Understanding the Medium

His Girl Friday (1940) stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. The movie is an adaption of Ben Hecht’s play The Front Page.

(If you think you’re working hard enough, look at the amount of work he produced in his lifetime.)

I enjoyed this movie for its fast dialog although it lacks any real tension or depth.

What caught my attention was the obvious fact that the movie is a filmed play. It’s set in a number of very staged scenes with most of the action taking place in a very restricted area. The film has to be carried on its dialog, like a play, because there is really very little else there.

It struck me that there is an analogy between the early days of the movie and the early days of the Internet. Compare this movie to The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), a movie that has intense tension, amazingly rapid pace, intense emotional highs and lows, and yet almost no dialog at all.

The movie has moved on to a place where it can really exploit the art form to create an exciting experience for the audience.

Perhaps the Internet today is still what the movie was in 1940. Information on the Web is still essentially newpapers, documents and television online. Just as His Girl Friday is a play on celluloid. What will we unleash on the Internet when we really understand how to use it? And how many years will we have to wait to know?