A cinematic farewell to the the phone booth, an urban icon of NYC

There are only four outdoor phone booths left in all of New York City—this is a late night conversation with one of them.

“We used to run this town.
For decades, we handled all of your drug deals, love affairs, runaways, pimps, crime tips, cranks, heavy breathers, and emergencies. You name it, we heard it all.”

“Without us, Clark Kent is—he’s just Clark Kent,”

In the age of smartphones, walk-in phone booths are very rare in the City of New York. “Dead Ringer,” is a four-minute short documentary by directors Alex Kliment,  Dana O’Keefe, and Michael Tucker that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was featured online by the New Yorker. As Ian Frazier recently reported for the New Yorker, by 2020 more than half of the city’s eight-thousand-plus phone booths will be converted into Links, which will provide high-speed Internet access across the city. But that doesn’t mean the old-school pay phone is going down quietly.