The first time Rachael Morrison heard of Joybubbles, the legal name of Joe Engressia, he had already passed. She read about him in an obituary in The New York Times, which called him the “Peter Pan of Phone Hackers,” a descriptor that intrigued Morrison.
“I had never heard of him. I had never heard of the phone phreaks. I didn't know there were hackers before computers. His life was just so fascinating,” Morrison tells Inverse following the SXSW Film & TV Festival premiere of her new documentary film, Joybubbles. Morrison, who had never made a film before embarking on the long, strange process of making a documentary about Joybubbles, felt it was her duty when she looked him up and discovered that none existed yet. “I thought there would be a book written about him or a film about him, and there wasn't anything that really covered the entire scope of his whole life.”
