Phone Booth

Joel Schumacher’s film follows Stu Shepard, a New York publicist who answers a payphone and then cannot leave the booth. Behind the voice on the line sits a rifle scope. The script is decades older than the film. Larry Cohen pitched it to Alfred Hitchcock in 1963; it stalled because neither could explain why the man would not hang up. Cohen found the answer, a sniper, only in the late 1990s. The shoot was as compressed: 10 days of principal photography in November 2000, 13 million dollars, a downtown Los Angeles block dressed as New York. On set the caller was voiced by Ron Eldard; Cohen judged that tone too weak and Kiefer Sutherland re-recorded the lines. The release date of 15 November 2002 moved to 4 April 2003 after the sniper attacks around Washington that October. Schumacher answers the narrowness of one corner with split screens, multiplying the space instead of leaving it. The job matters: a man who earns his living on the phone is on a call he cannot end and has to tell the truth. A good fit if you want the rule set in the opening minutes and the film never leaving that pavement. Not for you if you want a subplot, a flashback or a change of location; the story is one stretched conversation.