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| For the story's sake - pre iPhone |
The iPhone with its apps technology is more and more pervasive - it's everywhere. And just as stories had to adjust to the advent of the car, the telephone, radio, televsion, video technology ...iPhone technology forces us to tell our present-day stories differently. David Fincher talked about his Hollywood take on the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and decided the story would be pre iPhone technology. Lisbeth Salander, the lead character, is a brilliant hacker and would definitely have the latest and best technology - and her having iPhone technology would have meant her knowing too much at various stages in the story.
With an iPhone everything becomes more immediate, more apparent, more obvious. You use instant messaging, social media, compass functions, mapping, tracking, filming, camera functions, voice recording, travel, searching, finding, tanslating, etc. etc. - if you can imagine it, the app for your idea is probably already on the market ... remember the above Enemy of the State? Back then only super duper spy cracks had that sort of stuff - today more and more average schmoes like you and I have just about EVERYTHING in the form of an app in our pocket.
If you write a present-day story, you have to think about iPhone stuff. No way around it anymore. At every corner of your tale you need to think about plausibility - wouldn't he or she have an iPhone? And if not, why not? Do they live in the country? Are they poor? Is it broken? And if they have one then the questions are - wouldn't they know certain things? Wouldn't they have connected already? Wouldn't they have done this or that with the help of an app? I'm not saying stories will change dramatically - universal tales will continue to be told. But I bet if you'd do Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet today - it would include iPhone technology and would be quite a bit different from the 1996 version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes.
Makes me wonder whether more directors will choose to set their stories in pre iPhone times... as for me personally, I'm quite aware that some of my spec scripts would need some serious rethinking to fit into the present technology times... and maybe, maybe I'll just become a retro writer and focus on 40s film noir or 70s paranoia and cold war thrillers - you know, the good old quaint pre iPhone days.
2 comments:
An iPhone is a character strength like any other. And a clever writer can compensate for or negate any strength.
EMP blast, no signal, no wifi, a magnet. All ways to compensate for any cellphone. At the simplest, the bad guy can take or break the phone at the Act One/Two climax, which we see often enough already these days.
Like Sun Tsu said: If you know your enemy, you will win half your battles. If you know yourself, you'll also win half your battles. And if you know both, you will win all battles.
Know your characters and their enemies and no strength is too powerful.
Attention spans are shorter for iphone users; screenplay structure (see http://www.clickok.co.uk/index4.html ) is the same but contracted.
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