Polanski film makes waves at Sundance

A documentary that attempts to put the record straight about the 1978 Roman Polanski scandal, when the film director fled Hollywood to escape sentencing for the crime of "unlawful sexual intercourse" with a 13-year-old girl, is the talk of the Sundance Film Festival where it premiered on Friday. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, directed by Marina Zenovich, introduces new evidence that suggests that Polanski bought a one-way ticket to Paris - where he has remained ever since - when he realised he was about to become the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice.

According to the girl, Samantha Gailey, Polanski, then 44, had asked her mother if he could photograph her daughter for French Vogue. Her mother allowed a private photo shoot, which took place at the LA home of actor Jack Nicholson. "We did photos with me drinking champagne," Gailey recalled many years later in a 2003 interview. "Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realised he had other intentions.”

Polanski was initially charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, a lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor, but these charges were dismissed under the terms of his plea bargain, and he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

The Polish-born director, most famous then for his film Rosemary's Baby, completed 42 days of court-ordered psychiatric observation in prison and had been released on bail pending sentencing when, according to the documentary, it became clear to Polanski’s attorneys that the presiding judge, Laurence Rittenband, egged on by the media, was determined to severely punish Polanksi, when most experts involved believed he was not a threat and deserved only probation.

Entertainment Week’s film critic wrote of the documentary: "At first, I feared that the movie was going to tiptoe around the issue of Polanski's guilt. But no, it never denies that he committed a heinous crime. Yet by showing how a media feeding frenzy shaped the story, oozing like slime into the wheels of justice, and by going deep behind the closed doors of the hearings and negotiations, the movie creates an indictment of a legal system that was corrupted and warped by the celebrity culture - that is, by the very entitlement it was trying so hard to rein in."

Zenovich was prompted to make the film by the speculation in 2002 that Polanski might risk returning to America to pick up up his best director Oscar for The Pianist. He never did, but Zenovich got her film - and at Sundance it went down so well that a bidding war developed over the rights to distribute the film.