and he crashes The Telephone Company to get some answers. There he meets the manager, Mr. Websole, and his secretary, Beth Freemantle. They give him the old runaround and Nate lets them have it with both barrels, “The only problem with behaving like a computer, Miss Freemantle, is that someday, someone will press a button, one you haven’t been programmed for, and short-circuit your soul.”
His biting retort leaves her jaw hanging open as he storms out the door. Later she finds him at the Marriott where the environmental conference is taking place.
“I wanted you to know that I’m not a computer," she says, biting her lip. “Could we talk somewhere else? The cocktail lounge, perhaps?”
Nate agrees and then spends most of their drink sneering that he can't trust her because she works for “corporate giants." It sounds like what I imagine dating Bernie Sanders is like, except Nate has less dandruff. Miss Freemantle — “please, call me Beth” — seduces Nate by offering him a tour of The Telephone Company that lasts for six pages of telephone facts and figures.
Afterwards, Bernie — I mean, Nate — starts in on his rant about corporate interests and lobbyists again and how she's always wearing a robot mask and Beth has had enough. She turns down his invitation to dinner which will come with, presumably, even more lectures about the state of her soul. But Nate wins again, once more leaving her jaw hanging open with his insightful exit line:
“You’re afraid when something or someone gets beneath your mask, " he shouts. "You’re afraid of yourself.”
I wonder what it was like for women to read these paperbacks back in the day? The female characters are always being lectured by men on how they should behave, the first thing the noble hero notices is “the soft swell of her breast beneath her blouse,” the heroine is always being pushed up against walls and kissed whether she likes it or not, because in these books she always winds up liking it in the end.
Fortunately, when Nate gets back to Clarita Ray's apartment it's full of Clarita Ray who cooks him a dinner of steaks, martinis, and her vagina. After the “satisfactory” lovemaking she offers to bankroll his future corporate advocacy, but all he can think about is Beth Freemantle's “pert, stubborn little face.” He seeks her out to invite her to dinner and to apologize for being a dickhead, but it turns out she came to apologize first and found him in bed with Clarita Ray! “You’ve got it all wrong,” Nate says. “I can explain about that.”
Then he asks her to dinner and she says “Yes” and Nate kisses her. But he's being followed by a private investigator hired by Mr. Websole of The Telephone Company. He storms into Mr. Websole's office again, impressing Beth with his manly outrage, and gets in a fight with Mr. Websole who calls him “a…a…a troublemaker!” Nate responds, “And you’re a gutless whore for your almighty company.” Point: Nate!
Meanwhile, someone else is having dating problems: the killer! An electronics genius who lives above a health food store and rides his bike everywhere, Ron Clayton, goes to a bar, sits down next to a girl, notices “the soft swell of her breasts” and asks her to dinner. Suddenly, muscular and powerful Jason appears:
“Get lost, loser,” Jason growls. Ron gets lost and later that night Jason gets a phone call that fries his brain.
Over dinner, Beth kisses Nate “…her tongue finding his, a tiny, darting messenger with promises that needed no words” which just sounds gross, but there's no time to feel ooky because Meara has called Nate on the phone three times to tell him he believes him and has dynamite info that's going to blow the whole case wide open and he can't tell him anything on the phone, but come to the station house tomorrow and he'll give him all the details.
If you haven't figured out by now that Meara's going to die before that meeting then you have clearly never read a book or seen a movie before. After zapping Meara, Ron tries to zap Nate, calling him up in the middle of lovemaking with Beth but she and her tiny, darting tongue tackle him away from the phone.
“A person could fall in love with a girl like you,” Nate intones while staring at the soft swell of her breasts.
In a stunning turnabout that shocks no one, we learn that Clarita Ray was seducing Nate to get him to compromise his principles and seduce him over to the side of The Phone Company but Nate WILL NEVER COMPROMISE!!! Goodbye, Clarita and your satisfactory lovemaking. Hello, Beth, and your tiny, darting tongue.
Then, while watching TV, Nate puts the clues together and realizes that Ron's next target is the Healing Mental Illness Telethon!!! He calls the phone company but the supervisor, Mr. Waite, won’t cut the lines even though Nate is yelling at him super-seriously, “Cut the lines, now, dammit!…Every second counts…I put it together just now!”
But Waite is worried about the board and lawsuits and he has to ask other people their opinions like a beta cuck while Nate watches the Telethon muttering, “God, oh, Jesus. Time, just a little more time” but GOD IS DEAD and the whole phone bank of two dozen people get zapped simultaneously, their bodies flipping, flopping, and flying all over the studio on live TV.
“I’ll never go out for a sandwich again without thinking of this horrible night,” Kerrigan the cop (who replaced Meara) mutters darkly.
Nate identifies Ron and tells the cops, “The line between genius and insanity has always been a thin one," thus pushing the cliche meter into dangerous territory. But he manages to goad Ron into calling him at an appointed hour to zap him in the brain, and then gets Winters, a genius employee at The Telephone Company to build him an reverse-zapper zapper that will reverse the zap back onto Ron when he tries to zap Nate. It's a zap buster-buster!
Only Nate can take this Most Dangerous Phone Call and it's scheduled right after he gives his keynote speech at the conference where he tells the standing room only audience:
“We inhabit a generous and tremendous planet, but we still find it hard to realize that nature is our host and we are her guests. She has offered us the use of her forests, and we have plundered the hillsides of timber. She has offered us the use of her land, and we burn surplus crops while other nations starve. She has offered us the minerals of the planet's core...and we have taken them and polluted the very air we breathe.”
The press “scribbles furiously in their notepads, aware of the hot copy they were getting” and at the end Nate gets a standing ovation for stringing together the most generic platitudes ever uttered in human history. Beth races up and embraces him with “a shuddering cry” but wait! The call is coming!
“Jesus, Winters isn’t ready…he says he needs more time.”
But Nate waits for no man, and he engages Ron and his “electronic monument to terror” in a game of taunting, buying enough time for Winters to get the device working just as the zapper is activated. It turns the power back on Ron and sets his face on fire and the good guys win.
The Telephone Company tries to take all the credit, but Winters shuts them down.
“There’s only one hero here,” he said. “The guy who answered that phone.”
And that’s the lesson of Phone Call. We can all be heroes, every day, just by answering our phones. And that’s a feeling you can’t get from a cell phone.