Park City Dispatch. 3. Update: David D'Arcy Responds.

In this country, Roman Polanski tends to be known for one thing - a sexual adventure with a young girl in 1977, for which he was accused of rape. The film director eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of having sexual intercourse with a minor and, in a special deal with a judge who turned out to be vain and corrupt, he was left with a 90-day "diagnostic" period in a California State prison.

Updated through 1/23.

Never mind that Polanski directed Chinatown, one of the best American films of its time, and classics like Knife in the Water and Repulsion, and the unappreciated gem of black comedy, Bitter Moon. Never mind that he won the best director Oscar for The Pianist, not even one of his best movies. To a lot of Americans, he's first and foremost a sexual predator, a jailbait junkie. To Europeans, he's a great director with a few very forgivable pecadillos - hardly the first person in the arts to have divided opinion along those lines. Think of Fatty Arbuckle, or Charlie Chaplin, or Michael Jackson. Think of Bill Clinton.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the new documentary by Marina Zenovich about the director which premiered at Sundance on Friday, focuses on the sex case, and presents evidence, most of it readily available, which shows the prosecution to have been be as wild a miscarriage of justice as the trial of OJ Simpson, with a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who makes Lance Ito look like Louis Brandeis.

The documentary is an impressive work of archaeology, which reconstructs the life and career of a man who was smeared by the press and the courts. The truth about Polanski may be lurid, but it's not necessarily the "truth" that we read in media reports about him. Rittenband made a deal with prosecutors and Polanski's lawyers (and with counsel for the victim), all of whom are in the film, which enabled Polanski to resume his work after a diagnostic stay in prison was completed, with a certification from a prison psychiatrist that he was not a psychopath. The judge's pride was hurt when pictures were taken after the director's release from prison, of a free Polanski, in Munich, at the Oktoberfest with beautiful women at his side. When Polanski returned to the US, Rittenband was determined to throw the director in jail for another 48 days. Fearing that, or worse, Polanski left the country (with funds provided by Dino De Laurentis) and he has never come back.

Polanski's biography has always been at least as dramatic as the stories in his films - bear in mind that it was Polanski's childhood wartime exploits in Nazi-occupied Poland that Jerzy Kosinski was said to have presented as his own in the harrowing "novel," The Painted Bird. Once you read that book, nothing that Polanski has imagined in his films, or has been accused of in court, seems so grievous. And let's not forget that his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family.

As with all archaeology, the puzzle that is reconstructed is never complete, although Zenovich is exhaustive and entertaining. We never hear from Polanski - no surprise. You can imagine why he would be suspicious of any American reporter. We never hear from the mother of Samantha Geimer, the sexy 14 year old (now a mature mother of her own children), who Polanski says set up his meetings with the girl at Jack Nicholson's house on Mulholland Drive with the intention of blackmailing him. What really did happen? We know that Geimer has publicly "forgiven" Polanski.

We are likely to learn more, since the film will be shown in theaters in the US and Europe, and in the UK on the BBC. International rights are being sold by the Weinstein Company, with the added prospect that Polanski himself may be able to promote the film in France, which may mean at the Cannes Film Festival. Are we looking at If I Did It: Part Deux?

Revenge is rarely so unexpected - or potentially so profitable - since Polanski's discussion of his involvement in the incident in the inevitable interviews to come could well eclipse the information in the film, and become even more newsworthy. Just imagine Polanski and his wife and children walking up those long steps in Cannes with Harvey Weinstein at his side. Polanski can "correct" any assertions made in the film that he doesn't like, and place the documentary showing him to be a victim of California justice in the frame of his choice. For the European market that chews up anti-American stories like raw meat, this is steak tartare. And steak tartare is not cheap.

Update, 1/23: Polanski Revisited: Revulsion

Oh God. What reactions. Not entirely unexpected, but is there anything about Roman Polanski that doesn't inspire controversy and disagreement? I wrote in a short dispatch about Marina Zenovitch's very fine documentary that Polanski was prosecuted for a "sexual adventure." And adventures can come in many forms, not all them pretty or legal.

Initially, Polanski was charged with rape, but then he was prosecuted for a lesser charge of having sexual intercourse with an underage person, which is a far lesser offense in the State of California. Zenovich interviews people involved in the case who say that most defendants charged with such an offense would have gone unpunished. My implied point, which I should have made more explicit, is that the nature of his encounter with young Samantha Geimer is still not clear. Since when do prosecutors allow a defendant to plead down a rape charge, if their own evidence makes it clear that indeed it was rape? The point I was trying to make in urging everyone to see the documentary is that there remains ambiguity in the court record and in the fact that Geimer's mother, who seems to have set up the encounter between Roman Polanski and her daughter, at Jack Nicholson's house on Mulholland Drive (which the mother seemed to know well), is absent from Marina Zenovich's film. If the adventure was rape, the alleged rapist should have been prosecuted for just that. I am hoping that the closer examination of all those events will make clear exactly what Polanski did. Then the word "adventure" might not be necessary. Let's all bear in mind that Geimer has publicly "forgiven" Polanski. What exactly does that mean? Perhaps, with the release of the film and the new attention it brings, we will learn a lot more about what she is forgiving.

The last thing I would do is approve of rape in any form. I was noting that there remains ambiguity here, one of the many factors that motivated Zenovich to make the film. I wasn't condoning anything that Polanski did to this young woman. But the mission Zenovich gave herself in this documentary is to explore what really happened. There are still some gaps.

As to my joking prediction of Polanski walking up the stairs at the Palais in Cannes with Harvey Weinstein this spring, this was a joke and an exaggeration. I'm sorry that my literal-minded friends couldn't see that. Beware of their reviews of comedies. But don't for a moment assume that whoever is distributing the film in France or anywhere else in Europe won't use Polanski's legally free status to promote the movie. When has Weinstein held back? Who's kidding whom here? This means that we'll probably see reporters trying to interview Polanski about the events in question and trying to explore and clarify the very ambiguities at the core of the new documentary. He was there, remember.

Here's how my friend Bingham Ray of Sidney Kimmel Entertainment reflected on the prospect of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired being released in the spring:

My feeling about Polanski is that this film here in North America, as a marketing and distribution guy, is that this film will do - I would really take my left arm off to have the opportunity to use this film as the engine, as the vehicle, to end all this torment, this 30-year torment for Roman Polanski. I really think it could be the vehicle to do for RP what Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris did for Randall Adams - got him off death row in Texas, and now he's a free man. For me, that's the hook for the film. That could be the driving element.

Thanks to David Hudson for letting the opinions fly. That's what we're here for. As Frank Mankiewicz notes in Alex Gibney's entertaining new doc on the highly opinionated Hunter S Thompson, Gonzo, Thompson's colorful (even psychedelic) coverage of the 1972 US presidential campaign was "the least accurate and most truthful." We could use more of that.

Yet facts, as they say, are stubborn things. The Polanski case is still missing some crucial ones.

-David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at January 21, 2008 5:29 AM