An Op-Ed
by Jon Zelazny
Critics, artists, and intellectuals the world over took last month’s release of The Ghost Writer as a fresh opportunity to proclaim both Roman Polanski’s genius and bemoan his despicable treatment by Los Angeles County and the Swiss government.
Don’t be fooled. The Ghost Writer is a perfectly capable adaptation of a rather pedestrian political thriller, but one can feel the maestro pouring thought and energy into every tiny nuance while either ignoring or disdaining the fact that the work as a whole is brittle, hollow, and often just plain silly. Ewan McGregor, a trouper, is saddled with playing a protagonist who seems less of a human being than an automaton tasked with carrying the plot; he reminded me of poor Sean Connery in Hitchcock’s Marnie… another case of a dynamic actor left stranded by an old director who didn’t seem to give a shit whether his male lead did anything at all apart from hitting his marks.
Is this pale Ghost Polanski’s last feature? It’s hard to say. He turns 77 this August, and remains under house arrest in Switzerland; unless his next picture is called Weekend at Roman’s, it’s hard to imagine any financiers obtaining the necessary insurance to employ him. Master filmmakers from Fellini to Billy Wilder to Robert Altman found it endlessly frustrating to attract backing in their sunset years even without being American criminal fugitives. If The Ghost Writer is indeed Polanski’s last major work, it’s sad to see him go out with a whimper instead of the bang of his 2003 Oscar for The Pianist.
Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski were the first movie directors I knew by name and studied as a teenager. Of the two, I related to Polanski more—quiet movies about lonely people plagued by isolation and fear will probably always strike a greater chord with sensitive youngsters than the more cerebral Kubrick oeuvre—but Polanski also happened to be Polish, and I also happened to look at lot like him. (I had to write a report in fourth grade about notable people of my ethnic background, but my childhood reverence for Thaddeus Kosciusko, Madame Curie, and Stan Musial was waning; in Polanski I finally found a fellow Pole I could revere as a vibrant, active role model. Joseph Conrad also made my list around that time.)
I saw Rosemary’s Baby (1968) first, courtesy of Rochester, NY’s independent Channel 31, which tended to leave a lot more R-rated material in their nightly 9 PM movies than any major network censor. Thanks to another cultural cache—Bob Hyatt’s Classic Video in neighboring East Rochester—I was then able to rent tapes of the Polanski classics Knife in The Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), and Chinatown (1974). I next found Polanski’s 1984 autobiography Roman in my college library, where I first learned of his 1977 arrest for Statutory Rape and the ensuing complications that led to his final flight from the U.S. I was surprised by his matter-of-fact admission of his actions, though not overly shocked, because Polanski also makes sure to tell you about all the other teenage girls he had sex with throughout his adult life, including the fifteen-year-old Nastassia Kinski. I knew about groupies and drugs from biographies of The Beatles, The Who, and Jim Morrison; apparently directors got the same kind of action… only this guy got caught. Well, too bad for him. I certainly didn’t give the case any further thought as I eagerly hit campus screenings of lesser-known Polanski fare like Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), Cul-de-sac (1966), The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Macbeth (1971) and The Tenant (1976).
Polanski’s output slowed dramatically in the eighties and nineties. I dutifully plunked down coin for the pretty good Frantic (1988), the pretty dismal Bitter Moon (1992), the good-enough Death and the Maiden (1994), and the mostly-embarrassing The Ninth Gate (1999), but my former hero was now a faint echo on my cultural sonar. A few more details about his criminal case dribbled out over the years: that he paid his victim a settlement, that his victim revealed her true identity, publicly forgave her seducer, and said she hoped the whole case would be dismissed.
I also got to know Polanski’s old friend Gloria, one of the beautiful girls in the famous newspaper photo of the director at the 1978 Oktoberfest… the picture that so enraged L.A. Judge Laurence Rittenband that he changed his mind about Polanski’s agreed-upon plea bargain. Gloria adamantly defends Roman as an exemplary human being who would never harm a fly, and believes he got totally shafted out here: first by a mother-daughter team of would-be gold-digging fame-whores, then a corrupt judicial system obviously prejudiced against charming, sophisticated, internationally acclaimed creative geniuses who speak with thick European accents and like to have a good time.
Two years ago, the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired exhumed the case. Polanski supporters tend to herald this as groundbreaking investigative journalism, when in fact it’s barely a notch above your average E! Channel special. What does it ultimately prove about the Polanski case? That Judge Rittenband was indeed a cranky, vain, and hypocritical son of a bitch who didn’t always keep his word on some tacit agreements between the prosecution and the defense. This is all Polanski supporters need to hear: this judge acted inappropriately, therefore Roman Polanski should be left alone.
When the maestro was suddenly arrested by Swiss police last September, I was as stunned as the rest of the cinemaniacal, and would have gladly signed the famous filmmakers’ stirring petition of protest had I actually been a famous filmmaker. I figured the best I could do was draft my own rousing howl of outrage for my faithful internet readers, and dutifully set to work reviewing all pertinent facts in the case. Two weeks, four drafts, and thousands of words later, I finally threw in the towel.
There is one only accepted legal defense for Statutory Rape: if the perpetrator is unaware of the victim’s true age. Scouring the victim’s leaked grand jury testimony and Polanski’s account of the crime in his book, neither mentions the victim—or any of her friends and family members who met the director prior to the crime—revealing to Polanski she was only thirteen. This seemed to me proof of his innocence: he never asked and thus never knew the girl’s true age, therefore it was a terrible mistake for him to plead Guilty...
…except he did know her real age. That fact was plainly established by the Court at the time Polanski entered his Guilty plea. Asked if he knew the girl’s age before they had sex, he replies that he knew she was thirteen. The Court asks him a second time, just to make sure, and Polanski again admits this most damning knowledge.
What many Polanski supporters fail to grasp is that once our hero pled Guilty, he was a convicted American criminal, entirely at the mercy of the judge assigned to sentence him, and any speculation regarding the motives and character of his underage victim and her family became essentially moot. Had Polanski really wanted to argue about such things, and potentially clear his name, he was of course entitled to a trial.
The case up until that point was pretty cut-and-dried; the events Polanski defenders cite as proof of official corruption came in the months that followed. Judge Rittenband at first seemed inclined to dispense with the case as the sentencing advisors recommended: probation, no jail time. He even allowed Polanski to fly to Europe to prepare his next movie. Then some of Rittenband’s friends and colleagues inappropriately advised him that he was being too lenient. And when he saw that photo of his convicted—but not yet sentenced—criminal partying in Germany, Rittenband became very angry, and clearly conflicted as to how severe a penalty this silver-tongued satyr really deserved.
As anyone who’s attended even traffic court in this country can attest, the last thing you want to do is annoy your judge, much less make them angry and unsure about what to do with you. Did Rittenband start to fuck with Polanski? Yes. Was that nice of him? No. Did his methods of fucking around constitute judicial misconduct? Maybe. Polanski’s prosecutor Roger Gunson certainly thought so; soon after the director fled, Gunson joined Polanski lawyer Douglas Dalton in filing a formal complaint against Rittenband. The judge did not defend himself; he simply excused himself from the case… which threw Polanski’s fate into the hands of Judge Paul Breckinridge. Much relieved, Polanski immediately flew back to the U.S., accepted Breckinridge’s sentence, paid his debt to society, and went on to direct a number of wonderful Hollywood classics.
No, that last sentence isn’t true. Polanski did not return when the mean judge stepped aside in 1978, or when the mean judge retired in 1989 or died in 1993. Polanski did not return the day after he won the Oscar, when even his worst detractors had to admit The Pianist (2002) was a breathtaking humanitarian achievement. Why has Polanski never come back? Probably because by absconding, he instantly doubled the length of his rap sheet; any Los Angeles judge assigned his case is now obligated to sentence him for the crime he pled Guilty to, plus convict and sentence him again for running away.
My admiration for Roman Polanski as a filmmaker has never died, and while our lifestyles have little in common, I do like that he hasn’t spent the last thirty years bitching and moaning about what this case did to his career and lasting legacy. He decided to get on a plane knowing he could never set foot in Hollywood again—a tragedy if you happen to be a revered filmmaker—and he has abided by it. (That’s a Polish trait: we may be battered by circumstances, but we march on, like oxen.) That Polanski has “already been punished” to some degree is inarguable; unfortunately, convicted criminals in this country have never enjoyed the privilege of deciding the manner and extent of their punishment.
This simple fact seems to elude all the Polanski-championing dimwits roaming the blogosphere who speculatively thrash about in the minutia of the case like it was the JFK assassination, as well as the more educated legal and moral hair-splitters who really ought to know better than to argue that the possible mitigating factors at issue are somehow sufficient to make Polanski’s criminal status simply disappear.
With Polanski’s victim at least satisfied that justice has been served, I guess my heart goes out most to the new innocent bystanders here: Polanski’s wife, their two young children, and the financiers of The Ghost Writer, all of whom had to contend with the terrible shock of seeing their 76-year-old husband, father, and business partner not just jailed, but become the focal point of contempt by an America far less tolerant of adults having sex with minors than it was thirty years ago. While hindsight in this case is far from 20/20, I strongly suspect that had Roman Polanski bit the bullet in 1978 and returned to California to serve even, say, one to three years in prison, his crimes would now be little more than a stinky footnote is his otherwise long and distinguished biography.
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