Early last week I wrote about an event that was coming up, the Digital Entertainment Leadership Forum, which took place in Hong Kong on March 24 and focused on the success of Wellington, New Zealand as a filmmaking center. Matt Aitken and Barrie Osborne were among the speakers, introduced by Mayor Kerrie Prendergast.

I was sorry not to be there for their talks, but I got a pleasant surprise yesterday when David Ivory, based in Hong Kong, emailed me with a description of the event. It’s fascinating and contains some scraps of news. David has kindly given me permission to share his impressions of what went on. I’ll let him speak for himself: more »

Yesterday Variety announced that Mike Mulvihill, who produced the lavish supplements for the extended-version editions of the LOTR DVDs, is leaving New Line and moving to Fox Home Entertainment. As I described in Chapter 7 of The Frodo Franchise, Mulvihill hired producer-director Michael Pellerin to make the supplements. Now he’ll be senior vice president of global content development for Fox. Not surprisingly, he’ll concentrate on developing bonus features for DVD and Blu-ray releases.

Mulvihill had been at New Line for 14 years, so well back into the days of VHS.  Last April, Variety ran another story profiling him and saying that his future at New Line “remains murky” after the studio was merged into Warner Bros. One of the departments that disappeared from New Line was its home entertainment wing. Now Mulvihill’s future is no longer murky.

Will this have any impact on the Hobbit supplements? Michael made the DVD supplements for King Kong, even though that was produced by Universal, not New Line. My hope and guess would be that, like to many members of Peter’s team, Michael has become a regular collaborator and will probably make the Hobbit supplements as well.

Yesterday the LA Times online posted a story about the progress on the Tintin films. A few new details revealed and otherwise a good summary of where the project stands now. The “elaborate video-conferencing setup” mentioned sounds a lot like the “Fatpipe” system used during the making of LOTR.

As an ongoing franchise, the Lord of the Rings trilogy has a much lower profile than it used to. It’s still spinning money for its owners, though. Variety ran a brief article today on a big sale Warner Bros. International Television Distribution has made to RTL Television. RTL is the largest private commercial TV station in Germany.

It’s a multi-year deal for over 200 films and TV series. Among the upcoming films included in the pact are the Harry Potter finale, the two-part Deathly Hallows film. Quite a few older movies are involved as well, including the LOTR trilogy, Rush Hour 2 (both New Line films), and Ocean’s Eleven.

Of course, a film doesn’t have to be part of a franchise to show up in perpetuity on TV and home video of various sorts. I just bring it up as a reminder that LOTR is still an active franchise, however firmly in the past it may seem to many fans.

If we needed any more evidence that the Lord of the Rings film trilogy built an enduring cutting-edge set of filmmaking faciities in Wellington, we’ve got it. On March 24 the Digital Entertainment Leadership Forum in Hong Kong will present a day-long program, “Innovate Locally, Collaborate Globally: The Success of Wellington, New Zealand.”

Two of the people I interviewed for The Frodo Franchise will be the keynote speakers: Matt Aitken, of Weta Digital, and Barrie Osborne, producer of LOTR. Matt’s topic is “How and Why Creativity is the True Critical Success Factor.” Barrie speaks on “Making Movies for Global Entertainment Markets.” A third interviewee, Mayor Kerrie Prendergast, will introduce the program.

The event focuses mainly on Hong Kong’s potential for imitating the success of Wellington and for collaborating with New Zealand in future filmmaking ventures.

I’m sitting in the Cairo airport waiting for a delayed flight home. Thanks to free wi-fi here, I discover that Variety has posted a long summary of the first Tintin film, with information on Peter Jackson’s and Steven Spielberg’s relative contributions, the cutting-edge technology, and other juicy topics.

Assuming my flight takes off soon enough to allow me to make my connections and get home, I hope to resume regular blogging this coming week.