THE TELEPHONE BOOK
Dir: Nelson Lyon. 1971.
80 min. USA.

Premiere of a New Restoration Shown in HD

FRIDAY, MAY 3 – 8:00 PM (LAUNCH PARTY)
SATURDAY, MAY 11 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 19 – 8:00 PM

Sexually frustrated gamine Alice (Sarah Kennedy) is freed from her apartment-bound malaise when she receives the world’s greatest obscene phone call from one “John Smith.” Setting out on picaresque journey through the Manhattan white pages in search of its maker, Alice encounters ego-crazed porn directors, perverted psychologists and priapic shut-ins. Her trip grows more and more deranged (interrupted by first-person interviews with phone freaks), climaxing in one of the nuttiest half-hours of 1970s cinema.

Directed by Saturday Night Live writer Nelson Lyon and produced by Merv Bloch, creator of some of the movie industry’s best ad campaigns, The Telephone Book is hilarious and disturbing in equal measure, featuring Warhol Factory regulars, a man with a never-ending erection, and a lurid animation sequence (that is mostly to blame for its X rating). This is the Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask…for the porn-house crowd, with one caveat: it’s not porn and it never pretends to be.

Teaming up again with Vinegar Syndrome, Spectacle is excited to be hosting a sneak peek of the new digital restoration to be released this month.

Vinegar Syndrome is an exploitation film-focused distribution company founded by genre-film lovers for genre-film lovers. VS was developed to provide us with an opportunity to have a platform in order to cost-effectively restore and release the massive number of exploitation titles in their archive.