By Gina McIntyre
(L-R) Sarah Winshall, Patrick Lawrence, and Rachael J. Morrison attend the “Joybubbles” premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Yarrow Theatre on January 26, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
Rachael J. Morrison, the director of the winning new documentary Joybubbles, about the incredible life of the early proto-hacker Joe Engressia, confesses that she was entirely unfamiliar with her subject prior to reading his obituary in The New York Times in 2007.
But she quickly became fascinated by his singular life story: Born blind, he’d accidentally discovered how to manipulate phone lines, becoming one of the earliest and most prominent “phone phreaks” — a group of tech-minded phone hackers who wreaked good-natured havoc with the U.S. landline telephone network for fun. Determined to reclaim his childhood after suffering abuse, Engressia changed his name to Joybubbles and resolved to remain five years old for the remainder of his life, using his phone expertise to strike up conversations with people around the globe.
“I think the movie is about the beauty of human connection,” Morrison says following the documentary’s Sundance Film Festival premiere January 26 at The Yarrow Theater. “He’s such an amazing person, an eccentric person, I think his story is very universal even though it’s so strange and specific.”
The film, selected as part of the Festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition, uses extensive audio recordings Joybubbles made throughout his life, effectively allowing him to narrate his own story. Phil Lapsley, a contemporary of Joybubbles and the author of 2013’s Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell, provided some of the considerable archival material.
“I was a phone phreak in the 1970s,” Lapsley recalls, “and around 2005 or so, I started thinking, ‘Somebody really ought to start writing down some of this history before it goes away.’ So I had started documenting this [period]. I started reaching out to people, and I connected with Joybubbles and kind of got an oral history from him. We chatted about how he got involved in phone hacking. My focus was fairly narrowly on that, but he had so many recordings of himself; some of them go back to the 1970s.”
Reaching out to other sources as well, Morrison amassed a trove of material for the film; after partnering with producer Sarah Winshall, she recruited editors Bradford Thomason and Patrick Lawrence to help her shape the documentary. (Winshall, Thomason, and Lawrence are all present for the screening, along with producers Will Butler, Annie Marr, music supervisor Taylor Rowley, and composer Will Epstein.)
The project took years to come together thanks to the time-consuming nature of the work and various funding challenges. “It’s been inch by inch putting this together,” Winshall says. “We did run into people telling us, ‘Sure, sure, interesting story but not relevant. No one knows what a phone is.’” As the crowd chuckles, she expresses her gratitude for having the opportunity to show the finished product at the Festival. “Being able to finish the movie, which was very much a labor of this team’s love, and show it here for people, and hear you guys engaging with it, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s right! People know what a phone is. People want to know about the past and the present and how they are a lot of times the same.’”
As Lawrence opens up about how moved he feels at having been part of paying tribute to such an inspirational figure, the audience greets his sentiments with applause. “I’m really emotional right now,” he says. “I wish that he could be here right now to experience this. Sharing his story with the world was so important that he kept all these tapes, he went to these seminars to tell people about his life. I’m just so glad that right now we get to do that for him here.”
Morrison and company conclude the screening with a bit of news — the launch of a special phone line designed to spread the sort of joy that Joybubbles himself was known for. Just dial (350) FEE-LING to listen to his recordings, learn more about the film, or leave a message for the director and crew. The goal is fostering communication and building community.
