pneumatic tubes on film: a list

Undergrounds, streets, shares, shadows, kisses, love letters, ghosts, slime, memories, memos, control, spies and many many secrets - this is pneumatic tubes on film and the beginnings of a list:

1984
À bout de souffle
Argo
Baisers Voles (Stolen Kisses)
Brazil
Le Courniaud (The Sucker)
Ghostbusters II
Olsenbande-Filme (Part 12)
The Living Daylights
The Shadow
Une Femme est une Femme
Wolf of Wall Street

What is missing?

in the CIA set

Installing pneumatic tubes in film sets would have to be one of the more glamorous commissions for pneumatic tube suppliers. Thanks to a recent comment on this blog I found out that Scorsese isn't the only filmmaker to have demanded such close attention to detail on his set, as to install pneumatic tubes. Ben Affleck was also a stickler for detail when making his film Argo. The same vendor who supplied tubes for Wolf of Wall Street also supplied tubes for Argo, so that the filmmakers could replicate the CIA offices of the 1970s.

I've written in a previous post about the CIA pneumatic post system. Affleck used the L.A. Times building to film the CIA scenes, and as InfidelWorld reports, the use of "ancient technology" such as pneumatic tubes helped to set a tone of decline and uncertainty. Argo production designer Sharon Seymour tells Variety that her and her team went to some effort to track down old typewriters, computers, telephones and TV sets for the CIA office scenes, as well as build the pneumatic tubes, "to make audiences think about how communications have changed".

The question now remains: will the tubes be a lucky charm at the Oscars another year round?

Images of the Argo set from Deadline, Untapped Cities and image of a CIA pneumatic capsule from CIA's Flikr page.

wolves use tubes on wall street

At the movies the other night, watching Wolf of Wall Street. It's Jordan Belfort's first day as a stock broker, the beginnings of his infamous career. He is being shown around the place by Mark Hanna. Hanna is on the phone, makes a sale: "Done! Time to paint the tape! Wooh! A two thousand Microsoft goin' in the hole!". And there goes the ticket into the pneumatic tube. "It's alive, it's alive. Hold on to that, it's hot" Hanna yells. Jordan takes the capsule and opens up the door to the pneumatic tube system. "In in" Hanna urges. Jordan closes the door and it is off. "Sold!" Hanna exclaims!

This movie scene draws from Belfort's memoirs (an excerpt of which was published in Newsweek) of his first impressions of the chaos of Wall Street. He talks of pandemonium - buzzers and loudspeakers and shouting (the roar of the mob), sounds he writes he knew he'd never forget for they were the sounds of greed and ambition, which would come to define his own life. He describes the role that the tubes had to play in this chaos:

Every so often a broker would slam his phone down in victory and then fill out a buy ticket and walk over to a pneumatic tubing system that had been affixed to a support column. He would stick the ticket in a glass cylinder and watch it get sucked up into the ceiling. From there, the ticket made its way to the trading desk on the other side of the building, where it would be rerouted to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for execution. So the ceiling had been lowered to make room for the tubing, and it seemed to bear down on my head. 

He was so smooth on the phone that it literally boggled my mind. It was as if he were apologizing to his clients as he ripped their eyeballs out. 'Sir, let me say this,' ... Two minutes later Mark was at the tubing system with a quartermillion-dollar buy order for a stock called Microsoft. I’d never heard of Microsoft before, but it sounded like a pretty decent company. Anyway, Mark’s commission on the trade was $3,000. I had seven dollars in my pocket.

Not for long.

Use of pneumatic tubes on the stock exchange dates back to the 1920. The scene above, set in 1987, must be describing one of the last remnants of the pneumatic tube system on Wall Street, as according to A Financial History of the United States, by the mid- 1960s Wall Street firms were gradually replacing pneumatic systems with computerised systems. Although only a very brief moment in the movie, according to New York Arts, Scorsese did some painstaking research into the function of pneumatic tubes, for his historical portrayal of the stock exchange in the 1980s.

Movie quotes from moviequotesandmore.