Making it work
Other stories find the lighter side of telecommunications. On "Entourage," Ari Gold and his cellphone are like a high-intensity comedy duo. On "How I Met Your Mother," one drunken night, Ted's butt keeps accidentally calling -- a.k.a. "pocket dialing" -- his friend Marshall, and he later relives the evening by listening to all 17 voice mails. In Sarah Ruhl's play "Dead Man's Cell Phone," which begins at South Coast Repertory on Sept. 21, a woman realizes that the man at a nearby cafe table is dead and answers his cell when it rings. She takes it with her and uses it to enter his life.
"It's a more interesting device in movies because you can talk anywhere on it -- you can be on a beach, you can be in a car -- whereas onstage it becomes proxy for a soliloquy," Ruhl acknowledges. "I kind of find them pathetic, theatrically. Putting a cellphone at the center of the play is a way of having some irony about that."
Bruce Wagner satirizes Los Angeles in his "cellphone trilogy" of novels: "I'm Losing You," "I'll Let You Go," and "Still Holding." Perhaps the most apt medium for the device is a video game, as in "Grand Theft Auto IV," in which the player's character can call friends or receive photos of people to kill.
One mini-trend is the climactic cellphone throwaway. Three emblematic city girls have done it: Andy in "The Devil Wears Prada" (into a fountain), Carrie in "Sex and the City" (the ocean), and Serena in "Gossip Girl" (a trash can). The gesture demonstrates that the character has rid her life of whatever the cellphone represents.
A powerful sign of cellphones' impact is the number of famous stories of the past that wouldn't work in the post-Verizon era. For instance, how would they affect the end of "The Graduate," when Benjamin Braddock sprints through Santa Barbara to find Elaine before she gets married?
"I would imagine a lot of calls being made by a lot of people, suddenly," says Buck Henry, who co-wrote the screenplay. "If he calls her and the parents know that he called her, then they've got to call somebody, then they've got to call somebody else -- the battle of the cellphones taking up five minutes."
To some audience members, cellphones signify so many of society's ills -- the reliance on technology, the faster pace of life, the disconnect among fellow human beings -- that the device is distasteful no matter how it's used. Henry, who uses his only for emergencies, says that any time he sees one on screen, he inwardly (or outwardly) groans.
"It's an instant cliche," he says. And, even worse, "It reminds the audience -- or a large percentage of it -- that they might have a message in their pocket."
