Johanna Blakley

There’s been a barrage of news stories about director Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland and the flood of support he’s received from major figures in the entertainment industry, including Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton, David Lynch, Harvey Weinstein, Julian Schnable and Michael Mann. Of course their support is quite incendiary because of the charges against Polanski: that he forced a 13 year-old girl to have sex with him.

Others have voiced outrage that Polanski’s receiving preferential treatment because he’s a member of the media elite. Talk shows, news columns, and social networks are abuzz – this is another salacious celebrity-driven story, after all. The reason this sex scandal is on the front page of international newspapers is because it’s Polanski – a vaguely notorious figure (he claims that some people think he’s an evil elf) – with an incredibly dramatic personal story. If he had only been a survivor of the Holocaust (he subsisted as a Jewish child alone in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation) who became an internationally acclaimed director, that would be one thing. But add the fact that his stunningly beautiful wife and unborn child were murdered by Charles Manson and his ghastly crew, and you have a recipe for a true media frenzy.

Johanna Blakley

Whenever I meet someone from abroad, I can’t wait to ask them what TV shows are popular in their home country. In the U.S., we are inundated with information about the popularity (and financial success) of every imaginable kind of entertainment product, but it’s pretty rare to hear about what’s topping the charts abroad. Fortunately, the Hollywood Reporter recently released a special report about trends in global markets. Here’s what’s dominating the global airwaves now:

The U.K. appears to be overrun with dancing competition programs, including one hosted by Simon Cowell called the X-Factor. One of Germany’s most popular shows now is also hosted by a U.S. reality show star: Germany’s Next Top Model has Project Runway dominatrix Heidi Klum at the helm.

In Mexico, teen-oriented telenovelas are the big hits. The tried and true telenovela genre was getting long in the tooth, but smart broadcasters like Televisa have figured out how to take soapies across digital platforms. Too bad Guiding Light (cancelled after a 72-year run) didn’t manage to do that here.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery is in France.

Johanna Blakley

Devoted to all things Twitter, Jeff Pulver’s 140 Character Conference landed in Hollywood this week at the Kodak Theater, home to the Oscars. It was a symbolically appropriate venue for a new technology that thrives parasitically on “old media” . . . . you know, the stuff that people used to get paid to make.

Although the venue was conspicuously empty for most of the conference, and eyes were rudely glued to laptops, BlackBerries and iPhones rather than the live human beings on the stage, the fest had a tight-knit quality to it. Jeff Pulver’s rolodex seemed to reign supreme (compare Richard Saul Wurman’s TED) and culled from it were a surprising number of people intent on using Twitter to connect more intimately with humans and to use this short-attention-span technology to perform charitable work.

So, in addition to a marketing panel which included a guy working on the Bentley social media campaign (no mass marketing for Bentley!), there were homeless advocates, distance learning experts, voting rights activists and Twitter evangelists from the March of Dimes and the Canadian National Aboriginal Health Organization (actually, YouTube has proven to be their best outreach tool).