Couch Potato's Tuesday Trivia: Phone Booth was originally pitched to Hitchcock

A phone booth - the place one might go these days having left the house without one's mobile phone - is the claustrophobic setting for this Hitchcockian 2002 thriller about a publicist (Colin Farrell) trapped inside a phone box by an unseen sniper.

And when I say Hitchcockian I'm not just using old Hitch as an adjective, the great director actually had a stake in this film back in the 1960s when writer Larry Cohen originally came up with the idea and pitched it to the esteemed thriller master.

However, although he loved the idea, Hitchcock just couldn't identify a nifty way to confine the action within the telephone box, so it was put on hold - so to speak.

In fact, it was put on hold for a good 30 years (how I feel when trying to get to through to my energy supplier, but that's a different story).

Anyway, needless to say, when Cohen finally came up with his sniper idea in the late 1990s, Hitchcock was no longer around. So Joel Schumacher was the one to direct the movie.

Phone Booth is showing tonight - 16th August - at 9pm on Sky 1

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