CU:The Telephone Book (1971)

“It was almost like we didn’t care…. Fuck em.”~ Nelson Lyon

THE TELEPHONE BOOK was the stuff of legend.  For years I heard people talk about it like it was some sexed up holy grail. A few fuzzy bootlegs circulated.  Steve Puchalski gave it a rave in Shock Cinema, but I’d never been able to see it. The film had been missing in action since it left the Vogue Theater in 1971.

THE TELEPHONE BOOK (1971).
Far from the usual X-rated oddity, this is a mind-roasting chunk of NYC-lensed, experimental sexploitation, aesthetically akin to such raucous, counterculture assaults as DePalma’s HI MOM and GREETINGS. Directed by Nelson Lyon and shot in black-and-white, this doesn’t make a lick of sense, but always displays a singularly skewed, comic vision, sprinkled with now-familiar faces. LAUGH-IN regular Sarah Kennedy stars as the blonde, cupie-doll-voiced Alice, who has a lonely life and groovy furnishings (just check out her American flag bedspread). That changes after a trench coated, faceless stranger rings her up with an obscene phone call which is so inspiring that she considers it “a work of art.” As his calls become more frequent, she becomes more receptive, and decides to track down this desirable phone pervert. Along the way, Alice meets a pre-SPACE 1999 Barry Morse as stag-film-star Har Poon, who’s auditioning naked women and ends up in a bed full of squirming limbs; Roger C. Carmel (STAR TREK’s Harry Mudd) as an exhibitionist degenerate who pays Alice to tell him dirty stories; and William Hickey (PRIZZI’S HONOR) as Alice’s first sexual conquest, whose 12-inch tentpole won’t go down, and only Alice can relieve his frustration. The supporting cast also includes a young Jill Clayburgh as Alice’s best friend, Warhol-relics Ultra Violet and Ondine, plus [Capt.] Arthur Haggerty (HOME MOVIES) as a D.A. Eventually, Alice encounters this object of desire, who wears a pig mask and describes his descent from astronaut candidate(!) to aural phone-sex deviant. Played by velvet-voiced Norman Rose, he provided voice-overs for gigs like JABBERWALK, DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, and ironically enough, commercials for NY Telephone. Unfortunately, we never hear all of his seductive handiwork, even as we see it working its wonders on everyone from a high school cheerleader to an ancient old broad. If this wasn’t disjointed enough, the story is broken up with scripted ‘confessions’ from random fetishists (including Dolph Sweet), who describe their own obsessions. Unlike most avant-garde efforts of the time, this (happily) never takes itself seriously, but still overflows with gleefully pretentious visuals. That’s never more apparent than in the final minutes, when the movie bursts into vibrant color, mixing extremely lewd animation with Alice’s ultimate gratification. Less X-rated for its bare-flesh than for its raunchy conversations and deviant attitude, this is an impossible to categorize, lovably out-to-lunch artifact.
© 1999 by Steven Puchalski. SHOCK CINEMA  http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com

Then last September, I got a message from the great Larry Cohen saying he had a friend in town with a film we needed see. A few days later I was sitting in a darkened Theatre with Larry and his old college buddy Merv Bloch, checking out the first 10 minutes of one of the CU holy grails.  An X-rated fork in the eye, so far ahead of it’s time that it’s hard to believe it actually got made.

Merv Bloch and Nelson Lyon’s THE TELEPHONE BOOK!

I stumbled out into the lobby begging Merv to come back and screen the movie in November. (I’d been looking for an excuse to start up a “Criminally Unknown” series at the Egyptian.)  An hours worth of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick stories  later, we set a date.  November 5th 2009, almost 40 years after it’s run at The Vogue Theatre across the street,  The Telephone Book returned to Los Angeles!

Let’s back up a bit…… how the hell did this thing get made, and where has it been all these years?

Merv Bloch and Nelson Lyon were a couple of real “Mad Men”.  Merv was a high-powered New York advertising exec, the Creative Director on the MGM account. Nelson Lyon was a copywriter. They worked together on 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY, POINT BLANK, THE DIRTY DOZEN, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, BLOW-UP, GRAND PRIX,  THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, THE COMEDIANS, THE BIGGEST BUNDLE OF THEM ALL, HOTEL PARADISO, LADY  L, THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE, WHERE EAGLES DARE, THE LIQUIDATOR, THE FIXER, DARK OF THE SUN and the re-release of GONE WITH THE WIND.

In the late 60’s Merv left and formed his own company, Rosebud Studio.  Where he did some of the best trailers, posters and advertising ever made.  Everything from Kubrick to Woody Allen.

Merv directing Roman Polanski on the set of The Tenant trailer.

The finished trailer.

At some point around 1969, Merv and Nelson decided to try their hands at an X-rated feature.  Affectionately known around the office as “Captain Smut”, Nelson was a big fan of Terry Southern. He banged out this insane bit of New York “Candy” called THE TELEPHONE BOOK. Reading it now… the mind boggles.  It reads like a coked up Sam Shepard channeling Terry Southern, as twisted and angry as it is sexy and titillating. Full of long…..beautiful….. unfilmable monologues….. a work of art, not commerce.  Only mad men would actually try and get it made……

Amazingly… it was a hot script there for a while. Genevieve Waite was coming off “Joanna”,  loved the script and signed on.  Cinema 5 gave Merv an up-front distribution deal, but Genevieve’s rock star husband John Phillips got her to pull out at the last second and all bets were off.  Diane Keaton loved the script but wouldn’t do the nude scenes. Jill Clayburgh also auditioned for the lead, but refused to get naked. They gave her another part instead. Then watching TV one night, they saw Sarah Kennedy (a distant cousin of THE Kennedy family) in a soft drink commercial, a walking talking Betty Boop.  Looking back on it, they were damn lucky.  Sarah is so good, so natural, so genuine that she almost single-handedly makes the picture work.

Then we come to Norman Rose…

Merv had been using Norman for years, on trailers. He was one of the top voice-over artists in the business. He was known as “the voice of God.“ A pre Don LaFontaine, Don LaFontaine.  Norman was the voice of the U.S. Army recruitment commercials, AT&T, you name it.  He jumped at the chance of an onscreen role, even if it was going to be hidden beneath a pig mask.

They cast Barry Morse (Inspector Gerard himself) as an aging porn star, Roger C. Carmel (Harry Mudd from Star Trek) as a subway flasher, William Hickey as a man with a problem,  Andy Warhol and half the factory… (oddly Warhols scene was eventually cut, though many of the Factory artists like Ultra Violet, Geri Miller and Ondine remained.)

Producing The Telephone Book out of the NY offices of Rosebud, Merv was juggling locations, money and time. Working for big name clients like Kubrick late into the night, and trying to keep The Telephone Book from going off the rails. I’m not sure how well Nelson and Merv remember the actual making of the picture. Fueled by various substances, ambition, ego and genius. The memories vary…. and the memories fade….. people on ledges, people walking off the film, starts and stops… everyone at the breaking point… madness…drugs… and the result…A work of art… a beautiful… twisted… misanthropic American masterpiece.

That it got made is madness, that it still exists is a miracle.

The film opened in New York the same day as The Last Picture Show, October 3, 1971, and later at the Vogue in Los Angeles. No one understood it, aside from Kevin Thomas in Los Angeles and Alexander Walker in the UK, who both gave it raves.  It did big business at the Vogue, played a few other markets but disappeared quickly.  Merv went back to Rosebud Studio, remaining the go to guy for people like Woody Allen well into the 80’s.

Nelson moved to Los Angeles and eventually became a writer for Saturday Night Live.  His friend  Belushi died, and Nelson seemed to disappear along with him. Sarah Kennedy was last spotted in the mid 70’s, rumors are she lives in the Midwest and writes children’s books.  Norman Rose is  gone. Yet the film lives on.

Fast forward to September 2009. When Merv and Larry came to the theatre to show us a bit of The Telephone Book, they brought along the most amazing thing!A DVD box set from Hello Film in Germany, complete with commentary, trailers, the script, rare photos, a coffee table book of photos and interviews, and a reprint of the original one sheet!!

Probably the most lavish release a film this obscure has ever been given!

The negative was lost or destroyed. Merv’s print had gone missing for years and then amazingly a pristine print turned up overseas thanks to the efforts of his two European partners Moritz Peters and Florian Lambl, who made a digital master and put together the DVD box-set of the film for their company, Hello Film. Suddenly this “lost” film was playing festivals and filling galleries all over Europe.  (it’s playing in Rotterdam as i type this.)

I took the box set home, popped the DVD into the computer,  fired up the projector and watched the Telephone Book for the first time.  I’m not sure what i was expecting.  Steve’s Shock Cinema review wasn’t much help, it ended with a verdict of “impossible to categorize”. :)

We hit play and our lives would never be the same again.

It starts out as a beautiful….hysterical….picaresque….. urban “Candy”, every Coutard like shot more beautiful than the last, Sarah as mesmerizing and beautiful as anyone you’ve ever seen,  indescribable, darker and darker, it spins out of control, and hooks you deep with a 30 minute Norman Rose monologue, that puts Pinter and Beckett to shame. I remember looking over at the person i was watching it with, to see if they were as mesmerized as i was, they were, both of us silent, leaning forward, literally sitting on the edge of our seats. Wondering what the hell had just happened and where could this possible go?  Like all great movies, it went where it had to go, someplace we’d never been before. After that 30 minute monologue, the film ends with a 12 minute animated “fork in the eye”  A final FU to the audience, a punch to the gut destined to piss off audiences and send them angrily out the back exits.

I remember finally taking a breath and sitting back down in my chair when it was over….. then trying to sort out wtf I had just seen, with the other member of the audience.  We both loved the film, loved it to death.  10 stars, right to the top half of our respective lists.  Showing it in November would be a duty and an honor.  One of the most important things we could ever do.  but… that fork in the eye hurt…. it was ugly and painful.  I remember describing the movie to several people in the month that followed leading up to the screening.  Saying things like “it’s one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen, but that last 12 minutes or so, man they would have been better without it.”

Wanting to get the word out, I made a Facebook page for the film, started promoting it a bit, and amazing things started to happen.  Thanks to Facebook the long-lost writer/director Nelson Lyon resurfaced! Right here in L.A. If nothing else came of it, it felt great getting Merv and Nelson back together after almost 40 years. Then animator Len Glasser surfaced! Suddenly we had a full-scale behind the scenes reunion for the Q&A.

Finally on November 5th producer Merv Bloch, writer/director Nelson Lyon and animator Len Glasser were all on hand for the triumphant return of The Telephone Book to Los Angeles.

F.X. Feeney, Nelson Lyon, Merv Bloch and Len Glasser                       ~Photo by Lee Christian

The night of the screening I was sick as a dog, sick for the first time in 4 years, almost a disaster, but i made it through.  Sitting there in the Egyptian balcony with a boisterous and eager crowd, half out of my mind on Tylenol Cold and Flu, a funny thing happened.  By the time the credits were over, I realized i was wrong, the fork in the eye works…. i was just too stupid to feel it…..or see it….. it was dangerous… crazy…. unthinkable… but was the ONLY ending possible…. like some singer hitting a note that might kill him… a final lunge at the keys on the table outside your cell before the deputy gets back.

I was wrong, Nelson was right, and the Q&A that followed amazed even me.

“…it was a very chic script, it was running around. It was made at the time, when anything goes, anything was going, whatever you wanted to do, shock people… go for the jugular, slash across the windpipe,  second smile, all that crap, so that’s what we did, that’s what i wrote,  that was the approach we wanted to take, so we wound up with a picture that was not a comedy, it was a satire, a viscous satire…. an attack on the audience…. i had launched an attack on the audience … on people…  a misanthropic work, a tearing apart of the mythologies of love, romance and obsession.  With a kind of Alice in Wonderland picaresque narrative, taking you from one psycho to another psycho……. and there is this threat of the homicidal.” ~Nelson barked.

“….and Looking back what was i thinking, “ok i gotcha… that attitude, am i loco in the coco is there something the matter.  Yes there was.”

… on the ending, the 12 minute fork in the eye…. the animated fuck that kills. Nelson described his instructions to Len.

“anything goes, i just want it to be harsh and vile, you know, what people want to see, something not horrific, just harsh vile nasty and abusive.”

I’ve seen the film a dozen times now, it gets better each time.  Slowly working its way up my top 20 like Reflections of Evil.  It was love at first sight for both films, both films so epic and unknowable that i find myself reevaluating them almost daily, it’s like being taken to the woodshed over and over again…

What we have in The Telephone Book,  isn’t “a failure to communicate”, it’s a soaring, cathartic mind fuck… a knife to the gut that starts off as innocent and beautiful as Sarah Kennedy herself.  It’s a cry for help that doesn’t get heard until almost 40 years later.

As I put together some of my first CU posts last July, I started noticing a pattern.  Hickey & Boggs, Reflections of Evil, John and Norma Novak… they were all the work of stubborn bastards who lacked the ability to do the one thing you HAVE to do to be a “success” in this town…compromise…

I was reminded of a story Robert Culp tells, about the first screening of Hickey & Boggs in Vegas, he rented out a theatre just so Cosby could see it.  When it was finished, Bill got up…walked towards the door door without looking over at him and muttered “You just couldn’t let up could you.”  It wasn’t a question, he was just saying out loud what he already knew.  Robert couldn’t let up.  Like his old buddy Harlan Ellison, Culp is a man who knows he’s right, even if being right means getting kicked off the plane.  Almost 40 years later, Hickey & Boggs is out there proving Culp right every hour of every day.  The same way the Telephone Book is proving Nelson right. Unfortunately the price you pay for being right is being Criminally Unknown. That’s one of the reasons I’m having these screenings… writing this blog… to dress the wounds, heal the wounded, and shed some light.

The Telephone Book Q&A with Merv, Nelson and Len, moderated by writer and critic F.X. Feeney can be found in its entirety below.

“Grandpa made this fucking movie?  Holy shit!”
~ Merv Bloch (DVD commentary)

Nelson Lyon and Merv Bloch at The Egyptian Theatre

Nelson Lyon signing a Telephone Book poster at The Egyptian Theatre

Merv Bloch signing a Telephone Book Poster at The Egyptian Theatre

Nelson Lyon and F. X. Feeney at The Egyptian Theatre