I hear Enemy of the State features Miracle-Zoom™ as well.
To the countless number of reasons Roeper is an idiot, I can now add another. Did it ever occur to him that, uh, there are different area codes in the United States and the only way to insure that nobody pranks a movie-number is to (a) perform the impossible–have the studio secure the same number in every single area code, (b) use the 555 prefix? No, I didn’t think so.
Moron.
What bothers me more about 50’s and 60’s period films is the make-up: thick pancake foundation and heavy eyeliner with false eyelashes. And those bullet bra foundation garments.
That’s why you would show the number with the area code in the movie.
I know some studios purchased actual toll-free numbers to use in movies but I can’t think of any at the moment.
Sneakers is another fairly recent movie that featured a non-555 number.
Casting. Sometimes an actor will pop up that is so recognizable in a “Hey it’s THAT GUY!” way and introduced in a “Hey it’s THAT GUY!” way I will be taken out of the movie.
An example of this is David Mamet’s ‘Spartan’. A major goverment official is walking down a hallway. The camera is from his point of view. His attendants walk in front of him. One of them turns briefly toward the camera.
Hey it’s William H Macy!
Great movie otherwise.
You mean like when Natalie Portman cameoed in ‘Zoolander’ as Natalie Portman?
That’s got nothing on David Bowie’s appearance, as DAVID BOWIE flashes across the screen.
Yeah, but when a character gives his number out, the context usually doesn’t require an area code, so the area code is usually unspoken. And anyway, most people who are going to “try” that number in real life aren’t going to fuss with an area code in the first place.
Well, if Lute Skywatcher is correct, then it’s already been done in movies.
However, assuming he’s not, I know that Scrubs (the TV show) recently had Turk read off a phone number as part of the show. That phone number belonged to a cell phone that was kept on the set of the show so that the cast could answer it from time to time.
So it has been done, as far as TV Shows go.
Actually, that’s about the least egregious use of HollywoodOS I’ve ever seen.
The system shown in Jurassic Park is running a real filesystem visualization tool called fsn (pronounced “fusion”) that runs on IRIX (some flavor of Unix supported by SGI).
You can download it here
And, IIRC, there were actually reasonable *nix directories scrolling by in the movie.
The Incredibles had a real 800 number (or at least, a plausible one), but I don’t know what it’s the number for (I don’t have the DVD, and didn’t have a pencil and paper in the theater). I would imagine, though, that the line leads to some sort of promotional or marketing gimmick.
Another problem with using real phone numbers is that even if the company buys the phone number, they’re probably not going to want to staff it in perpetuity. Ten years from now, I seriously doubt that the Incredibles phone number will still be spouting marketing glurge. It will have been reassigned to someone else. Yet they’ll still be happily pumping out DVDs with the number on them. People will call the number. This is normally a small problem with phone number changeovers, but in any other case, the original owner of the number stops publishing it after they no longer use it. If it’s in a movie, it’s there for good.
Is this kinda like in Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back where Mark Hamil shows up, and then there’s a freeze frame and the words “HEY KIDS! IT’S MARK HAMIL!” shows up on the screen? 
Yeah, I know – I was just miffed at the idea of a pre-teen gal being a Grade-A Unix junkie more than anything else, especially since she showed no signs of computer geekery anywhere earlier in the film.
It’s like watching the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew get into some unstoppable dilemna, and then a runny-nosed teenage ensign on the bridge throws out some technobabble, taps a few buttons on the console, and… oh, nevermind. 
And don’t get me started on JP having the geek programmer, Dennis Nedry, claiming he wrote all 2 million(!) lines of the Park’s automation software code by himself…
Movies with “old” cars, but all the “old” cars are shiny and undented. So you know they got the local Classic Cars Club to bring their lovingly restored '48 Studebakers or '57 Chevies for this movie, cuz they all look brand new.
I can tell ya, cuz I was there – in 1955 everybody didn’t drive a 1955 auto, and there were a lot of old rust buckets on the street.
They could at least throw some dirt on those cars, and pace the drive-bys, so it doesn’t look like a parade.
I believe someone reverse-engineered the digits and discovered it was (888) SUPR-HRO.
As far as I know, it was just a line that went nowhere. Certainly no easter eggs when I dialed it…
I heard that Douglas Adams did it a lot. for example, someone would mention a improbability of 2 to the power of 1234567 to 1. so if you dialled 01 123 4567 you got Adams’ favourite pub.
Of course, the numbers are long since obsolete, don’t bother trying them.
Haha, exactly, except in Zoolander there’s even a musical interluide that accompanies it. Both scenes are equally hilarious though.
Novel author Patricia Highsmith also appears briefly at the bus stop (IIRC). In his cameo in Rear Window (one of my favorite films) he’s the clockwinder in the mucisian’s apartment, which strikes me as quite appropriate.
There are a lot of things that bug me about films (and I see a lot of them) but the worst in both film and literature is when a character exists strictly as an expositor of things that would be best described by images. The most common example is the totally unnecessary and obtrusive voiceovers tacked onto Blade Runner, but it’s even worse a lot of science fiction films where the director clearly doesn’t think the audience is bright enough to pound sand. Note that VO is okay when used appropriately and/or sparingly (Out Of The Past comes to mind) but running Wonder Years-type commentaries bug the hell out of me, as does the scientist’s assistant who is there only to ask dumb questions, as in Earth vs the Flying Saucers (though admittedly that film is so cheesy it becomes laughable rather than distracting.) Monty Python’s Flying Circus did a great riff on this in one episode (the one with the aliens shaped like blancmanges) in which the scientist ends up beaning his assistance because she’s such a twit.
This is also the case, most notably, with Larry Niven’s novels; the characters end up having long expository and badly misguided discussions about evolutionary biology or cosmology nominally to describe some development but actually to disguise the fact that the plot is going nowhere. Ditto with pretty much everything Clarke and Asimov ever wrote after 1960.
Stranger