Interestingly enough, today's quote -
Page 11 - Victoria: 'I've never been big on crowds. (a shrug) Anyway, fewer distractions just means I can spend more time with David.'
- was replaced by Vicki musing with a simple "Hmmm..." in response to Carolyn's explanation of how they deal with 200 rooms.
But getting back to the cell phone vs. TV reception, as Midnite will attest, I'm hardly a big cell phone advocate. Do I own one? Yes. But I resisted getting one until about four years ago, and I'm certainly not as obsessed with mine as some people are with theirs. My feeling is that no adult should always be instantly reachable 24/7 by another adult. So given all that, my first inclination when the subject of reception came up in the script was not to think of cell phones. And when Vicki spoke of how fewer distractions would mean she could spend more time with David, I didn't see a cell phone as that sort of distraction. Watching TV came to mind as a bigger potential distraction. Plus, lack of cell phone reception hardly means that one would be completely deprived of being able to make or receive phone calls. After all, there's still such things as land line phones. They were still very much in use in 2004. And it's not even hard to imagine that with a family as wealthy as the Collinses, the family's and Vicki's bedrooms could each have their own land lines. Throw in separate answering machines and where's the real loss when it comes to bad cell phone reception? And using a landline to converse could be pretty much as distracting as using a cell phone could be when it comes to taking time away from Vicki's time with David, especially considering that Vicki would in all likelihood be making any type of calls on her own time and not while she was with David.
Though when it comes to the dropped dialogue, the whole cell phone reception vs. TV reception is completely incidental up against comparing Collinsport to a third-world country. As I said, I realize it was to emphasize how isolated Collinsport is (plus a start in getting into Carolyn's dissatisfaction with living in Collinsport). But equating any sort of bad reception, no matter how bad that reception might be, could ever come close to being as consequential as some of the very real deplorable conditions in many third-world countries, so at best the comparison comes off as awkward - and at worst, well... Plus it potentially made Carolyn come off as far more insensitive and self-absorbed than I would have liked to have thought they intended. And I really do suspect that's the main reason the whole exchange was completely reworked for the actual pilot.
But anyway, now that all that's behind us, beginning with tomorrow's quote the remainder of the scene will play pretty much as it was scripted - and free of any potential awkwardness...
