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Review: ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED / Marina Zenovich (2008)

August 24th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Photo Credit: LA Times Collection, UCLA Library Department of Special Collections

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)
Directed by: Marina Zenovich
Written by: Joe Bini, Peter G. Morgan and Marina Zenovich
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Running Time: 99 min.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Since when does being a Holocaust survivor excuse one from raping an underage girl? That, and a publicity hungry judge eager to be a celebrity by association appear to be director Marina Zenovich’s prime arguments in her documentary defense of director Roman Polanski. They’re not enough.

In 1977, Polanski was hired to photograph young girls for Vogue magazine. (That’s like giving John Gacy a clown suit, a length of rope and a Cub Scout.) He brought his subject/victim, a 13-year-old girl named Samantha Gailey, to Jack Nicholson’s house (Jack was out of town), got her naked in a jacuzzi, plied her with champagne and Quaaludes and proceeded to “consensually” rape her. Ms. Gailey has since publicly forgiven Mr. Polanski.

According to Det. Phil Vannatter, the upstanding law enforcement agent who tried his best to keep O.J. behind bars, “(Polanski) did not perceive having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl as against the law. That was not in his culture, you know. It was a ’so what’ type of thing.”

On March 11, 1977 the film director was arrested for rape by use of drugs. Eleven months later, citing Judge Laurence J. Rittenband’s incompetence, Polanski fled to Paris and hasn’t set foot on American soil since, not even to pick up his best director Oscar for The Pianist. Admittedly, Rittenband is a piece of work. The tough sentencing senior judge loved celebrity trials and the limelight it afforded him. He ordered his bailiff to keep a scrapbook of his star-studded encounters. Rittenband even went so far as to solicit reservations from the media for a seat in his courtroom.

The lawyers that argued the case, Douglas Dalton for the defense and prosecuting attorney Roger Gunson, are given too much screen time. Dalton, still defending his ex-client, states, “People have the right to their own opinion, but they don’t have the right to their own facts.” Richard Brenneman, former writer for The Santa Monica Evening Outlook remembers a nasty joke that circulated at the time of the trial: The only reason Gunson was selected was “because he was a Mormon and the only member of the D.A.’s office that hadn’t had sex with an underage girl.” There comes a point in the film where the haggard Dalton and the still youthful Gunson alternate so many talking head close-ups, it looks like a dialog between Royal Dano and Phil Donahue.

Continue reading Review: ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED / Marina Zenovich (2008)

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Roman Polanski: New documentary examines the artist as a child rapist

May 6th, 2008 by Scott Marks

How do you separate the artist from the child rapist?

As a contemporary filmmaker, Roman Polanski has few peers. After Goodfellas, Bitter Moon was the best film of the 1990s. As a human being, he’s scum.

Thirty years ago Polanski was arrested at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and charged with raping the girl at the home of his friend, Jack Nicholson. Polanski admitted the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old Samantha Geimer, but instead of dealing with his henious act, Polanski fled to Paris before he could be sentenced.

Filmmaker Marina Zenovich has spent five years tracing every aspect of the case for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which she hopes will shed new light on Polanski’s crime.

According to WENN, the film is due to be televised next month. I’m surprised that Roman didn’t ask that the film be televised on Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel. It’s surprising that Billy Ray Cyrus didn’t hire him as a babysitter for Miley.

In Manhola Dargis’ New York Times review Ms. Geimer asks, “”Who wouldn’t think about running when facing a 50-year sentence from a judge who was clearly more interested in his own reputation than a fair judgment or even the well-being of the victim?”.’Wanted and Desired answers Ms. Geimer’s bombshell question with shocks of its own, notably corroborating interviews from Douglas Dalton, Mr. Polanski’s lawyer, and Roger Gunson, the assistant district attorney who led the prosecution. Together these two former opponents pin the blame for Polanski’s flight directly on the presiding judge, Laurence J. Rittenband (who stepped down in 1989 and died in 1994). Aided and abetted by an avalanche of fluidly organized visual material, the lawyers fill in the appalling details of what was effectively a second crime, one largely perpetrated by a celebrity-dazzled judge and the equally gaga news media he courted. This crime left two victims, Mr. Polanski, who was denied a fair trial, and Ms. Geimer, who was denied justice. As she wrote, ‘Sometimes I feel like we both got a life sentence.”‘

Zenovich says, “In 2003, talk of his winning an Oscar (for The Pianist) and whether he’d risk coming to accept it started me thinking about this case because nobody knew exactly what happened. Fearing sensationalism, nobody would talk to me. It took five years. Eventually those involved realized I had good intentions and just wanted to tell the story. I met the girl’s lawyer and then Samantha Geimer, the girl herself. Why she consented, I don’t know. Even her mother talked to me. Now blonde, clear-eyed, 45, with three kids, Samantha lives in Hawaii and she basically has forgiven him.”

I haven’t.

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