Marty uses the payphone at Lou's Cafe.
- "The prices [behind the counter in Lou's Cafe] fascinated Marty so completely that he must have stared at them long enough to convince the counterman that he was undesirable. / "Whatever you're selling, kid, we don't want any," he said abruptly. / "I'm not selling anything," Marty replied. "I just want to use the telephone." "
- —From Back to the Future by George Gipe (quote, page 86)
A payphone was a coin-operated public telephone.
History
There was a payphone situated in a booth in Lou's Cafe in 1955, which Marty McFly made use of while he was making a call to Emmett Brown, after having looked up his number in the telephone directory. Local calls cost 5¢ (better known as a nickel).
A video payphone bearing the AT&T logo was present in Courthouse Square in 2015, where Marty McFly, Jr. was spotted at one point through a binocular card used by Doc.
Behind the scenes
- In a deleted scene from Back to the Future, Mark Dixon traps George McFly in a payphone booth at Hill Valley High School during the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, and Mr. Strickland refuses to break him out.
- In real life, by 2015 most outside payphones had been removed because of the prevalence of cell phones, something that Back to the Future Part II obviously didn't foresee (although bulky cellular telephones were in use in 1989).
