Louis "Red" Deutsch - The Phone Calls

The Phone Calls

Deutsch is still known today for his profanity-filled tirades in response to a series of prank calls placed in the mid-1970s to his bar. The recordings of these calls were widely circulated in the 1980s and 1990s. The character of barkeeper Moe Szyslak on television's The Simpsons is said to be based on Deutsch.

The pranksters behind the phone calls, Jim Davidson and John Elmo, refer to themselves as "The Bum Bar Bastards". Although they initially said that they had picked the Tube Bar at random out of a phone book, they later admitted that they had passed by the bar several times as high school students, and had developed a long standing fascination with Red ever since they saw him beat a loitering drunk — literally hurling him through the front door of the bar by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt.

Some of the early phone calls involved getting Deutsch to unwittingly call out a name that was actually an embarrassing pun such as "Phil Lacio (fellatio)", "Jim Nasium (gymnasium)",or "Pepé Roni (pepperoni)". Initially the gullible Deutsch would fall for the gags, but later Deutsch began catching on to his tormentors, and would then invariably launch into a cursing tirade. He would say very insulting things about their mothers, and would threaten to mutilate them. The Bastards would also sometimes insult Deutsch to further infuriate him. The Bastards later escalated their assault on Deutsch, repeatedly challenging him to fight (but never showing). In another call, Davidson took on the characteristic voice of another of Red's bartenders, calling Red at home to tell him the bar was on fire. This was initially recorded as a series of calls, however while intoxicated one night they accidentally erased all but the last call.

Despite Deutsch's claim that he knew the identities of his tormentors, he never did, and after several months of telephoning Deutsch the pair moved on to other targets. Unbeknownst to Elmo and Davidson, the tapes they had made of their calls to Deutsch were beginning to circulate among their friends and friends of friends, becoming an underground sensation.

Chris Gore, creator of Film Threat magazine, got hold of the Red tapes and decided to make a film from them. He hired character actor Lawrence Tierney and took hundreds of still photos of him "playing" the character of Red in the Tube Bar. He then combined the photos into a film that was released in 1993.