Hollywood Goes Postal

Newsweek magazine reports, "The postal service lost $3.8 billion last year, but at least it's still got one big booster: Hollywood. Most of us use Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, YouTube, and blogs to communicate, but the movies are still trafficking in old-fashioned, handwritten letters."

Reporter Ramin Setoodeh goes on talk about several new and soon-to-be released movies.

Ramin writes, "In Dear John, a soldier overseas has a gushing, epistolary romance with his girlfriend back home. Letters to God is about an 8-year-old boy with cancer who sends dispatches to You Know Who and the mail carrier who befriends him. That's not to be confused with the upcoming Letters to Juliet, about an aspiring journalist (another dying breed!) who discovers a lost 'Dear Abby'–like note on a trip to Italy and responds with her own advice on love."

According to Ramin, "Some of this paper fetish has to do with screenwriters showing their age, but most of it has to do with nostalgia...Letters take us back to a time when we were careful with the printed word. When you write on paper, it's a permanent declaration, which is why so many people save letters (and why so many of us quickly delete e-mails)."

To read the entire article, click here.