Last week, I noted Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the ongoing troubles that Laura Poitras, a documentarian who’s chronicled the lives of people impacted by the American War on Terror, has had with Homeland Security, which has repeatedly detained her and confiscated her equipment on her return to the U.S. after reporting trips. But she’s not alone. Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan was just detained for the second time by immigration officials on his way into the United States, this time to give a lecture at Yale:

Khan’s arrival for his Yale lecture – preceded by a brief press conference – was delayed by over three hours. The actor did not comment as to why he was detained but before he began his Yale address, Khan smiled and took a witty dig at the incident, “It was nice, as it always happens… Whenever I start feeling too arrogant about myself I always take a trip to America. The immigration guys kick the star out of stardom.” Known for his characteristic humor, Khan further added, “They (immigration officials) always ask me how tall I am and I always lie and say 5 feet 10 inches. Next time I am going to get more adventurous. (If they ask me) what colour are you, I am going to say white.”

You might think that one of the advantages of integrating all of the government’s security functions into a single bureaucracy with unified databases might be that, when you wrongly detain and question someone, you could put a note in their file to so immigration officials who deal with this person in the future know to be polite and careful, and try not to repeat those same mistakes. Hassling artists because they’re brown, or because they question the outcomes of U.S. policy is not an efficient and effective way to ensure the security of America, or to win supporters for American policy.

The bridge is yours.

-It makes a lot of sense that in our multi-threat environment, American talent agencies would be going after Bollywood stars.

-The weird rationales foreign countries give for banning American movies.

-Even if La Scala’s gotten better about anorexia treatment, firing someone for blowing the whistle about what the environment used to be like there seems a tad defensive.

-Lifetime takes on the Columbine massacre. I doubt this will be as scary was We Need to Talk About Kevin.

-If Wes Anderson made Batman.

My friend Neda Ulaby has a cool piece about how Fox has beefed up its investment in making movies overseas for the markets where they’re produced — and how that’s going to affect what we see on U.S. screens:

“China is the second or third biggest market in the world at 50 percent local,” [Sanford Panitch] says. “India the fourth biggest at 90 percent local, France at 40 percent local, Germany at 30 percent local, Korea a billion dollar market 50 percent, Japan — actually, Japan [is] the biggest international market in the world, 60 percent local.”

Fox International Productions actually started off three years ago with a Japanese version of the movie Sideways — that’s the one about two guys touring wine country. “When we originally got into the business,” Panitch says, we thought, ‘We’ve got this great library, let’s take advantage of it.’ And ironically, local markets don’t want recycled Hollywood content.”

And really, why would they? Bollywood hardly needs need old American ideas. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has refreshed Hollywood’s interest in stories from abroad. That’s not a Fox picture, but Panitch says his division is introducing foreign books, scripts and directors to the larger Fox system.

“There’s a new aesthetic that’s coming out of people that weren’t schooled in traditional Hollywood ways,” he says. “There’s an incestuousness creatively here where we’re all reading the same publications and listening to the same music.”

It’s always nice when economic incentives line up in favor of creative storytelling. We’re already seeing something like this on television in the melancholic dramas we’ve imported from Israel and remake as In Treatment and Homeland. And it would be fascinating to see what conventions developed in international market end up sticking with American audiences. Could an Indian norm of chaster but emotionally charged romances find favor with devoutly Christian or Jewish movie-going audiences? Could grittier action sequences like the ones in Miss Bala, which Fox brought to the U.S. after one of the company’s executives based in Mexico found it and promised the director it wouldn’t be changed for American audiences, take the place of pyrotechnics? I haven’t watched enough recent Chinese movies to speculate on patterns there, though Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon certainly suggests there’s an American market for Chinese martial arts movies, a steady supply of which have reached our shores since.