The makers of The Telephone Book, the story of a 19 year old blonde cutie who seeks to meet an obscene phone caller who wowed her to the moon with his skillful dirty talk, clearly love Andy Warhol, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, New York City, naked bodies, masks, silly girls, bare asses, swinging breasts, absurd masturbation fantasies, non sequitur gags, documentaries, animation, oddball characters, cheap black-and-white photography, pornography, open-ended conclusions, mystery, subversion and maybe, just maybe, hallucinogenic drugs.
And so do I. So this amazing slice of surrealist smut held me in rapt attention across its fleshy eighty minutes. It’s a weirdo classic, shoved under film history’s rug over the decades, but rediscovered, readily available and fully restored today for anyone who wants to get twisted by it.
It’s the only film directed by Nelson Lyon, who’d later apply his sarcasm and nihilism to writing for Saturday Night Live in one of the show’s early seasons.