Thursday in Hollywood: <em>The Telephone Book</em> Thursday in Hollywood: <em>The Telephone Book</em>

Safety Shoes

The 1971 X-rated feature The Telephone Book screens Thursday evening, November 5, at the Egyptian Theatre. The film, described as a “biting satire on sexual morality about a girl who falls in love with the world’s greatest obscene phone caller,” probably isn’t for everybody. But it has developed a cult reputation over the years and was considered a source of inspiration for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris while Steve Martin labeled it one of his favorite films of the Seventies.

The reason it’s on the Brew is because the climax of the film is an outlandish and humorously erotic piece of animation directed by my pal, animation legend Len Glasser. Len has an illustrious history in the field. A student of Franz Kline and S. Neil Fujita, he worked at Terrytoons on Tom Terrific and designed films and commercials for Ernie Pintoff before starting his own commercial studio Stars and Stripes Productions Forever, which produced some of the craziest and most creative TV spots of the 1960s. Here’s one of his well-known spots:

The Egyptian screening will be followed by a Q&A with Len, along with the film’s director/writer Nelson Lyon and producer Merv Bloch. The film was also recently released on dvd in Europe. Ordering details can be found on the film’s official website.

Amid Amidi

Amid Amidi is Cartoon Brew's Publisher and Editor-at-large.

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