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hump dayThe midpoint of Cannes has arrived, and the fatigue is starting to set in. An excess of partying and working has caromed into the effects of sleep deprivation and drink, resulting in some hollow-eyed stares reflected back to you on the walk to the Palais. There’s a little inspiration fatigue going on. Many people will start consciously uncoupling from anything but the marquee sessions at the Grand Audi (and unconsciously coupling after the drinking begins). It’s a pity since the base just dropped. The celebrity sessions have improved dramatically. Jared Leto, who does even more things than James Franco, said the best thing of the week so far: “The bridge between reality and a dream is work.” Well, maybe that’s a close second to Ben Horowitz’s quotation of Marc Andreessen: “The difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.”

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onCe upon a timeStorytelling, the gift that sits at the base of all we do, has become the new “um.” Session designers stick it in the title when they can’t think of what else to say. And that’s a shame, because today was the day of the storytellers—the real ones. Gareth Neame, the genius behind Spooks and Downton Abbey, joined The Walking Dead producer and Terminator writer Gale Anne Hurd, and Whovian Steven Moffat for a master class on storytelling. The panel’s moderator sought in vain to reverse-engineer a formula for storytelling success. Moffat was having none of that: “I’m always amused when critics call something a ‘surprise hit.’ What other kind is there?” Well, the ones that prefigure the future. Hurd, our dystopian artist-in-residence, gave us her personal recipe for success: be a terrible athlete, embrace your nerdiness, dive into your passion, and manifest your vision. Oh, and by the way, Hurd was in the Pentagon a couple of weeks ago: “Skynet is real.” Pause. “And it’s sentient.”

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Charmers Ralph Fines, Courtney Love, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Jared Leto tag-teamed to tune up the audience with a series of enjoyable, quotable sessions., which was a nice change from the previous days. Courtney Love: “When you’re young, the gods are really listening.” Ralph Fines: “The idea is the most explosive thing we can have.” Eddie Moretti: “Vice is hardly revolutionary - just good quality documentary news coverage, but delivered in a peer-to-peer fashion, by people who are from our audience. Not by someone with a toupee.” Jeffrey Katzenberg: “The television market is not a zero-sum game.” And the enviable Jared Leto: “When advertising is great, it’s transcendent. It’s art.”

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a friend to all womenSheryl Sandberg captivated the audience in a talk so polished and wise, that for an hour, at least, everyone stopped resenting her success. We embed our sexism in how we view successful women and successful men. Are the women resented and the men envied? As Sandberg put it, “If more women are in leadership roles, we’ll stop assuming they shouldn’t be.” Substitute “creative” for “leadership” in that sentence, and you have the problem with our industry. Sandberg reminded us that only 3% of creative directors are women. That’s even lower than the standard-bearer industry for inequity: computer science.

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