Hollywood is ruled by conventional wisdom—or, as it's known when it takes off its coat and tie, magical thinking. Certain factors, they say, make for a surefire hit; certain others mean you'll never make a buck. Some of the rules sound silly, but, really, why tempt fate? Listen to director Bill Condon as he slips one of these showbiz credos into a recent interview: “You know, they say for a great performance you need a great telephone scene.” To the uninitiated, this may sound strange—surely an outlying tenet of the faith!—but Hollywood's belief in the “telephone scene” is curiously devout. And unlike other Tinseltown lore, with its murky past and fractured provenance, this tale of the telephone is easy to track to a single event nearly eighty years ago.