Leonardo DiCaprio fans keep pouring into a Humboldt County grocery store for a movie pay phone that was only a prop, and staff say the stream has not slowed.
Roughly a year after One Battle After Another hit screens, visitors still show up at Murphy’s Market in Cutten, California, hunting the telephone from a chaotic scene that stuck with audiences. The phone was never a real fixture of the store. It was a prop. It is gone.
NY Post reported that the steady fan traffic has turned the small Humboldt County grocer into an unlikely stop on the celebrity-map circuit, complete with reenactments, photo ops, and the occasional blocked lane in the parking lot.
What they find instead is a PRIMO water refill machine. That has not stopped the pictures.
In the film, DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a washed-up revolutionary. Clad in a bathrobe, beanie, and oversized sunglasses, he shouts into a pay phone, calls an old ally, blanks on a password, and spirals through a public meltdown. The bit traveled far beyond opening weekend.
Production rolled through the market in 2024. About 80 onlookers lined up across the street that day to watch. Employees say the crew ran the take again and again.
Ciara Vest, a five-year Murphy’s worker who fielded the on-set spectacle and now fields the tourists, described the grind and the aftertaste.
"We watched them do it over a hundred times, I swear. But it makes you appreciate the process. And it’s been really cool to have a lot of people seeing our store, being like, ‘Oh, I go there. I shop there all the time.'"
The phone questions never really stopped.
"They ask about it all the time. And I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s not real. Well, it’s real. It’s somewhere. But it’s not here.'"
Fans do not leave empty-handed or unposed. They storm the aisles to recreate a sprint from the scene. They swarm the checkout for cheap sunglasses in the spirit of Ferguson’s look. They photograph the water machine where the prop phone once sold the shot.
Some have stopped traffic in the lot while filming the storefront. The public restroom has become its own stop. Worker Jennifer Sherman noted why.
"It’s got the same seat they put in for the movie."
Hollywood came, shot, and left. The props left with it. The map pin stayed.
Vest and colleagues have talked about installing a mock phone so visitors have something real to stand beside. The pitch is practical, not mystical.
"I think it could probably bring more customers."
In a state where polished grocers already double as scenes for the online crowd, a working-class market in Cutten did not ask to join the tour. A single filmed meltdown put it there anyway. The phone is “somewhere.” The customers are here.
Small-town counters still beat studio backlots for proof that a story landed, even when the prop that made the moment is long gone and the water machine has to take the selfies.
