I am going through a decades-old Ghostbusters scrapbook that I just located again, and found a little note I’d tucked in there, of various places that I had seen ‘the Ghostbusters phone number’… 555-2368
I’m gonna try to do some framecaps, but for now here is the list in the order that I noticed them:
Ghostbusters
Howard the Duck
Ordinary People
When A Stranger Calls
AT&T commercial 1993
Far and Away
Rockford Files opening credits
I had to look up the title for When A Stranger Calls, as my note simply said “Carol Kane? movie with killer in house”… and while checking its imdb page, discovered that the same phone number also appears in Forever Young.
Some more possibilities found via online searches…
1965’s A Patch of Blue
the hotel room in Memento
Real Estate, Along Came Polly
Tony Baretta, Baretta
Guiler residence, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Det. Sgt. Rick Hunter, Hunter
Hotel Phone, Jane Austen’s Mafia!
Kojak, Kojak
Jaime Sommers, The Bionic Woman
Seems to be pretty popular among TV detectives, huh?
They were out of business for a while, remember? Maybe they lost the old number during that time.
(Or the guys in the Columbia prop department making the decals for the ECTO-1A weren’t nerds enough to realize that a phone number had appeared in the first movie, and made up their own.)
Wilson Pickett (originally written by Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper) - cool tune! Johnny Lang hacked at it though mid-way through the song in Blues Brothers 2000. Sends shivers down my spine like nails on a chalkboard.
Didn’t they do a promotion for Ghostbusters 2 where you could the number and get a “special message” or something? I thought I read that somewhere (here actually)
Not for the sequel, that I recall, but for the first movie, yes.
"After the film was out and doing well – just to keep the phenomenon going – Ivan came up with the idea of taking a ‘junk-buy’ cross-country on late-night TV and running the commercial just as it appeared in the film, only with the superimposed phone number changed to an 800 number. Then people could call in and get an answering machine with Danny’s and Bill’s voices saying: ‘Hi, we’re the Ghostbusters. We’re not in right now – we’re out catching ghosts…’ Well, they did that, and they got a thousand calls per hour, 24-hours-a-day for six weeks. "
--executive producer Michael Gross
[quoted on p. 47 of Don Shay's <U><u>Making Ghostbusters</u></U>]
I remember hearing that story a couple of years later, around '86 or so, at leastways it was after I had taped the movie off cable. The guy telling it wasn’t the most truthful individual I’ve ever met, and he apparently was unaware they had changed 555-2368 to a non-fictitious number instead. Anyway, we tried calling 1-800-555-2368 and got the “the number you have dialed does not exist” recording from the operator, which only convinced us all further that Earl was a liar.
Many years later, when James Van Hise gave me a copy of Making Ghostbusters, I saw the little anecdote in the sidebar and thought, “I’ll be darned. Earl was telling the truth for once!”
I would LOVE for someone to dig up a recording of the message. That should’ve been on the DVD/Blu-Ray.
867-5309 is the number to GEM Plumbing and Heating here in Rhode Island. They have this quote from their website:
“Today, Gem Plumbing & Heating Company has over 300 employees over 165 trucks making it one of largest plumbing & heating companies in the United States. Gem continually strives to provide the best in customer service coupled with the most knowledgeable plumbers and service technicians in Rhode Island.”
I find it to be a strange coincidence that 867-5309 is the number to plumbing companies across the country. I wonder if they branched??
The one here in Indy calls itself Benjamin Franklin, but there has to be some connection, I’d think, if nothing other than one plumber did it first, and a bunch of others latched onto the idea. Sorta like how I once saw a lawyer ad from New York City that was exactly the same as one here, only with the badly dubbed in firm name being different.
