The Forgotten Story Of An Accidental Phone Hacker
“I had never heard of him. I had never heard of the phone phreaks. I didn't know there were hackers before computers.”
The first time Rachael Morrison heard of Joybubbles, the legal name of Joe Engressia, he had already passed. She read about him in an obituary in The New York Times, which called him the “Peter Pan of Phone Hackers,” a descriptor that intrigued Morrison.
“I had never heard of him. I had never heard of the phone phreaks. I didn't know there were hackers before computers. His life was just so fascinating,” Morrison tells Inverse following the SXSW Film & TV Festival premiere of her new documentary film, Joybubbles. Morrison, who had never made a film before embarking on the long, strange process of making a documentary about Joybubbles, felt it was her duty when she looked him up and discovered that none existed yet. “I thought there would be a book written about him or a film about him, and there wasn't anything that really covered the entire scope of his whole life.”
Joybubbles among his toys.
Born blind, the self-styled Joybubbles accidentally invented phone hacking when he realized that by whistling certain tones into the telephone, he could make long-distance calls for free. His neat little trick would inspire a movement of phone hackers and enthusiasts who called themselves “phone phreaks,” among whose membership included future Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Joybubbles was at the beginning of a tech movement that actively shapes the world today, yet he remains a forgotten footnote in history. Morrison hopes, with her documentary, that’ll change.
“[I] decided I would make a documentary film about him since nobody else had,” Morrison says.
Inverse spoke with Morrison about the unique archiving process that went into making Joybubbles, how she made Joybubbles the narrator of his own story strictly through archival audio, and why the world was forever changed by this one forgotten phone hacker.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Rachael Morrison and producer Annie Marr at the Sundance premiere of Joybubbles.
What would you say was the most surprising thing to learn when you were making Joybubbles?
There's so many surprising facets to his life. I think what really makes the film work is all the audio that I collected, and that was, of course, incredibly surprising. I didn't know that there was much audio of him when I started making the film. I just thought, "OK, I'm going to go around and film interviews with people who knew him."
One of those interviews with this woman, Cynthia Bond, resulted in a bunch of cassette tapes that she had where she had asked him to narrate his whole life story, and that became the backbone of the movie. Then I also discovered other tapes along the way. It's a film, but it's very audio-heavy because I wanted to let him narrate his own story through the audio.
Tell me about your process, because I'd heard that Joybubbles was cut on Adobe Premiere almost entirely from archival footage, despite limited media available about Joe. Can you tell me how you went about building this process?
We started with an editor named Patrick Lawrence, and he cut what I would call a radio edit. We sifted through all of this audio, hours and hours of audio to lay out the story first. Then Bradford Thomason came on. He was the second editor who really pushed the film forward, finished it, and made it so beautiful. He took what Patrick had done and was able to rearrange the story as needed. Then he added in all the visual elements, which I had found as an archival producer, and also the interviews as well.
I know that you especially wanted Joybubbles to narrate his own story. Did you ever encounter a hurdle where you thought that this was an important aspect of his life to talk about or to explore, and then you didn't have any actual footage or content to draw from?
We didn't cut out any audio or interviews because we couldn't find visuals for it. We kept everything in. There's limited footage and photographs of Joybubbles, although I was surprised by how much I did find of him. He was in the news a lot. He was in the news when he was a hacker, and then he was in the local news again when he was Joybubbles.
But yeah, the rest of the film is archival that I consider it emotional archival producing, looking for archival that emotionally corresponds with what he is talking about and isn't necessarily a one-to-one relationship of he's talking about something and you're seeing exactly what he's talking about. We also have animations and shots in Super 8 to get coverage for everything, but there were definitely stories and moments, things that were more difficult in his life, some of the trauma that he experienced, where it took me a while to figure out, like, "How are we going to visualize this?"
Born blind, Joybubbles never stopped striving for his independence.
One thing I found really fascinating about this documentary and the Joybubbles story was that the phone freaks and the idea of hacking phones was kind of a precursor to computer hacking, and I think there was a part that Steve Jobs even had been a bit of a phone phreak in his early days before going on to found Apple, which is such a fascinating little piece of history that a lot of people wouldn't know about. Do you think that this forgotten piece of technology/hacking history is something that people should know about more?
I mean, Joybubbles is incredibly important in the history of hacking and technology. There was a magazine article that he was featured in that both Woz and Jobs read. They then were able to figure out how to hack into the telephone network as well, just from reading this article and then figuring out how to build something called a blue box, which we talk about a bit in the film. So Joybubbles was exceptional because he could whistle the tones.
Pretty much everyone else built these little devices that were the size of a pack of cigarettes, called the blue box, and those would make the tones that the telephone system used to the tones that controlled the system. So it really was their first project together, and also the first thing that they packaged and sold.
So it's kind of funny in the film because Steve Wozniak is talking about, "Oh, we decided we would make this thing together," and then Jobs says, "We could sell this." Woz is like, "Oh, I didn't think we could sell it." Which is such a funny little piece of the dynamic that they had forever in making Apple. Joybubbles inspired them, and they may not have started Apple if they hadn't done this.
What has the reception at festivals for Joybubbles been like for you?
I feel like I've gotten great feedback, and people on the screening seem really fascinated by him and touched by his story, which is amazing. You know, you make something with your friends and colleagues, and you don't really know how the world is going to receive it, but I'm really delighted. He's such an amazing person, so I'm glad that his story is getting out there and it's resonating with people.
