(no subject)
In reading the crtitic article in this month's GQ got be thinking to myself that I sure don't know very much about that era nor the directors noted in the article and the movies they have done. I'm not sure if I should be ashamed of myself or it is just the generation gap or the fact that...well I have no clue. I may be missing or have missed out on some good converation topics.
ROMAN POLANSKI, FRAMED
Whatever you think of his high crimes and dirty doings, Polanski remains one of the most provocative-and talented-directors in history. With a new HBO documentary agitating for his return from exile, Tom Carson inspects the life and work of Hollywood's most notorious filmmaker
By Tom Carson; Photograph by Bob Willoughby
just for the hell of it, let’s pretend Sharon Tate is a grandmother in Encino. Sure, her big-screen career fizzled after Francis Coppola cast her in Looking for Mr. Goodbar back in 1977. But people still talk with affection about how great she was on Falcon Crest. Because no one remembers a psychotic drifter who dropped acid and walked into traffic one day during the Summer of Love, the name Charles Manson means nothing to either her or you. Tate and her ex-husband still get along. He lives in their old house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Air. Yes, they had to split up once she caught Roman snapping naked pictures of their babysitter. But even though Polanski, too, has had his Hollywood ups and downs, he’s not doing badly right now. Everyone but Emma Watson (“No comment”) agrees the old guy did a terrific job of directing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
It didn’t work out that way. Polanski starred instead in both Hollywood’s ultimate real-life ’60s horror story and its dirtiest cautionary tale about ’70s decadence. The first one wasn’t by choice: Eight months pregnant in August of ’69, his wife was the Manson “Family’s” best-known victim, butchered along with four other people in and around the Cielo Drive house. Having recently scored big with Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski was in London. Just under a decade later, he bolted from Los Angeles to Paris-still his residence today-while facing sentencing for unlawful intercourse with Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old he’d allegedly drugged and sodomized at the home of his Chinatown star Jack Nicholson while Nicholson was away. Samantha Gailey Geimer is now almost twenty years older than Sharon Tate was when she died.
just for the hell of it, let’s pretend Sharon Tate is a grandmother in Encino. Sure, her big-screen career fizzled after Francis Coppola cast her in Looking for Mr. Goodbar back in 1977. But people still talk with affection about how great she was on Falcon Crest. Because no one remembers a psychotic drifter who dropped acid and walked into traffic one day during the Summer of Love, the name Charles Manson means nothing to either her or you. Tate and her ex-husband still get along. He lives in their old house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Air. Yes, they had to split up once she caught Roman snapping naked pictures of their babysitter. But even though Polanski, too, has had his Hollywood ups and downs, he’s not doing badly right now. Everyone but Emma Watson (“No comment”) agrees the old guy did a terrific job of directing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
It didn’t work out that way. Polanski starred instead in both Hollywood’s ultimate real-life ’60s horror story and its dirtiest cautionary tale about ’70s decadence. The first one wasn’t by choice: Eight months pregnant in August of ’69, his wife was the Manson “Family’s” best-known victim, butchered along with four other people in and around the Cielo Drive house. Having recently scored big with Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski was in London. Just under a decade later, he bolted from Los Angeles to Paris-still his residence today-while facing sentencing for unlawful intercourse with Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old he’d allegedly drugged and sodomized at the home of his Chinatown star Jack Nicholson while Nicholson was away. Samantha Gailey Geimer is now almost twenty years older than Sharon Tate was when she died.
Looking reassuringly well-adjusted and sensible, she’s one of the main talking heads in HBO’s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a look at the case that features new interviews with nearly everyone involved except Polanski himself. To anyone who remembers the rumors that swirled for years about The Girl’s identity-the most famous one was that Polanski’s prey was future Family Ties star Justine Bateman-it’s mesmerizing to watch her talk placidly on-camera. So is seeing some of the photos (not the revealing ones) he took of her that afternoon; looking ever so slightly apprehensive, there The Girl is, gazing into Roman Polanski’s lens all of an hour before he allegedly fed her that alleged fateful quaalude. The adult Geimer doesn’t have it in for Polanski, for whom she says she feels neither sympathy nor ill will. That’s her business, but what’s problematic is that the doc doesn’t condemn him either.
Polanski thought then-and presumably still thinks now-that he got trapped in a game of cat and mouse by a limelight-hungry judge, and not only his own lawyer but Geimer’s and the upright Mormon D.A. who prosecuted the case agree. After pleading guilty to charges considerably reduced from the original indictment, whose multiple sexual specifics are on the appalling side, he jumped the country only when the sentencing goalposts got moved one time too many. But the case is still outstanding, the reason he didn’t return to the States to collect his best-director Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist.
All the same, that Holocaust epic was blatantly and a bit too blandly devised as Polanski’s testament. He’d evaded the Nazis as a boy, but his mother died in Auschwitz. Tellingly, The Pianist was also his first movie in something like a quarter century to gain much critical traction or audience interest. The question Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired never asks but can’t help raising anyway is whether we’d still have a compelling interest in him as a filmmaker if he weren’t a haunting, sometimes repellent archetype. He’s the Man Who Survived the Twentieth Century, from Hitler and Manson to fleeing the Los Angeles court system just as the anything-goes ’70s went sour. The flip side is that it’s impossible to tell what we’d make of his movies if we weren’t aware of his biography, a confusion Polanski has never exactly discouraged.
*****
as if he’d been hell-bent on proving nothing daunted him, his first project after the Tate-LaBianca murders was 1971’s grisly Macbeth. On one level, the movie-produced, I swear, by Hugh Hefner-is just the period’s ridiculous idea of hip Shakespeare. If we didn’t know Polanski had directed it, we’d probably shrug. But since we do know, the gore is a creepy selling point-especially the slaughter of Macduff’s wife and children, with looming assailants, screaming women, and torn bodies glistening with blood. Wouldn’t you have liked to be on the set that day? Worse, the psychological interpretation that makes the most sense to me is pretty hideous: Lady Macbeth = Sharon Tate, luring Macbeth/Polanski to Hollywood, hubris, and chaos.
Even in Chinatown-not only an infinitely better movie but a more Shakespearean one, steeping us in the bright rot of L.A. in the ’30s-there’s the tawdry kick of knowing the hood who slits Nicholson’s nose open is the actor whose beautiful young wife got stabbed to death. Only five years after Tate’s murder, Polanski knew we’d know it. Yet the proof of his maddening brilliance is that his cameo isn’t meretricious. Linking the corrupt Los Angeles of a bygone day to the L.A. of the audience’s present, unnerving us with the added twist that Sharon Tate’s ex isn’t casting himself as one of Tinseltown’s casualties but a nasty little villain, his few minutes on-screen are the themes of Chinatown boiled down to a tabloid haiku.
That’s just the most famous example of how he tempts us to conflate his movies and his life. But to see how complicated all this can get, consider The Tenant, a little-known effort that from today’s perspective looks like a fascinating spin on his distress in exile. It’s a claustrophobic persecution fantasy about losing your identity, and not only is it set in Paris but Polanski plays the lead. Then you remember it was made in 1976-before he’d laid eyes, or anything else, on Geimer and two years before he drove to LAX and fled to France for good.
As creepy as it is amusing-and it’s very amusing-Rosemary’s Baby (released a year before the Tate murder) captures the menace hidden in ’60s giddiness just as flavorfully as Chinatown evokes the Watergate era through a 1930s prism. It’s both a terrific comic-book flick-you can’t really take horny Satan seriously, can you?-and a great pop metaphor for maternal and marital paranoia. The Polanski touch is that Mia Farrow is such an odd duck you aren’t sure what Satan sees in her. Yet Rosemary’s Baby was also retrospectively colored by a gruesome history: The Tate-LaBianca murders didn’t need any help to be horrific, but their vibe in the public mind would have been different if Polanski’s big hit in 1968 had been, say, The Love Bug. If you were Roman Polanski, wouldn’t you feel a little spooked about which scripts you agreed to direct next?
So far as I can tell, he never has, because he’s very tough. (That’s an evaluation, not a compliment.) An assumption that civilization is the cork in a wine bottle bursting with perversity was his calling card from his first feature, 1962’s Knife in the Water, made in his native Poland before he slipped across the Iron Curtain. All of his gifts-the command of tone, the attentiveness to the perturbing undercurrents of people’s gestures and demeanor, the fascination with antlike human activity-are on full display. But so is the quality I suspect might have stopped the later Polanski short of true greatness even if Samantha Gailey had never been born: a hard-heartedness that gets less interesting once you catch on that it’s immutable. He’s never thought people have anything to teach him about life, and it shows.
*****
even though Wanted and Desired soft-pedals it to keep our focus on the courtroom shenanigans that pushed Polanski’s “escape” button, something that’s fairly clear about that notorious afternoon at Jack’s pad is that Roman wasn’t a guy rashly succumbing to an impulse he’d never felt before. More to the point, his milieu put him under no pressure to find it abhorrent. To those of us who were around then, the doc’s big frustration is its failure to come to grips with the lunacy of ’70s permissiveness. Not only were egregious nudie books featuring barely pubescent girls being peddled as coffee-table connoisseurship, but in a just world, any number of aging rock musicians would be living down the block from Polanski in Paris today. As late as 1979, Woody Allen didn’t even think once about having the high-minded hero of Manhattan play hide the salami with plainly underage Mariel Hemingway, and why he isn’t living in Paris beats me.
Those were different times, as Lou Reed once put it, and so much for morality. From a movie lover’s point of view, the question is what we’ve been deprived of by Polanski’s flight from justice. In the three decades since, he’s never stopped working; whatever you think of the results, his determination to stay in the game is as commendable as, say, the late Robert Altman’s tenacity even after he went out of fashion. Hampered by his inability to shoot in countries where U.S. extradition treaties apply, he has benefited from the eagerness of name actors-Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate for one, and I bet Depp regrets it-to be directed by a legend. Yet Polanski’s post-1978 filmography is mostly to wince at: swank literary adaptations (Tess) in which he has no noticeable stake but lends his prestige to, odd ventures like Bitter Moon that reprise his old perversity without his old savvy. It’s no surprise he’s a cynic; he probably became one at the age of 6, and with good reason, too. What you didn’t expect was that he’d turn into a feckless one.
Even so, I’m not sure the story would be much different if he’d stayed in Hollywood. His later films don’t communicate the sense of being part of our present that made his earlier ones exciting. But from Coppola on down, plenty of ’70s directors who aren’t under Polanski’s constraints lost their way when tastes and the market changed. At best, with his relatively narrow range of specialties, he might have ended up as an improved Brian De Palma-and while I agree we could use one, that’s not the point.
Despite having four or five certified film classics to his name, even he probably realizes that the Roman Polanski Story is his best shot at immortality. I doubt there’s another living director HBO would run a splashy feature-length documentary about. As for us, we’ll never know how things would have played out if Sharon Tate were a grandmother in Encino. But isn’t that just the miniature version of wondering what Polanski’s life would be like if the Holocaust had never happened?
tom carson is a gq correspondent. To see his must-have DVD picks, click here.
ROMAN POLANSKI, FRAMED
Whatever you think of his high crimes and dirty doings, Polanski remains one of the most provocative-and talented-directors in history. With a new HBO documentary agitating for his return from exile, Tom Carson inspects the life and work of Hollywood's most notorious filmmaker
By Tom Carson; Photograph by Bob Willoughby
just for the hell of it, let’s pretend Sharon Tate is a grandmother in Encino. Sure, her big-screen career fizzled after Francis Coppola cast her in Looking for Mr. Goodbar back in 1977. But people still talk with affection about how great she was on Falcon Crest. Because no one remembers a psychotic drifter who dropped acid and walked into traffic one day during the Summer of Love, the name Charles Manson means nothing to either her or you. Tate and her ex-husband still get along. He lives in their old house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Air. Yes, they had to split up once she caught Roman snapping naked pictures of their babysitter. But even though Polanski, too, has had his Hollywood ups and downs, he’s not doing badly right now. Everyone but Emma Watson (“No comment”) agrees the old guy did a terrific job of directing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
It didn’t work out that way. Polanski starred instead in both Hollywood’s ultimate real-life ’60s horror story and its dirtiest cautionary tale about ’70s decadence. The first one wasn’t by choice: Eight months pregnant in August of ’69, his wife was the Manson “Family’s” best-known victim, butchered along with four other people in and around the Cielo Drive house. Having recently scored big with Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski was in London. Just under a decade later, he bolted from Los Angeles to Paris-still his residence today-while facing sentencing for unlawful intercourse with Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old he’d allegedly drugged and sodomized at the home of his Chinatown star Jack Nicholson while Nicholson was away. Samantha Gailey Geimer is now almost twenty years older than Sharon Tate was when she died.
just for the hell of it, let’s pretend Sharon Tate is a grandmother in Encino. Sure, her big-screen career fizzled after Francis Coppola cast her in Looking for Mr. Goodbar back in 1977. But people still talk with affection about how great she was on Falcon Crest. Because no one remembers a psychotic drifter who dropped acid and walked into traffic one day during the Summer of Love, the name Charles Manson means nothing to either her or you. Tate and her ex-husband still get along. He lives in their old house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Air. Yes, they had to split up once she caught Roman snapping naked pictures of their babysitter. But even though Polanski, too, has had his Hollywood ups and downs, he’s not doing badly right now. Everyone but Emma Watson (“No comment”) agrees the old guy did a terrific job of directing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
It didn’t work out that way. Polanski starred instead in both Hollywood’s ultimate real-life ’60s horror story and its dirtiest cautionary tale about ’70s decadence. The first one wasn’t by choice: Eight months pregnant in August of ’69, his wife was the Manson “Family’s” best-known victim, butchered along with four other people in and around the Cielo Drive house. Having recently scored big with Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski was in London. Just under a decade later, he bolted from Los Angeles to Paris-still his residence today-while facing sentencing for unlawful intercourse with Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old he’d allegedly drugged and sodomized at the home of his Chinatown star Jack Nicholson while Nicholson was away. Samantha Gailey Geimer is now almost twenty years older than Sharon Tate was when she died.
Looking reassuringly well-adjusted and sensible, she’s one of the main talking heads in HBO’s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a look at the case that features new interviews with nearly everyone involved except Polanski himself. To anyone who remembers the rumors that swirled for years about The Girl’s identity-the most famous one was that Polanski’s prey was future Family Ties star Justine Bateman-it’s mesmerizing to watch her talk placidly on-camera. So is seeing some of the photos (not the revealing ones) he took of her that afternoon; looking ever so slightly apprehensive, there The Girl is, gazing into Roman Polanski’s lens all of an hour before he allegedly fed her that alleged fateful quaalude. The adult Geimer doesn’t have it in for Polanski, for whom she says she feels neither sympathy nor ill will. That’s her business, but what’s problematic is that the doc doesn’t condemn him either.
Polanski thought then-and presumably still thinks now-that he got trapped in a game of cat and mouse by a limelight-hungry judge, and not only his own lawyer but Geimer’s and the upright Mormon D.A. who prosecuted the case agree. After pleading guilty to charges considerably reduced from the original indictment, whose multiple sexual specifics are on the appalling side, he jumped the country only when the sentencing goalposts got moved one time too many. But the case is still outstanding, the reason he didn’t return to the States to collect his best-director Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist.
All the same, that Holocaust epic was blatantly and a bit too blandly devised as Polanski’s testament. He’d evaded the Nazis as a boy, but his mother died in Auschwitz. Tellingly, The Pianist was also his first movie in something like a quarter century to gain much critical traction or audience interest. The question Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired never asks but can’t help raising anyway is whether we’d still have a compelling interest in him as a filmmaker if he weren’t a haunting, sometimes repellent archetype. He’s the Man Who Survived the Twentieth Century, from Hitler and Manson to fleeing the Los Angeles court system just as the anything-goes ’70s went sour. The flip side is that it’s impossible to tell what we’d make of his movies if we weren’t aware of his biography, a confusion Polanski has never exactly discouraged.
*****
as if he’d been hell-bent on proving nothing daunted him, his first project after the Tate-LaBianca murders was 1971’s grisly Macbeth. On one level, the movie-produced, I swear, by Hugh Hefner-is just the period’s ridiculous idea of hip Shakespeare. If we didn’t know Polanski had directed it, we’d probably shrug. But since we do know, the gore is a creepy selling point-especially the slaughter of Macduff’s wife and children, with looming assailants, screaming women, and torn bodies glistening with blood. Wouldn’t you have liked to be on the set that day? Worse, the psychological interpretation that makes the most sense to me is pretty hideous: Lady Macbeth = Sharon Tate, luring Macbeth/Polanski to Hollywood, hubris, and chaos.
Even in Chinatown-not only an infinitely better movie but a more Shakespearean one, steeping us in the bright rot of L.A. in the ’30s-there’s the tawdry kick of knowing the hood who slits Nicholson’s nose open is the actor whose beautiful young wife got stabbed to death. Only five years after Tate’s murder, Polanski knew we’d know it. Yet the proof of his maddening brilliance is that his cameo isn’t meretricious. Linking the corrupt Los Angeles of a bygone day to the L.A. of the audience’s present, unnerving us with the added twist that Sharon Tate’s ex isn’t casting himself as one of Tinseltown’s casualties but a nasty little villain, his few minutes on-screen are the themes of Chinatown boiled down to a tabloid haiku.
That’s just the most famous example of how he tempts us to conflate his movies and his life. But to see how complicated all this can get, consider The Tenant, a little-known effort that from today’s perspective looks like a fascinating spin on his distress in exile. It’s a claustrophobic persecution fantasy about losing your identity, and not only is it set in Paris but Polanski plays the lead. Then you remember it was made in 1976-before he’d laid eyes, or anything else, on Geimer and two years before he drove to LAX and fled to France for good.
As creepy as it is amusing-and it’s very amusing-Rosemary’s Baby (released a year before the Tate murder) captures the menace hidden in ’60s giddiness just as flavorfully as Chinatown evokes the Watergate era through a 1930s prism. It’s both a terrific comic-book flick-you can’t really take horny Satan seriously, can you?-and a great pop metaphor for maternal and marital paranoia. The Polanski touch is that Mia Farrow is such an odd duck you aren’t sure what Satan sees in her. Yet Rosemary’s Baby was also retrospectively colored by a gruesome history: The Tate-LaBianca murders didn’t need any help to be horrific, but their vibe in the public mind would have been different if Polanski’s big hit in 1968 had been, say, The Love Bug. If you were Roman Polanski, wouldn’t you feel a little spooked about which scripts you agreed to direct next?
So far as I can tell, he never has, because he’s very tough. (That’s an evaluation, not a compliment.) An assumption that civilization is the cork in a wine bottle bursting with perversity was his calling card from his first feature, 1962’s Knife in the Water, made in his native Poland before he slipped across the Iron Curtain. All of his gifts-the command of tone, the attentiveness to the perturbing undercurrents of people’s gestures and demeanor, the fascination with antlike human activity-are on full display. But so is the quality I suspect might have stopped the later Polanski short of true greatness even if Samantha Gailey had never been born: a hard-heartedness that gets less interesting once you catch on that it’s immutable. He’s never thought people have anything to teach him about life, and it shows.
*****
even though Wanted and Desired soft-pedals it to keep our focus on the courtroom shenanigans that pushed Polanski’s “escape” button, something that’s fairly clear about that notorious afternoon at Jack’s pad is that Roman wasn’t a guy rashly succumbing to an impulse he’d never felt before. More to the point, his milieu put him under no pressure to find it abhorrent. To those of us who were around then, the doc’s big frustration is its failure to come to grips with the lunacy of ’70s permissiveness. Not only were egregious nudie books featuring barely pubescent girls being peddled as coffee-table connoisseurship, but in a just world, any number of aging rock musicians would be living down the block from Polanski in Paris today. As late as 1979, Woody Allen didn’t even think once about having the high-minded hero of Manhattan play hide the salami with plainly underage Mariel Hemingway, and why he isn’t living in Paris beats me.
Those were different times, as Lou Reed once put it, and so much for morality. From a movie lover’s point of view, the question is what we’ve been deprived of by Polanski’s flight from justice. In the three decades since, he’s never stopped working; whatever you think of the results, his determination to stay in the game is as commendable as, say, the late Robert Altman’s tenacity even after he went out of fashion. Hampered by his inability to shoot in countries where U.S. extradition treaties apply, he has benefited from the eagerness of name actors-Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate for one, and I bet Depp regrets it-to be directed by a legend. Yet Polanski’s post-1978 filmography is mostly to wince at: swank literary adaptations (Tess) in which he has no noticeable stake but lends his prestige to, odd ventures like Bitter Moon that reprise his old perversity without his old savvy. It’s no surprise he’s a cynic; he probably became one at the age of 6, and with good reason, too. What you didn’t expect was that he’d turn into a feckless one.
Even so, I’m not sure the story would be much different if he’d stayed in Hollywood. His later films don’t communicate the sense of being part of our present that made his earlier ones exciting. But from Coppola on down, plenty of ’70s directors who aren’t under Polanski’s constraints lost their way when tastes and the market changed. At best, with his relatively narrow range of specialties, he might have ended up as an improved Brian De Palma-and while I agree we could use one, that’s not the point.
Despite having four or five certified film classics to his name, even he probably realizes that the Roman Polanski Story is his best shot at immortality. I doubt there’s another living director HBO would run a splashy feature-length documentary about. As for us, we’ll never know how things would have played out if Sharon Tate were a grandmother in Encino. But isn’t that just the miniature version of wondering what Polanski’s life would be like if the Holocaust had never happened?
tom carson is a gq correspondent. To see his must-have DVD picks, click here.