Las Vegas Raiders offensive coordinator Chip Kelly told reporters Thursday that he does not game plan with team minority owner and Fox NFL broadcaster Tom Brady — at least not “on a weekly basis” — despite a report during “Monday Night Football” this week that suggested otherwise.
During the first quarter of the Chargers-Raiders game at Allegiant Stadium, ESPN’s Peter Schrager reported from the sideline that “Chip Kelly told us that he talks to Brady two to three times a week. They go through film. They go through the game plan.”
After the game, Raiders coach Pete Carroll called the report “not accurate” and said that while he and Kelly speak with Brady “regularly,” those conversations are “about life and football and whatever.”
Kelly was asked about the ESPN report during media availability Thursday. His response echoed Carroll’s.
“I’ve spent a lot of time just talking football with [Brady], but it’s not on a — we don’t talk about game plans,” the former UCLA coach said. “We spent a lot of time over the summer, a couple Zooms … and we would just talk ball, you know, ‘What did you like against this?’ So really, when I use Tom, and I just use him as a resource of, ‘Hey, you know, when you faced a Mike Zimmer-type defense, what did you like protection-wise and play-wise?’
“But on a weekly basis, he’s not game planning with us or talking to us.”
Kelly later added: “In terms of weekly game plans, like, that’s not a collaboration that we do. I mean, he’s also a busy guy, so I haven’t even thought of using him to do that, and I don’t think you can, so — you know, our staff does all that.
“But he’s been a guy that I could talk football with, just shooting it about, ‘Hey, have you ever faced a two-trap defense?’ and, ‘With the inverted, Tampa two that everybody’s running now, what was your best thoughts about that?,’ things like that. But we don’t talk game plan at all or any of that stuff in terms of on a weekly basis.”
The Times reached out to ESPN for comments from Schrager or the network on the matter. A network representative declined to comment.
During Schrager’s report, “Monday Night Football” showed a live shot of Brady sitting in the Raiders coaches’ booth and wearing a headset. Kelly told reporters Thursday that he thinks Brady did the same thing during the Raiders’ preseason game last month against the San Francisco 49ers, also at Allegiant Stadium.
“But he doesn’t talk to the coaches when he’s up there,” Kelly said. “I think he just — he’s watching football.”
NFL chief spokesperson Brian McCarthy said in a statement Tuesday that Brady was doing nothing wrong.
“There are no policies that prohibit an owner from sitting in the coaches’ booth or wearing a headset during a game,” McCarthy said. “Brady was sitting in the booth in his capacity as a limited partner.”
Brady faces a number of NFL-imposed restrictions on what he’s allowed to do as a broadcaster given his dual status as a team minority owner. Last season, Brady’s first in both roles, he was prohibited from attending the weekly production meetings during which the Fox crew meets with coaches and players ahead of that week’s game.
“Tom continues to be prohibited from going to a team facility for practices or production meetings,” McCarthy said in his statement. “He may attend production meetings remotely but may not attend in person at the team facility or hotel. He may also conduct an interview off site with a player like he did last year a couple times, including for the Super Bowl.
“Of course, as with any production meeting with broadcast teams, it’s up to the club, coach or players to determine what they say in those sessions.”
Yet the phrase “conflict of interest” has come up quite a bit on social media — go ahead, search it on X (formerly Twitter) — regarding the optics of an NFL broadcaster hanging out with Raiders coaches and apparently communicating with others in the organization through a headset,
The NFL said Tuesday, however, that Brady doesn’t appear to have done anything wrong.
“There are no policies that prohibit an owner from sitting in the coaches’ booth or wearing a headset during a game. Brady was sitting in the booth in his capacity as a limited partner,” NFL chief spokesperson Brian McCarthy said in a statement emailed to The Times. “All personnel sitting in the booth must abide by policies that prohibit the use of electronic devices other than league-issued equipment such as a Microsoft Surface Tablet for the Sideline Viewing System.”
Also during the Raiders’ 20-9 loss to the Chargers, ESPN’s Peter Schrager reported that Raiders offensive coordinator Chip Kelly told him that Brady speaks with Kelly multiple times a week to discuss game plans and break down film. Asked about the report after the game, Raiders coach Pete Carroll said it is “not accurate.”
“We have conversations — I talk to Tom, Chip talks to Tom — regularly,” Carroll said. “We have a tremendous asset and we all get along well and we respect each other. And so we just talk about life and football and whatever. … He has great insight and so we’re lucky to have him as an owner.”
During the 2024 season, Brady’s first as both a broadcaster and a team owner, he was not allowed to attend the weekly production meetings during which the Fox crew meets with coaches and players ahead of that week’s game. That restriction was lifted going into this season.
While McCarthy did not specifically answer a question from The Times about Kelly’s reported comment about his talks with Brady, it would appear that the NFL is confident that the restrictions it has in place would prevent Brady from acquiring any information any non-owner wouldn’t be able to gather.
“Tom continues to be prohibited from going to a team facility for practices or production meetings,” McCarthy said in his statement. “He may attend production meetings remotely but may not attend in person at the team facility or hotel. He may also conduct an interview off site with a player like he did last year a couple times, including for the Super Bowl. Of course, as with any production meeting with broadcast teams, it’s up to the club, coach or players to determine what they say in those sessions.”
MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE — With only the lazy Joshua trees and hovering buzzards out here to bear witness, this isolated expanse of high-desert plain could well be among the quietest places on the planet.
By day, the summer heat hammers hard and the dull whistle of the wind is the only discernible noise. Come nightfall, the eerie silence is often pierced by the woeful bleat of a wandering burro.
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But wait. There’s another sound.
Along a line of wooden power poles running to the horizon in both directions, 14 miles from the nearest paved road, a solitary pay phone beckons with the shrill sound of impatient civilization.
Then it rings again. And again. And yet again, often dozens of times a day.
The callers? A bored housewife from New Zealand. A German high school student. An on-the-job Seattle stockbroker. A long-distance trucker who dials in from the road. There’s a proud skunk owner from Atlanta, a pizza deliveryman from San Bernardino and a bill collector from Denver given a bum steer while tracing a debt.
Receivers in hand, they’re reaching out–at all hours of the day and night, from nearly every continent on the globe–to make contact with this forlorn desert outpost.
They’re calling the Mojave Phone Booth.
Here comes a curious caller now:
“Hello? Hello? Is this the Mojave Phone Booth?” asks Pher Reinman, an unemployed South Carolina computer worker.
Told by a reporter answering the line that he has indeed reached what cult followers call the loneliest phone booth on Earth, he exclaims: “Oh my God, I can’t believe it! Somebody answered! There’s actually somebody out there!”
Calling to See What Happens
Like Reinman, callers everywhere are connecting with the innocuous little booth located not far from the California-Nevada border, along a winding and treacherous dirt road accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicle.
Out here, where summer temperatures soar to 115 degrees and cattle often wander by en route to a nearby watering hole, there’s rarely anyone on hand to answer the calls, but persistent phoners don’t seem to care. If someone does pick up, of course, so much the better.
Some of those who do answer are previous callers who, for unknowable reasons that make sense only to them, also feel compelled to visit the booth.
“For us,” wrote screenwriter Chuck Atkins of his recent trek to the booth, “it was about driving into nowhere for no good reason, meeting fellow netizens who shared our sense of childish glee at the coolness of a phone booth in the middle of nowhere.”
Indeed, this public phone, first installed in the 1960s and operated with a hand crank by nearby volcanic cinder miners and other desert denizens, has been popularized by the globe’s most advanced communications system: the Internet.
The so–called Mojave Phone Booth is shown as it looked in Jan. 1998, in Cima, Calif.
The craze began two years ago after a high-desert wanderer noticed a telephone icon on a Mojave road map. Curious, he drove out from Los Angeles to investigate and wrote a letter to a counterculture magazine describing his exploits and including the phone number. After spotting the letter, computer entrepreneur Godfrey Daniels became so captivated by the idea he created the first of several Web sites dedicated solely to the battered booth.
Since then, word of the phone has been beamed to computers virtually everywhere.
It has evolved into a worldwide listening post straight from the mind of a Rod Serling or a David Lynch, captivating countless callers.
There’s Preston Lunn of San Bernardino, whose wife reluctantly let him take a long-distance shot at reaching someone at the phone, a call he made “just for the hell of it, just to see what happens.”
There’s Debbie, the 20-year-old baby-sitter from Boston whose older sister, “the one who goes to college,” told her about the phone. Bored, with her infant wards asleep, Debbie decided to take a chance and telephone the desert.
“So, what’s out there?” she asked tentatively. “Just, like, cactuses and a dirt road and stuff?”
And there’s Atlantan Jim Shanton, who heard about the phone “from one of the ladies on our pet skunk e-mail list.” Added Shanton: “And I was just crazy enough to call. For me, this is like calling Mars. It’s that far away from everything I know.”
‘If You Call It, They Will Come’
What callers reach is just a shell of a phone booth, actually–its windows long ago blasted out by desert gunslingers desperate for something to shoot at, its coin box deactivated so that only incoming calls and outgoing credit card calls are possible.
But fans have taken the neglected old booth under their wing. Outside, they’ve posted a sign that reads “Mojave Phone Booth–you could shoot it, but why would you want to?” Next to that is another placard reading: “If you call it, they will come.”
On top of the pay phone perches a nude Barbie doll. Scratched into the booth’s metal frame are its longitude and latitude coordinates. Inside, along with plastic-coated children’s magnets spelling out “Mojave Phone Booth,” are mementos such as candles and license plates. Visitors have covered the booth’s bullet holes with Band-Aids.
Nearby, fist-sized stones form the phone’s number along with a huge arrow pointing to the booth. The message can be seen from the air so, as one Mojave phone fan put it, “even aliens can find it.”
The booth-oriented Web sites multiplied when their creators saw the phone on other sites and–after calling numerous times–decided to document their own pilgrimages to the desert phone.
James Wielenga, left, and Gerald Zettel survey the spot where the so–called Mojave Phone Booth formerly stood on May 19, 2000. The booth was removed under an agreement reached by the National Park Service and Pacific Bell.
There’s the lighting designer from New York who was so thrilled to finally reach the Mojave phone that she stripped naked “and ran around like a giddy little girl.”
And two L.A. writers, who later chronicled their trek to the Mojave, headed out just to return the receiver to its cradle after learning the phone was off the hook. They arrived to find the phone temporarily out of order.
Rick Karr, a 51-year-old spiritual wanderer, has no Web site, but says he was instructed by the Holy Spirit to travel to the desert and answer the phone. The Texas native recently spent 32 days camping out at the booth, fielding more than 500 calls from people like Bubba in Phoenix and Ian in Newfoundland and repeated contacts from a caller who identified himself as “Sgt. Zeno from the Pentagon.”
“This phone,” he said with a weary sigh, “never stops ringing.”
While she would not provide statistics, a Pacific Bell spokeswoman said the phone experienced “very low outgoing usage.”
Still, the booth is sometimes used by locals to conduct business or check messages.
“I’ve passed that old phone booth just about every day for more than 20 years now and I’ve never given it as much as a second thought,” said Charlie Wilcox, a sun-wrinkled 63-year-old tow-truck driver who has become the booth’s unofficial tour guide. “And I’ll be damned. Now it’s a celebrity.”
Phone booth callers, Web site creators and Internet intellectuals alike are trying to figure out just why this far-flung phone has gripped the imagination of those who come across it.
Some say calls to the booth are an attempt to create community in a disconnected world. Others view the calls as pure phone fetish, a sort of long-distance voyeurism.
The Attraction of Exotic Isolation
“It’s the kick of reaching out and touching a perfect stranger in a completely anonymous and indiscriminate way,” said Mark Thomas, a New York City concert pianist who created a Web site listing the numbers of thousands of public pay phones worldwide, including the Mojave Desert phone.
Many of the phones on his list are located in urban areas–such as the one at the top observation deck of the Eiffel Tower–and Thomas said the Mojave Phone Booth may attract so many callers because of its exotic isolation.
“You could make a chance contact at any pay phone, but the odds of reaching someone out in the desert are incredibly remote,” he said. “That’s why people call.”
Others say calls to the phone are made out of sheer boredom.
“It’s the get-a-life factor,” said UCLA sociologist Warren TenHouten. “Some people just have nothing to do, so they pursue shreds of information that have no value. It amuses me, but there’s something pitiful about it too. I mean, what’s the most interesting thing that could happen by being so mischievous as to call a public pay phone?
“Someone answers, a person you have absolutely no connection with. You exchange names and talk about the weather. What a thrill.”
One of the 60 callers greeted by a reporter on a recent visit acknowledged that he was shocked anyone was there to answer.
Cows run past Rick Carr and the Mojave Desert Phone Booth located about 20 miles from I–15.
(Los Angeles Times)
“I thought I’d just call and wake up the coyotes,” said a purchasing agent from San Bernardino County, who buzzed the phone from work. “Modern times are passing us by and it’s just sort of romantic–just the idea that it’s out there.”
Daniels, a Tempe, Ariz., resident, is considered the father of the phone booth. He was hooked in the spring of 1997, after reading of the Mojave phone in the cryptic letter to the magazine “Wig Out.”
The 36-year-old, who once ran for the Arizona Legislature and tried to start a country called Oceania, had discovered a new adventure: He began calling the booth every day. And he forced friends to call whenever they visited him.
After weeks of long-distance dialing, someone picked up.
“I was probably more surprised than he was that we were having a conversation on that phone,” said Lorene Caffee, a local miner who answered the Mojave line in 1997.
Daniels transcribed the conversation on his new Web site. Later, after making several trips to the phone, he included such features as a 360-degree view of the surrounding desert from atop the phone and pictures of a bust of composer Richard Wagner–which he carries with him on his travels–inside the booth.
Soon came the call blitz. On one two-day trip to the booth, Daniels answered 200 of them, including a confused connection from Albania during the war in Kosovo.
Daniels plans to return on New Year’s Eve to take Y2K reports from around the globe.
“I like the fact that you can have people who have never met or never will meet and they have this little intersection,” he said. “Two people who have no business talking to one another.”
Surprised to Get an Answer
Since most callers don’t expect an answer, they gasp when a visitor actually picks up, many quickly hanging up like teenage telephone pranksters.
One call answered by a reporter came from 17-year-old Jan Spuehamer of Hamburg, Germany. “This is costing me a lot of money, but I think it is very funny,” Spuehamer said. “One magazine article said you have to be very lucky to have someone pick up this line. Because this is the loneliest phone in the world, no?”
And so people keep calling the Mojave Phone Booth. And visiting.
On a drive home from Las Vegas, Wade Burrows and Brian Burkland impulsively decided to visit the booth. They walked around for 10 minutes scratching their heads, finally leaving behind their own memento: a car license plate they both autographed.
Said the 21-year-old Burkland: “Dude, this is, like, so cool!”
Then Burrows, a San Bernardino pizza deliveryman, placed a call from his favorite desert phone booth.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, holding a cigarette burned down to the filter. “You’ll never guess where I’m calling from–a phone booth in the middle of nowhere.”
He paused, listening.
“Why am I out here? Well, Mom, that’s a long story.”
Picture this: A gaggle of 21-year-olds squeeze into a booth, pull the curtain and smile for the camera. After a series of mysterious analog rumblings, the booth expels a tiny strip of prints. The posers crowd in to savor the tiny film prints — and raise their cameras to snap digital images of them.
While boomers blink in puzzlement, legions of digital natives have embraced the old-school ritual and machinery of the photo booth — and the people at San Francisco-based Photomatica are among those building empires on that enthusiasm. Their latest venture: a Photo Booth Museum in Silver Lake, which opens Thursday.
For anyone who grew up with digital photography, a photo booth is a sort of visual adventure — a selfie with “analog magic.” And at $6.50 to $8.50 for a strip of four photos, it’s more affordable than plenty of other entertainment options. Photomatica, one of several companies riding the photo booth wave, has been restoring and operating these contraptions since 2010. This is the company’s second “museum.”
At the new L.A. site at 3827 W. Sunset Blvd. (near Hyperion Avenue), the company has gathered four restored analog photo booths — two of which date to the 1950s — and one digital booth. The 1,350-square-foot space is designed to look “as if you walked into a Wes Anderson movie set,” said spokeswoman Kelsey Schmidt.
The machines are retrofitted to accept credit cards and Apple Pay, but otherwise the technology is original on the old machines — which means no retakes and a 3-to-5-minute wait for image processing. The film-based booths print black-and-white images only; the digital booth offers a choice of color or black and white.
Is this at all like a traditional museum experience? No. It’s a for-profit venture. Though visitors might learn a little about photography history, the core activity is making and celebrating selfies. So far, Schmidt said, the booths have been especially popular with people under 25, especially female visitors.
A birthday group gathers for a snapshot in the Photo Booth Museum, San Francisco.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
Photomatica rents out and operates about 250 booths (including bars, restaurants, hotels, music venues and special events) nationwide. The company hatched the museum idea after drawing immediate crowds with a booth in the Photoworks film lab on Market Street in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood.
On its Thursday opening night, the L.A. Photo Booth Museum will operate from 6 to 10 p.m., offering up a limited number of free photo sessions and key chains. Otherwise, daily hours will be 1 to 9 p.m.
