In junior high or elementary school we watched a film dramatisation of Ray Bradbury’s story Dial Double Zero. A guy answers his phone and says, ‘Hello?’ IIRC, there was at first no answer so he hung up. The phone rings again and he says, ‘Hello?’ A mechanical-sounding voice on the other end says, ‘Hel-lo.’ He keeps receiving these calls over and over. I think the voice eventually sounded human. I don’t recall how it ended.
From what I could see last night, the story was never published. I have not been able to find the film online. It does not appear in a search on IMDb. There is a film about the writing of the story. I have not watched it, but scanning it quickly I didn’t see anything I remembered. I’ll have to watch it to see if it’s actually the film I saw decades ago.
"An original Bradbury short story, ‘Dial Double Zero,’ was dramatized as part of the NBC-TV special, The Story of a Writer, based on RB’s life and work. Telecast November 20, 1963
Story of a Writer interweaves with these scenes from Bradbury’s daily life a jaggedly cinematic adaptation of his short story “Dial Double Zero.”
The protagonist climbs the power pole and pokes around the box his phone line comes out of. He is electrocuted and falls off of the pole, dead. A narrator says he saw something in the box and he knew it had won.
It was never published and is mentioned only in the Story of a Writer program Pork_Rind mentions. I suppose that would make it a teleplay or the story on which the play was based, but it doesn’t appear in any of his bibliographies.
I don’t have any thing relevant to the OP, but this thread reminded of a comment the first Mod of Cafe Society, who, having met Bradbury, described him as ‘Ed Meese in horn-rimmed glasses.’ I got a chuckle out of that.
I used to live a couple of miles from Ray Bradbury. I never did get up the gumption to knock on his door. I understand his house was torn down long ago.