I tapped Mel Brook’s phone. Please, Mel, accept my belated apologies. |
By Joel Sucher, Contributor, Huffington Post| Updated October 10, 2021
It was only for a few minutes many decades ago but the recent kerfuffles over all things cyberhacking yanked this buried episode from deep in my memory bank and brought it back in full living color.
It was 1970 — I was studying film with Marty Scorsese at New York University — and in my spare time shooting film with a bunch of Anarchist troublemakers known as Transcendental Students. Having shot a load of 16mm film for a film we called Inciting to Riot we needed a secure facility to cut the stuff. We passed the hat and came up with enough scratch to rent a real editing room.
The editing suite adjacent to ours had a plaque on the door proclaiming Twelve Chairs Productions. Mel Brooks and his editor were inside finishing up the cut on his second major feature film.
Unable to foot the cost of having Bell Telephone install a phone we turned to a member of our group; an ex-Marine who had strung up phone lines in the service and had held on to his linesman’s phone. It was a handset contraption with an old fashioned rotary dial and two long wires sporting alligator clips at the end. To test a line for connectivity all one had to do was attach the clips to screws in a terminal box and…
