Wednesday

Since there's been some discussion of it I thought I'd ask: are mobile phones as terrible for script-writers as guns? I would like to broaden this question, though, to include modern technology in general, e.g. the internet. When a character is in trouble they can quickly phone the police. When they don't know something they can easily look it up on Wikipedia. Modern technology solves dilemmas quicker than we can create them. So what is a script-writer to do? Most often you'll find a character will lose reception, run out of battery, or drop his phone down a deep chasm etc. Script-writers try whenever possible to avoid the issue. Watching someone read a text message, or write an email, is not good cinema. Talking on the phone can be dramatic, but it normally halves the tension of a scene. Perhaps this is why there has been a great interest with science-fiction/disaster in film? When there's a gun-impervious alien in your living room, phoning someone or looking it up on Wikipedia won't help - likewise for when the earth's core stops rotating. However, as Alex says, you can try to turn phones into a positive force for your movie. I would like to suggest, though, that this is a rare example, not easily replicable in all contexts. The best solution, and the hardest, is to think of dilemmas in which using a mobile phone wouldn't help even if you had one. These, after all, are the best stories anyway: would it have helped Achilles, or Hamlet? (Yes, perhaps it would've helped Romeo...).