The LITTLE girl steals it. That's why Carrie doesn't have her cellphone. And that's why Big can't reach her to say he's backing out of the wedding in the "Sex and the City" movie.
A clever technique for creating drama? Or a contrived way to keep the pair from speaking, in an age in which everyone has a cell handy?
Either way, the episode shows how our pesky pocket devices have become crucial to storytelling. The U.S. had 255 million cellphone subscribers (83% of the population) in 2007, according to the International Telecommunications Union, meaning that audiences expect almost all present-day characters to carry one. For dramatic writers in many media, cellphones' ubiquity -- and the particular way they condense time and space -- creates both opportunities and obstacles.
"You would normally do scenes where people would come together face to face," says Josh Schwartz, executive producer of the network TV shows "Gossip Girl" and "Chuck." But now, "Why would they come to the door? They would just call."
Could "24" exist without cellphones? Jack Bauer would spend 20 minutes every episode searching for a phone booth. The "Gossip Girl" characters would die of boredom without their stream of salacious electronic chitchat.
While cellphones appear to help storytellers, since they allow anyone to talk to anyone at any time, "that seeming freedom only makes it all the more difficult," says Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru and author of "Story." "It takes away a possible source of conflict -- the difficulty of communicating, the difficulty of calling for help."
McKee compares the situation to the loosening of rules about depicting sexuality -- writers have more options, but they lose the tension created when they're forced to be implicit rather than explicit. Still, he doesn't see the development as negative. "All it means is that the writer has to be even more ingenious in building the conflicts and the tensions in a credible way," he says.
Writers imagined a cellphone world even before the device existed. James Bond had a car phone, "Get Smart" (1965-70) had a shoe phone and Tony Roberts' character in "Play It Again, Sam" (1972) tells his office the phone numbers for everywhere he's going to be. When cellphones first became available, on screen they were shorthand for excess. Gordon Gekko uses one on the beach in "Wall Street" as do the spoiled teens roaming the school halls in "Clueless."
