Ripped From the Phone Book

Whenever an investigative character looks up information in a telephone directory and find the one piece of information they've been looking for, they'll rip out the entire page from the phone book. A lot of the time, the directory was one of those found next to a public telephone, which mean that our Sam Spade or Intrepid Reporter has just ruined the chances of anybody else looking up anybody who's name begins with B. Perhaps it helps to show how rushed and straight to the point they are but you'd think people in those professions would have gotten used to carrying around a pen and notepad.

This was Truth in Television, although it might have just been Life Imitates Art. In either case, it could get very frustrating after the Oh-don't-know-how-many-times one has gone to look up something in the phone book at a public pay phone only to discover several pages missing, including the one you needed.

Today, though, this is a Dead Horse Trope. After two decades or more of cell phones proliferating across the face of the planet, about the only place you can find a payphone is where they've been deliberately preserved for historical or aesthetic reasons, or there's a legal requirement to continue providing public telephone access. And even those few pay phones which have survived into the 2010s rarely if ever have phone books -- doing a web search on a modern smart phone has long since replaced them.

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Examples of Ripped From the Phone Book include:

Film

• In Back to The Future, Marty searches for Doc in a phonebook in a cafe and rips the entire page out for one number. The cafe owner doesn't seem to mind; maybe he was used to seeing it happen all the time in Bogart flicks.
  • Although he does respond to Marty holding the page and asking him a question by interrupting with a snippy "Are you gonna order something, kid?"
    • "You can vandalize my property as long as you buy stuff!"
• In The Terminator, Kyle Reese does this with the page containing the listing for "Sarah Connor". Averted by the Terminator later in the film, since its flawless memory allows it to instantly memorize the listings.
• Hilariously taken to the extreme in Knowing when Nicolas Cage's character crowbars an entire door (which of course has information written on it) off of its hinges and takes it with him. Well, he was in a hurry.
• Done in The Dream Team by Billy when he and the group are searching for their missing psychiatrist in a hospital. One of the group, Henry, does note that what Billy did is vandalism, but Billy shrugs it off and it's never brought up again.
• In The Last Boy Scout Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans) uses a pay phone (in a police station no less) to get an address so he can track down where Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) is. He rips the page from the phone book as Joe's daughter looks on. She then traces the information he wrote down, and rips that page out of the phone book and follows him, leaving the phone book back at the police station with two missing pages!
• Frantic. Harrison Ford does this because he's getting increasingly frustrated over his attempt to get hold of an off-duty concierge who might have seen where his missing wife got to.

Live Action TV

• In one episode of The New Adventures Of Superman, there was a plot point where Lois was looking for information on an individual. What she needed was in the white pages, and she promptly tore a page out of the copy in a phone booth.
• Done by one Rock Star in an episode of CSI; he was tracking down an ex-groupie who had given birth to his son.
• Intrepid Reporter Carl Kolchak regularly did this in Kolchak the Night Stalker. In one episode he went to find a number in his office phone book but discovered he had previously ripped out the page. He used the phone book of fellow reporter Ron Updyke - and ripped the page out of it too.
• In Veronica Mars, Nathan Woods rips out the page of a phone book while looking for Alicia Fennel's address.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Glory with the Magic Box ad in the episode "Shadow".^[context?]
  • Season 7's "Showtime". A Potential steps off a bus and goes to a public phone to look up Buffy's address, only to find the page ripped out. Having identified herself by turning to the torn page, the Bringers move in to kill her.

Western Animation

• Toaster does this in The Brave Little Toaster.
• Bender does this in Bender's Big Score when he is searching for Fry in the past. This was a take-off on the aforementioned example from The Terminator: Bender was a robot going into the past to kill Fry, and there were many different joking Terminator allusions in that sequence.