It's written, couldn't read..

showing a character reading, except perhaps very briefly. The same way in books. Only rarely does a character in a book read. Think about it. How interesting would it be to watch 90 minutes of someone reading? Or read 400 pages of someone reading? What makes us watch movies or read books is the action therein, even when the action is somewhat intellectual rather than physical.

Starwars did. As the article says, even their histories are videos of people speaking.

It was also a universe based on slavery. Droids, that are intelligent and even free willed creatures are actually a slave underclass that perform all labor. so their are illiterate slave overlords.

And I still love the universe.

get a pass on never showing people reading, but Star Wars doesn't?

And in our current world, there's an amazing amount of video out there, including videos of history. Do you ever watch PBS? Any Ken Burns's specials?

Movies also rarely show people going to the bathroom, other than when it's needed for plot purposes. Same with sleeping or eating. Or working. Movies and books are always a particular version of life that is actually a lot different from the lives we all live.

The real problem is when people think something is true just because they see it in a movie or on TV.

So, you can criticize contemporary society because most people don't read enough, and that is OK because but contemporary society with its literature and its libraries and long history is built into stories set in contemporary society. Even if writing and books aren't part of a story, they are in the background. In most scenes set in houses, you will see books on a shelf. They are part of this world. Look at a scene set in a coffee shop, you will in almost every case see a newspaper, because that is valid and expected in a coffee shop. Luke has no books in his home on Tattonie. Obwan had none in his hermit's hut. Certainly there were none on the millennium falcon.

This is not true in Star Trek, where books were shown in the quarters of the officers and in scenes set on various planets. Picard loved reading real books, a fact repeated in many episodes. Even if literature wasn't what a story was about, it was there to set the scene.

Historical stories set in medieval societies have writing and literature as part of their background. There isn't much of it because that is a fact about medieval europe where libraries were rare and books treasures read only by a few of the learned.

Star Wars was an epic exercise in world creation, built from scratch. Somehow, they did not build writing into it. Their most ancient archives with the Jedi are video archives. There are no newspapers. People watch the news via video. If they need to know something, they don't look it up in a book, they ask a slave, i.e. a droid. In the background of a set there are not shelves of books.

Movies and books are about telling stories. Reading may not be a part of the story, but you will find it in the background of a scene because they create scenes in movies to reflect the character at home in that place. It is the same with books. If you are going to reveal a character in a contemporary society and you describe his home and no books or magazines are there, that says the character doesn't read. it is done that way becuse in books nothing wasted. We don't have to see the character reading a book, but if it is absent from the world shown in the story, it is characterization.

All about a kid reading a book and actually shows him reading it fairly often.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088323/

And I loved the neverending story, though the book was better than the movie.

someone reading. LOL I snark I snark!

Cheers!

but the existence of a literature isn't handled by people reading, it is in bookshelves, it is in newspapers blowing down a dingy street, it is in background to a scene.

But, really, people reading is a great venue for interior monologue.

Doh!

Interior monologue doesn't work well in movies. It is a literate thing.