Excerpt:
Lately, I’ve noticed that writers of action and suspense films and TV shows are encountering an amusing new storytelling problem: How to explain why their protagonist doesn’t just use his cell phone to get him out of a predicament.For the entire history of film, characters have found themselves alone in desperate circumstances, with no possible solution except using their wits to escape. These days, a litany of archetypal pickles find themselves easily solvable with the press of a few buttons. Lost? Kidnapped? Held hostage? Tied up? Trapped? What’s the problem? Whip out the Razr.
Advances in phone technology have been thwarting action movie writers for some time now. One casualty of technological progress has been the call-tracing scene, where the villain would taunt the hero over the phone, while technicians desperately tried to trace the call. Of course, the villain would always hang up just seconds before the trace could be completed, leading the loyal tech to say, “We lost him”, the hero to grimace, and the police captain to throw his phone headset and shout an expletive.
Screenwriters never came to a consensus over how long this semi-mythical call tracing process should last. Sometimes a villain had to end his call before the two-minute mark, while other times he only had 60 seconds. At the same time I was seeing these complicated law enforcement efforts on screen, their attempts to thwart terrorism dependent on the hero’s ability to keep his nemesis monologuing, my parents had Caller ID at their house, which worked…immediately. I do understand why Caller ID never played a big role in the movies:
Hero: We lost him.
Police Tech: I’m sorry, Sarge. He must have dialed *67.
Sergeant: Do we have *69 on this phone?
Police Tech: No, sir. It costs an extra $7.99 a month.
Sergeant: DAMMIT! (sweeps papers off desk, storms out of the room)
