CONTEXT
On Friday, December 4, Polish film director Roman Polanski left a small detention cell in the district court prison
in Winterthur, near Zurich. Just two months earlier, on September 26, the 76-year Oscar winner had been
arrested on a U.S. warrant issued as he arrived at the Corso Cinema in Zurich to receive a lifetime achievement award. According to Swiss officials, Polanski posted $4.5 million in bail in order to be granted house arrest – a
first in Switzerland for a detainee in an extradition case.

Polanski, now wearing an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, cannot leave his three-story Swiss chalet in
Gstaad, where he is staying with his wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children. It is
unclear how long Polanski’s captivity will last. Swiss authorities are currently deciding whether to send the
director to Los Angeles to face sentencing in a 32-year old sex case.

Eurovision was there – in both Winterthur and then in Gstaad – as the story developed over the course of the day.

EUROVISION SPECIAL EVENTS
Eurovision provided a full range of services to broadcasters from around the world, and especially Europeans
who have been following this story closely over the last ten weeks. Eurovision provided traditional multiformat playout facilities and offered live standups in front of the principal sites of interest, including the Corso Cinema where Polanski was first arrested, the prison in Winterthur and, finally, the Polanski chalet near Gstaad for the director’s homecoming.

Of course, that makes it all sound very easy. This story was anything but, said Eurovision producers Bruno Beeckman and Ivan Stojanovic. Beeckman says, “The difficulty with this story was that the Polanski team was working very hard to keep the press off guard and, as a result, it was extremely tricky to figure out where the story was moving…literally! We didn’t know when Polanski was actually going to be released, when he’d be going to Gstaad, etc. In planning terms this made it very challenging, to say the least! ”

Beeckman said Eurovision met this challenge by having the best sources, including the owner of an excellent coffee bar with a view of the district court prison in Winterthur. He alerted Stojanovic and the Eurovision team
to what was happening near the prison. And in Gstaad, said Stojanovic, the owner of the salle des fetes
(village hall) located near Polanski’s chalet, tipped Eurovision to the exact time of the director’s release one
full hour before this news was announced to the press. One hour made all the difference.

“The other huge challenge was the cold,” says Beeckmam. “We arrived Saturday and the temperature was 4 degrees Centigrade. During the night, however, we got snowfall and the temperature dropped to minus nine. As a result, on Sunday the mechanism for pointing the dish to the right satellite was frozen. I ended up spending three hours on the roof of the truck with a blessed hairdryer before I could get it to work again.”

RESULT
Beeckman reports that Eurovision’s customers were extremely pleased with the set-up and facilities. “At times,” he said, “when there was no news coming, we had to take a financial gamble: Do we pull out and lose our prime live standup position or do we stay and wait it out? In Gstaad, for example, there was only room for two trucks on the hill facing the chalet – clearly the best position – and if we left our position we wouldn’t have gotten it back, that’s for sure! So, we waited. And, in the end, our gamble paid off and we saw a big increase in traffic from customers.”

“We love Switzerland and its people! The difference for us on this story was the help we received from local sources – the coffee bar owner and the owner of that salle des fetes in Gstaad. This is something that makes Eurovision what it is – our ability to establish the best possible local relationships. In this case that single hour of advance notice gave us the edge.”
— Bruno Beeckman, Eurovision Producer