Dialing Wonderland: Nelson Lyons The Telephone Book

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Art & Trash, episode 11
Dialing Wonderland: Nelson Lyon’s The Telephone Book
Stephen Broomer, April 22, 2021

Nelson Lyon’s The Telephone Book is a fantasy about Alice, a lustful, wide-eyed New Yorker who is led on a series of comic, erotic encounters in search of a man who styles himself as the greatest obscene phone caller of all time. In this video, Stephen Broomer considers Lyon’s film in relation to the social satire of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, the era of the Playboy lifestyle, the Warhol Factory scene, and the nascent brotherhood of American outsider comedy with which The Telephone Book belongs (alongside such works as The Magic Christian, The Crying of Lot 49, and Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him). Alice comes to learn more about the world from her encounters with perverts, thieves, and frauds - cats without grins, grins without cats, cabbages and kings - and her Manhattan is a utopia where even the most menacing, alienated, and neurotic corners of society present invitations to love.

The Telephone Book is available for rent on DCP from the American Genre Film Archive and has received a limited edition home video release from Vinegar Syndrome.

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