I spoke yesterday at Library House’s Mediatech 2008 conference, where Slingshot was honoured as one of the MediaTech 100 - one of the 100 most innovative media/technology companies in Europe. It was a fun and thought-provoking conference, with particularly interesting things to say about the rise of casual gaming and what the trend towards cloud computing might mean for web 2.0 (are we onto 3.0 yet?) businesses.

Nic Brisbourne has been kind enough to Blog about my presentation over on The Equity Kicker

Well, we’re now about 10 meetings into Inside Pictures 2008. We’ve traversed a studio lot, debated with lawyers, chit-chatted with casting directors, discussed the relative merits and demerits of superbowl spots with marketeers and eaten large quantities of Korean Beef. A good few days. Here are a handful of highlights:

• Discovering that Chuck Roven, one of the biggest and most successful producers in Hollywood, and the man behind my favourite film of the year, and the second biggest movie of all time, The Dark Knight, is a genuinely decent, profound and eclectic human being. A living, breathing exemplar of the fact that you can triumph within the system without dumbing down one jot. This is a man who in his time has written and acted in films, breeds horses, managed race-car drivers, and a roster of musicans including Alanis Morisette, The Goo Goo Dolls, Weeza and many others, was married to the redoubtable Dawn Steel, first female head of a studio, and some how along the way produced some of the best and biggest movies of all time, including Twelve Monkeys, City of Angels as well as both the Nolan Batman movies. Chuck was our first meeting and an inspirational one.My three take aways from his talk:

1. Producers prove themselves by making hard decisions in hard situations.
2. Audience testing tells you somethings, but not everything. Listen to the audience, but don’t listen blindly. Interpret and when push comes to shove, trust your gut. It’s the only one you have.
3. Grab. Opportunity. Now.

• Meeting some nice agents and managers at our agent and manager panels and drinks party today, including a brace of folk from Paradigm, Endeavor and William Morris.
• Korean beef. Lots of it.

Whilst we have been having fun, of course, the world continues to go to hell in a handcart, with the melt-down in the financial markets continuing unabated and the real economy clearly balanced precariously. The most we can say is that at least we inhabit a counter-cyclical industry. As Content Rights Management and Entertainment One both raise large production facilities.
We hope.

Finally, as a courtesy to some of my colleagues who have felt left out that they have not been mentioned in the blog to date, I should point out that Gemma is with the band, Rachel has nice shoes, Adam uses words like ‘non-correlated’ and ‘granularity’ casually;  and Laura should be on everyone’s list of go to Producers.

Sitting on the hotel roof deck, by the pool, drinking lemonade whilst a collection of multi-ethnic bikini clad beauties lounge in front of me. Truly, this is the only way to blog.

Here is the syllogism that describes my current happiness:

Sunshine makes everything better

No major city in the world has better sunshine than LA,

ergo - *everything*  in LA is better….

Whether or not you buy that, the warm rays of the sun, fresh fruit and homemade muesli is definitely a better welcome to Hollywood than the one I got at LAX last night. After an 11 hour flight (viewing included: I AM LEGEND, DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN and as much of HAPPY GO LUCKY and HAROLD & KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO as I could manage, 2 Eps each of 30 ROCK, GAVIN & STACEY and a classic ep of FRAISER ‘Ham Radio’) I landed at  LAX, one of America’s more ugly airports and, eager to get to the hotel (the very comfortable almost opulent, yet understated Le Park Suites in West Hollywood), sped through emigration and was about to get my bags…

But alas, my gratification was to be delayed. Because, just as I reached out to get back my passport from the charming boarder control lady (do they need the guns sitting behind the desk, really?) something started flashing ominiously on her screen and suddenly the passport proffering hand was withdrawn, and I found myself whisked towards a room marked ‘Secondary Inspection’.

Here my documents and baggage was taken away from me and I was told to sit (don’t get up, dont walk about) in a row of chairs along with a collection of Indian dentists, Arab holiday makers,  Eastern European women with good cheekbones and bad hair, a British football lout (who kept loudly proclaiming that he was an ally who had stood shoulder to shoulder with the yanks in Iraq, fair point, really) and a collection of old people in wheelchairs (one of them, a straggly haired gentlemen who looked like he might have been Hannibal Lecter in disguise, kept trying to get out of his wheelchair, but was firmly instructed to stay put).

What the sins real or immagined of my colleagues could be, I never found out. Mine, it appears, is that in the 14 months since I last visited the US of A, my name has been adopted as a nome de guarre of a suspect in the war against terror.

Now hold on a minute.  Arvind ETHAN DAVID. Really? This is what some undercover operative of Al Queda has decided is a non-descript name? Because it sounds a bit Jewish?

Click here for google search results of my name:

What you will notice, if you can be bothered to click through the first 15 pages or so of results is that it’s all actually about ME. The real Arvind Ethan David, with a whole bunch of really easily verifiable information about my life. And that even if you get to page 20 of results - there is no one else with this name out there in the whole of the googleverse. Now this isn’t because I’m particularly famous, it’s because we live in the internet age and (this is the key bit) I HAVE A REALLY QUITE UNUSUAL NAME.

None of these arguments, however, assuaged Office Huang (who to be fair was fairly embarrassed and apologetic about the whole thing) and instead of doing a google search to verify that I was who I was, he instead made a succession of phone calls to his superiors (who apparently in turn were calling their superiors in Washington, and thereafter for all I know direct to the Oval Office) and discussing such thrilling information as:

- my father’s full name

- the town of his, and my mother’s birth.

- my mother’s maiden name (Khelani A/P Kirshnan (MA -  I know - see comments below) for those who care. And even if you don’t try explaining that the A/P stands for Anak Perumpuan, meaning ‘female child of’ to a gun bearing Korean-American Home Land Security Officer and you have some idea of the world of pain I was in).

As the minutes ticked into hours, and with memories of Harold & Kumar too fresh in my brain (it doesn’t help that Kal Pen, the actor who plays Kumar, looks considerably less like a terror mastermind than I do) my irritation started to morph into worry. This would not be a good way to start the Hollywood phase of my career.

Kal Pen or me - you pick the terrorist mastermind
Anyway, eventually his superiors, satisfied that my mother’s maiden name was such as to guarantee that no son of her’s was a terrorist, gave me the clearance - along with the cheerful assurance that this would almost certainly happen at least once more on my next visit to the US, and only if I passed the same set of checks a second time would they consider taking my passport of the watch list, and I got to escape here to the gorgeous Le Parc Suites, where even reliving the tedium and terror of last nights experience is failing to annoy me.

Sunshine. It just makes everything better.

Randy Paunch continues to teach. GooTube really does reach beyond the grave.

I’m sorry to have only heard of this remarkable man on the day of his death. Watch the speech that made him famous here, and learn more about his life here