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Interview with Merv Bloch, Producer of THE TELEPHONE BOOK

Olaf Moller: Production of The Telephone Book took some two years. In which ways did the social/cultural climate change in that time? I remember seeing posters for The Telephone Book alongside ones for The Last Movie and The Last Picture Show – both works emphasize the end of something. In fact, some think that a certain, say: BBS’ish type of US-art cinema ended with The Last Movie.

Merv Bloch: During the mid-sixties, films such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider, Joe, Five Easy Pieces, Midnight Cowboy and M*A*S*H* all helped to form the counterculture in American society. It was the young, anti-Vietnam audiences that became the new film generation and turned risky, modestly made movies into huge hits. By 1971, when The Last Picture Show, THE TELEPHONE BOOK and The Last Movie were released, there wasn’t the same intensity associated with movies. Young audiences were still going to films but they weren’t that zealous about them; they weren’t talking about the films with the same impassioned spirit as they did only a year or so before. I think The Last Movie did represent an end to a golden age of seminal, socially radical films. Dennis Hopper stopped directing movies for a while and BBS Productions was never a high profile company again, although Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson did continue to make excellent films throughout the seventies.