text:
Annals of Law
The Celebrity Defense
Sex, fame, and the case of Roman Polanski.
"Roman is not defeated by anything," a friend says. "He is neither in denial nor apologetic about his life."Illustration by Philip Burke
On the morning of March 11, 1977, Detective Philip Vannatter, of the Los Angeles Police Department, arrived at his desk in the West L.A. division to find a report that had been placed there a few hours earlier. The document recounted how patrol officers had gone to the home of Samantha Gailey, a thirteen-year-old girl who lived in the San Fernando Valley, after her mother called police to say that Samantha had been raped by Roman Polanski, the movie director, who was forty-four at the time.
"In those days, I was too busy raising kids and paying bills to go to many movies," Vannatter recalled recently. "But of course I knew who Polanski was, because of Sharon Tate." Seven and a half years earlier, Tate, who was married to Polanski, and four other people were killed at the couple's home, in Benedict Canyon, by members of Charles Manson's "family."
Vannatter read the file and went to interview Gailey and her mother, reported on his findings to prosecutors in the district attorney's office, and then took the girl and the mother to speak to the lawyers themselves. According to Vannatter, "The prosecutor decided that we should go to the hotel where Polanski was staying and execute a search warrant"—to find, among other things, photographs of Gailey that she said Polanski had taken and quaalude pills like the one she said the director had given her. "The head of the D.A.'s office there told me to do the search but not to arrest him," Vannatter recalled. "They said they didn't want to do an arrest, but to do the case more slowly, through a grand-jury investigation. I was very unhappy when I heard about that. I thought we had plenty of evidence to arrest him, and that's what I thought we should do."
So, in the early evening, Vannatter and his partner went to the Beverly Wilshire hotel, in Beverly Hills, where Polanski was staying. "As we were walking through the lobby, I saw Polanski getting out of the elevator," Vannatter said. "I walked up to him and placed him under arrest. I thought, The heck with this. I wasn't going to let those D.A.s tell me how to do my job. Why not arrest the guy? Any other person would have been arrested. So I said I'm going to do what is right.
"After I read him his rights, I asked him to take me upstairs to his room, so I could do the search," Vannatter went on. "I noticed that he had something in his hand, and he was just about to drop it. So I put my hand under his and said, 'Why don't you drop it into my hand instead of on the floor?' " Polanski placed a single quaalude in Vannatter's palm.
In Suite 200, Polanski was jittery but coöperative. "As we say on the farm, he was nervous as a hen on a hot rock. He kept asking me for the quaalude back, so he could take it and calm down," Vannatter said. "By the time we got back to the station house, he told me he had had sex with her." (The question of exactly when Polanski first admitted having sex with Gailey is a matter of dispute.)
But the case did not end there, and, almost thirty-three years later, it's still not over. On March 24, 1977, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Polanski on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. On August 8, 1977, pursuant to a plea bargain, Polanski pleaded guilty to the least serious of the charges against him, having unlawful sex with a minor—statutory rape. On the eve of his sentencing hearing, which was scheduled for February 1, 1978, Polanski fled to Europe, and he has not returned.
Earlier this year, on September 26th, he was detained in Switzerland after American authorities made a provisional request for his arrest. Last week, Polanski's lawyers provided the deed to his apartment in Paris, the final piece of security to raise $4.5 million for a bail package that had been approved by the local courts. Under the terms of the arrangement, Polanski was then released to house arrest at his chalet, known as Milky Way, in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, having spent sixty-seven days in a Zurich detention center. The large amount of bail, and a requirement for him to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet, might seem extreme for a seventy-six-year-old man; but, considering that Polanski is one of the most famous fugitives from American justice in the world, his release from prison under any terms at all may seem like a generous deal for him.
The question of whether Polanski's celebrity has helped or hurt him hovers over his lengthy legal battle. For Vannatter, the lesson in Polanski's long flight from justice is that celebrities enjoy special privileges in the legal system—a subject on which he possesses a unique vantage point. Seventeen years after arresting Polanski, Vannatter, with his partner Tom Lange, led the investigation of the murder of O. J. Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. (Simpson was acquitted.) "I just think that celebrities get a sweetheart deal, more than the average guy does," Vannatter, who retired from the L.A.P.D. in 1996 and moved, part-time, to a farm he bought in Indiana, said. "I never believed in that."
It is easy to see why Vannatter and many others find such a moral in Polanski's story. Polanski has enjoyed a comfortable exile in Europe, where until this year he not only avoided prison but continued to make films. For decades, his conviction for a felony sex crime existed mostly as a footnote in a long and eventful life. But the Polanski story suggests an alternative view, too. Over the years, there have also been times when he has been penalized for his celebrity status. Mostly, celebrity warps the criminal process, and not always in a predictable direction. In Polanski's case, the effect of his celebrity was doubly, and inconsistently, pernicious; it obscured both how badly Polanski treated his young victim and how badly the legal system treated him.
Polanski's period of house arrest will mark a return to an alpine village that has long been a favorite escape for him. Friends of Polanski brought him to Gstaad to help him recover from his grief over the murder of Sharon Tate. On that visit, in the late sixties, Polanski discovered that Gstaad was, he wrote in an autobiography, "the finishing school capital of the world [with] hundreds of fresh-faced, nubile young girls of all nationalities." At the time, "Kathy, Madeleine, Sylvia and others whose names I forget played a fleeting but therapeutic role in my life. They were all between sixteen and nineteen years old. . . . They took to visiting my chalet, not necessarily to make love—though some of them did—but to listen to rock music and sit around the fire and talk." He described sitting in his car outside the schools at night, waiting for his "date" to climb out over the balcony after roll call. At this age, Polanski wrote, the girls "were more beautiful, in a natural, coltish way, than they ever would be again." The autobiography, "Roman, by Polanski," was published in 1984, seven years after his guilty plea, and suggests a lack of contrition about his actions. While exile and tragedy have been persistent themes in Polanski's life, so, too, has a sexual obsession with very young women. He started dating the actress Nastassja Kinski when he was in his mid-forties and she was in her mid-teens. He has been together with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, since he was fifty-one and she was eighteen.
And then, of course, there is the criminal case involving thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey. In his autobiography, he wrote of the day that Vannatter arrested him, "I was incredulous; I couldn't equate what had happened that day with rape in any form." In an interview two years after the crime, with Martin Amis, Polanski spoke in even blunter terms: "When I was being driven to the police station from the hotel, the car radio was already talking about it. . . . I couldn't believe. . . . I thought, you know, I was going to wake up from it. I realize, if I have killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But . . . fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls—everyone wants to fuck young girls!"
Roman Polanski has led the kind of life that has already called forth multiple biographies. He was born in Paris in 1933, and his survival into adulthood must count as something close to a miracle. His father, a Jewish émigré from Poland whom Polanski described as a "struggling entrepreneur," made the extraordinarily unwise decision to return his family to Kraków in 1936. After Hitler's invasion, the family was confined to the city's ghetto. His mother, four months pregnant, was taken to Auschwitz and gassed; his father was carried off, too, but somehow survived. On March 14, 1943, the Germans completed the liquidation of the ghetto.
"He has a world view which has been informed by terrible events, unspeakable events, that have never soured him as a person. There is no bitterness, no anger, though there is memory," Jeff Berg, his longtime agent, who spoke to Polanski while he was jailed, told me. "Roman is not defeated by anything," Peter Gethers, who edited his autobiography and wrote two screenplays with him, said. "He doesn't regret the things that happen to him, because he understands that things just happen. He is neither in denial nor apologetic about his life. He wouldn't use the word, but it's a very existential approach to life."
Polanski's early life seems to have instilled in him a voraciousness for experience—intellectual, physical, sexual. Amid the deprivations of postwar Poland, the young Polanski became an accomplished actor, skier, bicycle racer, fencer, mimic, and artist. Summer camp changed his life. "I became Troop 22's head of entertainment," he wrote in his autobiography. "Organizing, directing, and starring in all our Boy Scout shows. I had discovered my vocation."
In the early fifties, Polanski joined the threadbare Polish film community in Lodz. He made a handful of experimental shorts. His first full-length feature was "Knife in the Water," a dark, atmospheric drama about a married couple who pick up a young stranger on the way to an excursion on their boat. It earned Polanski an Academy Award nomination in 1963 for Best Foreign Language Film. "I flew into L.A. first class and was met by a huge limousine sporting a Polish flag on the fender," he wrote. (He lost to Federico Fellini, for "8½.")
Polanski landed in Hollywood at a propitious moment. "It was a great time in the movie business," Peter Bart, then the vice-president for production at Paramount and later the editor of Variety, said. "It was possible to be a great artist and make pictures that made money, too." Shortly after Polanski's Oscar nomination, Paramount acquired the rights to Ira Levin's book "Rosemary's Baby," a satanic thriller. After Polanski rejected Bart's initial requests that he direct the movie version, Bart asked his boss at Paramount, Robert Evans, to intervene. "Bob called up Roman and said, 'What have you got to lose? If you come to L.A., the worst thing that can happen is that you are going to have the best sex of your life.' Roman said, 'I'll be there.' "
"Rosemary's Baby" became a huge success, and Polanski found himself a member of a celebrated generation of young actors and directors, including Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma. "For the first time, we were making money," Bart said. "Roman started to like this community. He loved the fast life. He became a real star. He got good tables in restaurants. That had not been part of his life. You could see him change, to a degree. The unthinkable happened to Roman—he was actually happy."
Polanski even found a woman he loved, a young actress named Sharon Tate, and they married on January 20, 1968. When Tate was pregnant with their first child, she and Polanski rented a house on the quiet and remote Cielo Drive.
It was shortly before dinner on August 9, 1969, when Polanski, who was in London, received the phone call. His maid had found the bodies: Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant; Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hair stylist; Wojtek Frykowski, a friend of Polanski's from Poland; and Abigail Folger, Frykowski's girlfriend and an heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. (Steven Parent, who had been visiting the estate's caretaker, was shot outside.) Tate had been stabbed sixteen times, Folger twenty-eight, and Frykowski fifty-one (and shot twice). The word "PIG" was written in Tate's blood on the front door.
For months, the crime was unsolved, and it became the subject of a torrent of speculation, with some insinuations directed at Polanski. Time noted that "Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world's more offbeat crowds." The innuendo wounded Polanski, who assisted the police, and offered a reward for leads. Finally, on December 1st, the police announced that the case had been solved. Most of the Manson "family" members who had conducted the attacks were already in custody. Manson had no connection to Polanski, or to any of the victims.
"Sharon's death is the only watershed in my life that really matters," Polanski wrote. "Afterward, whenever conscious of enjoying myself, I felt guilty." After months of wandering, and much skiing, and eventually running out of money, Polanski directed a movie version of "Macbeth," which was a critical and commercial debacle. A little later, his friend Robert Evans asked him to direct a script, by Robert Towne, about the murky origins of modern Los Angeles. Polanski was reluctant, but Evans courted him by hosting a Passover Seder, with Kirk Douglas presiding and Sidney Korshak, the mob fixer, arranging the catering. Polanski agreed to direct "Chinatown." That film, which came out in 1974 and features a victim of incest trying to protect her daughter from the same fate, earned Polanski his next Academy Award nomination. (He lost to Coppola, for "The Godfather, Part II.")
In the years after Tate's death, Polanski lived a gilded itinerancy, mostly in Europe. He shot "The Tenant," a thriller in which he also starred, in Paris, and directed "Rigoletto" at the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich. In his autobiography, Polanski recounted an evening in Munich in late 1976 when he and a journalist friend went on a double date. At Polanski's hotel suite, the journalist stayed with his date, whom Polanski knew only as "Nasty," and "I took the other girl, a stunning blonde, to bed. By the time I surfaced the journalist had gone. Nasty was half-asleep in an armchair in the sitting room. Taking her by the hand, I led her back into the bedroom. We never repeated this threesome, though I saw a lot of both girls thereafter." Nasty was Nastassja Kinski, an aspiring German actress. Kinski spoke little English, and Polanski spoke no German. She was, according to Polanski, fifteen years old.
Late in the fall of 1976, French Vogue asked Polanski to guest-edit its Christmas edition. He took Kinski to the Seychelles and used photographs taken of her there in the issue. He then secured an assignment from Vogue Hommes, also based in Paris, to shoot a feature on adolescent girls, to "show girls as they really were these days—sexy, pert, and thoroughly human," he wrote in his autobiography.
Samantha Gailey. Photograph from Scope Features / Landov
Photograph from Scope Features / Landov
Polanski headed to Los Angeles, where he was preparing to direct an adaptation of "The First Deadly Sin," a novel by Lawrence Sanders, concerning a serial killer. He mentioned the Vogue assignment to a friend, Henri Sera, who suggested that the younger sister of a woman he was dating might make a good subject. This tip led Polanski to make an appointment to meet Samantha Gailey and her mother at their home in the suburb of Woodland Hills, on February 13, 1977. During the visit, Susan Gailey, a divorced actress who had played small roles in "Police Woman" and "Starsky and Hutch," did most of the talking. Also at the meeting was Susan Gailey's boyfriend, who was an editor at Marijuana Monthly. As Gailey later testified before the grand jury, Polanski showed her the Vogue Christmas issue and explained that his current project was to feature "young girls seen through his eyes and possibly an interview." Gailey recalled telling Polanski that her daughter was thirteen, "because I thought maybe she was too old. I thought he might want younger girls."
Although the legal case involving Polanski remains controversial and unresolved, the underlying facts are largely undisputed. Except for a few specific details, what happened between Polanski and Samantha Gailey is pretty clear.
At that first encounter with Samantha, at her home, Polanski claims to have been "disappointed" because she was "a good-looking girl but nothing sensational." Still, Polanski arranged to return a week later to take some photographs of Samantha. He arrived at about 4 P.M. on February 20th; Susan had laid out a selection of clothes that the girl might wear. Polanski said at first that he wanted to shoot in Benedict Canyon, but, concerned with the fading light in the late afternoon, he agreed with Susan's suggestion that he go to some scrubby hills just behind the Gailey home. Susan asked to go along—so that she could take her own pictures—but, she testified, "He said, No, that he would rather be alone with her because she will respond more naturally."
Polanski selected some clothes and drove Samantha to a hillside near her home. They walked and Polanski started taking pictures. He took a number of shots of her in different shirts and then, according to Samantha's grand-jury testimony, "He said, 'Here, take off your top now.' " She did, and they finished the session at about six-thirty in the evening, after Polanski had shot about two rolls of film. "She had nice breasts," Polanski wrote. "I took pictures of her changing and topless." Samantha did not tell her mother about the topless photos. When they returned to the house, Susan's boyfriend gave Polanski several issues of Marijuana Monthly to give to Jack Nicholson, in the hope of obtaining an interview with him.
Polanski then flew to New York to do research on police procedures for "The First Deadly Sin." When he returned to L.A., he made an appointment to see Samantha on March 10th. Polanski again arrived in the late afternoon, greeted her mother, and drove off with Samantha. They went first to the home of a friend, the actress Jacqueline Bisset, who lived on Mulholland Drive, in the Hollywood Hills. They took about fifty pictures, but the light was fading, and there were several guests on the premises. So Polanski called Jack Nicholson's house, on the other side of Mulholland. He reached Helena Kallianiotes, a professional belly dancer who worked as a caretaker for Nicholson as well as for Marlon Brando, who owned the compound. She told Polanski to come over.
Kallianiotes let Polanski and Samantha in, then chatted with them in the kitchen. Samantha said she was thirsty. Polanski poured glasses of Cristal champagne for the three of them. Kallianiotes left, and Polanski began taking pictures of Samantha sipping the champagne. "I just kept drinking it for pictures," she testified. Polanski again asked her to pose topless, which she did. "We weren't saying much now, and I could sense a certain erotic tension between us," Polanski wrote. Samantha dialled her mother, at Polanski's request, and he told Susan that they would be later than expected. Susan also spoke to Samantha, who told her that she was fine.
After the phone call, Polanski asked Samantha to pose in Nicholson's outdoor Jacuzzi. Polanski produced a yellow pill container with a quaalude broken into three parts. When he offered Samantha part of the pill, she hesitantly accepted. "I think I must have been pretty drunk or else I wouldn't have," she testified. (Polanski does not mention the pill in his book.)
Samantha removed all her clothes, except for her underwear, before entering the Jacuzzi. "I was ready to get in and he said, 'Take off your underwear.' So I did and then I got in," she testified. Polanski took more photographs of her, then removed his clothes and joined her in the Jacuzzi. When Polanski moved toward her, Samantha said she wanted to get out because her asthma was acting up. (This was not true; she'd never had asthma.) "I had to get out because of the warm air and the cold air or something like that," Samantha testified that she had said. She also said that she wanted to go home. Polanski wrote that "she said she'd stupidly left her medication at home." He encouraged her to join him in Nicholson's swimming pool instead, which she did. After a few moments, she left the pool and went inside to the bathroom.
At this point, Gailey's story and Polanski's diverge somewhat. She told the grand jury that he approached her in the bathroom "and told me to go in the other room and lie down." She went into the room, then asked again to go home. He said he would take her home later. He began kissing her, and then began performing oral sex on her. "I was ready to cry. I was kind of—I was going, 'No. Come on. Stop it.' " In light of the champagne and the quaalude, Samantha said, "I was kind of dizzy, you know, like things were kind of blurry sometimes. . . . I was mostly just on and off saying, 'No, stop.' "
Polanski with a group of women during the Munich Oktoberfest, in September, 1977—the photograph that infuriated Judge Rittenband. Photograph by Istvan Bajzat / Picture Alliance
Photograph by Istvan Bajzat / Picture Alliance
Polanski began having intercourse with her and asked whether she was on the pill (she said no) and when her last period was (she couldn't remember). Polanski said, " 'Oh, I won't come inside of you then,' . . . then he lifted up my legs farther and he went in through my anus," despite her saying that she didn't want him to. Samantha said she did not fight back physically, "because I was afraid of him," though she continued to ask him to stop.
In his book, Polanski described the sexual encounter this way: "We dried ourselves and each other. She said she was feeling better. Then, very gently, I began to kiss and caress her. After this had gone on for some time, I led her over to the couch. There was no doubt about her experience and lack of inhibition. She spread herself and I entered her. She wasn't unresponsive."
While Polanski and Gailey were in the bedroom, Anjelica Huston, Nicholson's girlfriend, arrived at the house. Soon after, Polanski and Gailey made an awkward departure—"I didn't mention making love in the TV room, though that must have been pretty obvious," he wrote. Samantha had hurried out before he did. "I was sitting in the car and I was crying," Gailey testified. According to Polanski, Samantha "talked a lot during the drive home" and mentioned that she was studying "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in school. "I tried not to wince when she started spouting Shakespeare in a strong Valley accent." Before they reached the Gailey home, she testified, he said to her, "Don't tell your mother about this, and don't tell your boyfriend either. . . . This is our secret."
Inside the house, Susan Gailey thought that her daughter was "weird looking." Samantha told her, out of Polanski's earshot, that she had invented a case of asthma, and then hastily retreated to her bedroom. Polanski showed Samantha's mother and her sister, Kim, the photographs from the first session, on the hillside. When they saw Samantha topless, the atmosphere in the room turned tense. According to Susan's testimony, "Kim stepped back. And I kind of stepped back. And the dog peed on the floor and Kim went for the dog and threw her out. And she doesn't do that. It must have been some kind of energy thing happening." (After the dog's accident, Kim testified, "Roman gave me a big speech on how to take care of dogs.")
Samantha's boyfriend came over later that night, and she told him what had happened. Kim overheard them, and informed Susan. Enraged at the news, Susan Gailey called the police. The police arrived after 11 P.M. and took a statement from Samantha, and then took her to a hospital, where she was examined. By the following evening, Vannatter had placed Polanski under arrest.
On the night of Polanski's arrest, his entertainment lawyer helped arrange his release on bail of twenty-five hundred dollars. The lawyer then quickly hired Douglas Dalton to take the criminal case. Dalton's representation of Polanski is now well into its fourth decade.
Once one of the most prominent lawyers in Los Angeles, Dalton has not practiced for years. "I turn eighty this year, and I've been retired for ten years," Dalton told me, as we sat in front of the fireplace in his Tudor-style mansion, near Hancock Park. "But I've kept my law license active for this one case, just because I feel what happened to Roman was so wrong. The system was totally out of control."
Polanski's arrest, on March 11, 1977, set off what was usually described as a media frenzy, even if the press reaction seems almost quaint when judged by the standards of the cable-news and Internet era. Crowds of photographers greeted Polanski at his court appearances, and Johnny Carson made jokes about him ("Close Encounters with the Third Grade"). But, by and large, Dalton was free to build his best defense—and, at least initially, to use Polanski's celebrity to his advantage. "We investigated this case and expected it to go to trial," Dalton told me.
The early signs were not promising for Polanski. Samantha Gailey's grand-jury testimony, which she gave on March 24, 1977, laid out a damaging case against him. On the issues of drugs and coercion, Vannatter's investigation established important points of corroboration. Undeveloped photos in Polanski's camera showed Gailey in Nicholson's Jacuzzi, and her drinking champagne. A pill bottle found in Polanski's hotel room featured a prescription for quaaludes. Gailey's concoction of the asthma attack, which Polanski acknowledged, suggested that she was trying to escape from him. Anjelica Huston also agreed to testify for the prosecution.
But the Polanski defense had options, particularly at a time when rape cases were treated in different ways than they are now. In her grand-jury testimony, Gailey acknowledged that she was not a virgin (she had had sex twice with her boyfriend, who was seventeen) and that she had once accidentally taken a quaalude. California had a rape shield law, which would have limited what Gailey could be questioned about on the stand, but it wouldn't have protected her entirely from public scrutiny. That process had begun. Dalton told the press, "The facts indicate that before the alleged act in this case, this girl had engaged in sexual activity. . . . We want to know about it, we want to know who was involved, when. We want to know why these other people were not prosecuted. And this is a thing we want to fully develop." Likewise, the character and behavior of Susan Gailey might have come into play in a trial. Susan could have been portrayed as a neglectful parent who, in essence, offered up her daughter in order to ingratiate herself with a famous director. In the climate of the time, it mattered little that attacks on Samantha and her mother might not have been relevant (or true); rape defendants had been acquitted with less.
Samantha's father, who was a lawyer, lived in another state, and he arranged for her to be represented by a Los Angeles attorney named Lawrence Silver. (Silver, who is still her lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.) He allowed Gailey to give testimony before the grand jury (which is a closed proceeding), but, mindful of the fate that often awaited rape victims, he did not want her to have to appear in a public trial. Dalton artfully leveraged Silver's concern for Gailey into a critical advantage for Polanski.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1977, Dalton and the prosecutors skirmished over access to evidence (Gailey's underwear was cut in half, so that both sides could test it) and other procedural issues. Any notion of a plea bargain stalled when the government insisted that, according to the policy of the district attorney's office, Polanski be allowed to plea only to the most serious count against him—in this case, rape with the use of drugs, which carried a sentence of at least three years. Dalton wanted a misdemeanor plea or, at most, a plea to the least serious count, statutory rape, which would likely incur a shorter sentence. Silver wrote a letter saying that Gailey did not want to testify, and her family did not want her to, either:
Long before I had met any other attorney in this case, my clients informed me that their goal in pressing the charges did not include seeking the incarceration of the defendant, but rather, the admission by him of wrongdoing and commencement by him, under the supervision of the court, of a program to insure complete rehabilitation. . . . Whatever harm has come to her as a victim would be exacerbated in the extreme if this case went to trial.
A reporter had told him that this "promised to be one of the most sensational Hollywood trials," Silver wrote. "This is not the place for a recovering young girl."
This was perhaps the clearest example of Polanski's celebrity helping him: the attention drove the victim to try to withdraw from the case. And so the D.A.'s office agreed to allow Polanski to plea to felony statutory rape, the least serious count in the indictment, which he did, on August 8, 1977.
At the insistence of the prosecution, Polanski received what's known as an "open plea"—that is, a plea where his sentence was left to the discretion of the judge, Laurence J. Rittenband. At the hearing, Polanski said he knew that the maximum sentence for his crime was "one to fifteen-twenty years in state prison." The prosecutor, Roger Gunson, asked Polanski, "Who do you believe will decide what your sentence will be in this matter?"
"The Judge," Polanski said.
"Who do you think will decide whether or not you will get probation?"
"The Judge."
Silver read his letter in open court. Midway through, Rittenband interrupted him. "I think some of the reporters are taking notes," he said. "You might read a little slower, so that they will be able to get this."
The plea bargain is the moment when the case pivoted from the story of what Polanski did to Samantha Gailey to the story of what the system did to him. Polanski's detractors focus on the first, his supporters on the second, but the two are intertwined, and both were shaped by the influence of Polanski's celebrity.
Polanski's fate was now in the hands of Judge Rittenband, who had, by 1977, established himself as an eccentric figure on the Los Angeles legal scene. A New York-born prodigy, Rittenband went straight from high school to New York University Law School; too young to take the bar exam after earning his law degree, Rittenband filled the time by acquiring an undergraduate education at Harvard. Wounded in the Second World War, he moved to California, started practicing law, and won appointment as a judge in 1961. Rittenband presided in the Santa Monica courthouse and could be a querulous, domineering presence on the bench. He snared many of the high-profile cases that tend to occur in that tony region of Los Angeles County—Elvis and Priscilla Presley's divorce, a child-custody case involving Marlon Brando, a paternity suit against Cary Grant.
Rittenband was a peripheral Hollywood player—a lifelong bachelor who juggled several girlfriends and enjoyed the friendship of movie stars at the Hillcrest Country Club. He also seems to have sought out the news media more than other judges. As Rittenband assumed control of the case, Polanski's celebrity, heretofore an important advantage for him, became more of a mixed blessing.
Since the nineteen-seventies, in California and elsewhere, criminal sentencing has changed dramatically, particularly with regard to the role of the judge. "California used to have a wide-open system, where the law gave the judge a lot of discretion about how long to sentence someone," Robert Weisberg, a professor at Stanford Law School, said. That system, which was known as "indeterminate sentencing," evolved into the current, very different regime, which is known as "determinate sentencing." Judges now have far less latitude, and discretionary parole has been abolished for most crimes in California. Sentences are more severe. Today, an adult defendant who pleaded guilty to statutory rape in California would likely receive about three years in state prison.
In addition, the sentencing process has become more formalized, with the judges being required to present explicit findings concerning how they reached decisions. Three decades ago, especially in Rittenband's courtroom, a case would often be resolved with an off-the-record understanding among the lawyers and the judge. Dalton was hoping for a deal that would lead to probation.
After Polanski's guilty plea, his chances for a light sentence at first seemed good. In the previous year, according to Polanski's defense team, none of the convictions for statutory rape in Los Angeles County resulted in a sentence to state prison, although many defendants spent time in county jails or lockups. (How many defendants had been allowed to plea down from charges as serious as those against Polanski is another question.) The report in the case by the probation officer, Irwin Gold, read more like the words of a starstruck fan than like those of a law-enforcement officer. After a lengthy summary of Polanski's tragic past, Gold wrote, "Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half-century. The motion-picture industry has proved [a] magnet to many of them." As for Polanski's crime, Gold wrote:
There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother, that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing; as one doctor has additionally suggested there was the lack of coercion by the defendant who was, additionally, solicitous regarding the possibility of pregnancy. It is believed that incalculable emotional damage could result from incarcerating the defendant whose own life has been a seemingly unending series of punishments.
Alvin E. Davis, the psychiatrist Gold cited, seemed equally smitten, writing that incarceration "would impose an unusual degree of stress and hardship because of [Polanski's] highly sensitive personality and devotion to his work." Davis saw the rape as the result of the "loss of normal inhibitions in circumstances of intimacy and collaboration in creative work, and with some coincidental alcohol and drug intoxication." In the report's twisted recitation, Polanski's proffer of alcohol and drugs to a child becomes exculpatory; his claim of a "lack of coercion" is accepted as fact.
But on September 16, 1977, three days before Polanski was to be sentenced, Rittenband called the lawyers in the case to an off-the-record private meeting in his chambers—a meeting that remains a crucial point of controversy in the case. According to Dalton, Rittenband said that he had decided to order Polanski to go to the state prison at Chino for a "diagnostic study" of his mental state, which might take as long as ninety days, under a California law that allowed for evaluation of prisoners before sentencing. Assuming that the report from the psychiatrists at Chino would be favorable, Dalton later wrote in a court filing, the Judge told the lawyers that "the diagnostic study at Chino would constitute defendant Polanski's punishment and that there would be no further incarceration." At the meeting, the prosecutor and the probation officer told Judge Rittenband that it was inappropriate to use a diagnostic study as a punishment, but the Judge ignored them, and an improvisational sentence was not, in fact, unusual for its time.
Rittenband made another request: he asked for what Dalton, in a 2008 affidavit, called a "charade of arguing our respective positions at the Probation and Sentencing Hearing on September 19." Dalton told me, "Rittenband said, 'You both argue. You argue for a prison sentence, and you argue for probation.' But it was all for show"—he had already made up his mind. (Gunson, the prosecutor, agrees with this version of events.) Three days later, at the public hearing, Gunson and Dalton did as Rittenband instructed. Rittenband also kept to his script and ordered the mental evaluation at Chino.
Dalton expressed no real objection to the diagnostic sentence, because his client appeared to be on a glide path to avoiding real prison time. "All we needed was a good psychiatric report, and Roman would have been free," Dalton said. But the defense lawyer made what turned out to be a miscalculation. At the September 16th meeting in Rittenband's chambers, Dalton asked the Judge to stay the order of incarceration until Polanski could complete work on a new directing project. In another example of Polanski's privileged status, Rittenband said that he would publicly authorize a reprieve of only ninety days, but he told Dalton, off the record, that he would have the option of asking for further stays, until the film was finished. [#unhandled_cartoon]
Polanski's plan to direct "The First Deadly Sin" had fallen through after his arrest, but he was quickly hired to direct a remake of the 1937 film "The Hurricane," which was to be produced by Dino de Laurentiis, a major figure in middlebrow seventies cinema. Polanski was happy to get the work, even if it appeared likely to fall below his usual aesthetic standards. (The plot was to include pearl divers getting caught in a giant clam.) "Dino's faith in me showed I had ceased to be a complete Hollywood outcast," Polanski wrote. He wanted Kinski to play the female lead. "Although Dino was bowled over by her looks, he doubted if she could acquire a sufficient command of English before shooting began."
De Laurentiis asked Polanski to go to Europe, to set up a West German distribution deal. While there, Polanski was photographed at an Oktoberfest celebration in Munich, sitting amid a group of attractive young women, and smoking a cigar. The picture went out on the U.P.I. wire, and was printed in the September 29, 1977, edition of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, with a caption stating that Polanski "enjoys the companionship of some young ladies at the Munich, Germany, Oktoberfest." The photograph infuriated Rittenband, who believed that Polanski was abusing the privilege of the stay of his sentence. Rittenband gave an interview to a gossip columnist (even then an unusual thing for a judge to do in a pending case), Marylin Beck, who reported that "Roman Polanski could be on his way to prison this weekend." Polanski's celebrity was turning against him.
Rittenband ordered Dalton to bring Polanski back to Santa Monica for a hearing about why the stay should not be revoked. At the hearing, on October 24th, Dalton called witnesses, including de Laurentiis, who established that Polanski had a legitimate business reason for being in Germany. Rittenband was persuaded to leave the stay in effect, but he declined to extend the ninety-day limit. Given the uncertainty of Polanski's situation, de Laurentiis fired him. (The film, directed by Jan Troell and starring Mia Farrow, was released in 1979, to dismal public response.) Polanski entered the Chino prison shortly before Christmas and was released, when his evaluation was complete, forty-two days later, on January 29, 1978. According to a letter to Rittenband from Chino's associate superintendent, "Staff are in agreement the granting of probation in this case would be in the best interest of all concerned."
On January 30th, the day after Polanski was released—and two days before he was to be officially sentenced—Rittenband summoned the lawyers for another private meeting. Rittenband said that he was unhappy with the diagnostic report, which he called a "whitewash." This was, to be sure, an understandable reaction, given that the Chino report, like the earlier probation report, was extremely deferential toward Polanski. But Rittenband also expressed discomfort with the way his rulings had been received by the public. He had changed his mind again, saying that he had decided to impose an additional prison sentence. The Judge said he was considering limiting the further punishment to forty-eight days—to complete the original ninety days—but only if Polanski then agreed to leave the United States for good. (Polanski did not have a green card; he is a French and Polish citizen.) At a meeting the next day, with Lawrence Silver, Gailey's lawyer, also present, Rittenband said, according to Dalton, that "there was nothing which could be produced by the defense that would influence him regarding his intended sentence."
Dalton informed Polanski of the latest dispiriting turn of events. It wasn't clear what Rittenband was going to do, although it did seem that there would be more prison time in Polanski's future—perhaps just forty-eight days, or perhaps more. (It was also not clear how Rittenband planned to enforce his deportation plan. State judges have no authority over immigration matters.) Polanski wrote in his autobiography, "Since it was clear that I had served my forty-two days in Chino for nothing, an obvious question arose: what had I to gain by staying? The answer appeared to be: nothing." In fact, Polanski had the right to appeal any sentence that Rittenband might impose, although prevailing would be a long shot. But Polanski decided that he had trusted the American legal system long enough. That evening, without telling Dalton, he took a British Airways flight to London. By the following morning, when Dalton appeared in front of Rittenband to announce that Polanski had fled, the director had flown on to Paris. At what would have been the sentencing hearing, on February 1st, Rittenband issued a bench warrant for the arrest of Polanski, who was now a fugitive.
Five days later, on February 6th, Rittenband held a press conference in his chambers to denounce Polanski for fleeing and to reveal that he planned to sentence him in absentia. He confirmed that he had wanted Polanski to leave the country after his release. Dalton responded by filing a motion to have Rittenband recused from the case for bias. (Holding a press conference about a pending case was one of the grounds.) Rittenband agreed to be replaced, though he refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing; if Polanski had returned, his case would have been heard by a different judge. In subsequent years, Rittenband nevertheless vowed to sit on the bench until Polanski came back, but he retired in 1989, and died in 1993, at the age of eighty-eight.
Polanski settled into a spacious apartment on the Avenue Montaigne. By August, 1978, seven months after fleeing the States, he was shooting his next film, "Tess," a movie version of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," starring Nastassja Kinski, who was still in her teens. (The story features an older man who either seduces or rapes the young Tess.) The film won Polanski his third Academy Award nomination. (He lost to Robert Redford, for "Ordinary People.")
Thus began Polanski's fruitful, if somewhat circumscribed, years of exile. "Roman is a superstar in the streets of Paris," his friend Thom Mount, who produced three of Polanski's movies, said. "He walks into a restaurant, and the headwaiter faints." Polanski's status as a fugitive from American justice has made it difficult, but not impossible, for him to continue to direct major films. "The case was more than just background noise," Jeff Berg, his agent, said. "It determined what he could do and where he could do it and with whom he could work." (Berg is the chief executive of International Creative Management, where I am also a client.) The terms of the Franco-American extradition treaty do not compel either country to extradite its own citizens, but Polanski has had to be careful in his travels; the United Kingdom, for example, has been off-limits. It was seven years between "Tess" and "Pirates," a misbegotten seafaring adventure starring, of all people, Walter Matthau. Two years later, in 1988, Polanski released "Frantic," a thriller set in Paris, with Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, who was then his girlfriend. It turned out to be his last production with a major American studio. In 1989, he married Seigner, and over the following decade they had two children.
The legal case against Polanski largely faded from view. Every few years, Dalton made an overture to resolve the case, but the prosecutors always insisted that Polanski return to the United States first. Polanski refused to expose himself to that level of uncertainty. In 1997, Dalton came close to brokering a resolution, which would have required no further prison time for Polanski; according to Dalton, the judge assigned to the matter, Larry Fidler, had more or less signed off on the plan but insisted that the final hearing be televised. (Fidler, through a spokesman, denied imposing this condition. Gunson supports Dalton's recollection.) In any event, Polanski scuttled the plan.
The last turn in the case began, oddly enough, with perhaps the greatest triumph of Polanski's career. Polanski and his producing partners had pieced together financing to produce an adaptation of a Polish memoir, first published in 1946, called "Death of a City." The story of a musician who survived the Warsaw ghetto while his entire family perished, the movie was called "The Pianist," and it was released in 2002; it proved to be a perfect vehicle for the director, who turned seventy the following year. At last, Polanski's long-sought Oscar seemed within reach.
The success of "The Pianist" raised the question of whether Polanski would return to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards, and the Los Angeles Times ran a story about his long exile. "I saw that article, and it piqued my interest," Marina Zenovich, a documentary filmmaker, told me. "Then a little while later I saw Samantha Geimer on Larry King." Over the years, Geimer, née Gailey, had become an increasingly vocal supporter of Polanski's return. In 1993, Polanski reportedly agreed to pay five hundred thousand dollars to Geimer as a settlement in a civil suit. (It apparently took several years, and more legal wrangling, for the money to be paid.) She never backed down from her grand-jury testimony, but as she moved toward her forties, with a family of her own, Geimer urged the district attorney to allow Polanski to return without having to go to prison. On February 23, 2003, Geimer and her lawyer, Lawrence Silver, appeared on "Larry King Live." Silver said, "What happened that day, both to Polanski and to some extent the American judicial system—I really think it was a shameful day." Zenovich recalled, "That didn't make sense to me. So I decided to investigate the case myself." A few weeks later, Polanski won the Oscar for Best Director; he remained overseas for the ceremony.
In a previous documentary, Zenovich had become obsessed with her subject, the French businessman, politician, and actor Bernard Tapie; now she focussed the same fanatical level of attention on the long-dormant Polanski legal drama. Zenovich created an especially damning portrait of Judge Rittenband, complete with interviews with his girlfriends. Most important, Zenovich tracked down a player whose role had been unknown to Polanski's team. David Wells was a deputy district attorney who had worked briefly on the case before Gunson took over, and he told Zenovich that he had spoken secretly with the Judge and pushed him to be tougher. Wells said that he had brought Rittenband the photograph of Polanski at Oktoberfest. "What I told him was . . . 'Look! He's giving you the finger. He's flipping you off,' " Wells told Zenovich. "He said, 'What? What? He's not getting away with that.' " (Wells has recently recanted this part of his interview, telling The Daily Beast, "I lied. . . . I thought it made a better story if I said I'd told the judge what to do." He declined to speak with me.) Wells's lobbying of Rittenband raised the spectre of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct and thus possible grounds for a dismissal of the case.
Zenovich's documentary, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," premièred at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008 and was broadcast on HBO later that year. The force of celebrity had buffeted the case once more. It had helped Polanski by persuading his victim to support a plea deal, and by inspiring a fawning probation report; it hurt him by drawing suspicion to his legitimate travel to Germany and prompting Rittenband's erratic decisions. Celebrity now helped by drawing Zenovich's attention, which, in turn, led to new questions about the case against him. His lawyers decided to make yet another attempt to resolve it.
Dalton recruited Chad Hummel, a partner at the Los Angeles firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, to help with the case. Armed with Zenovich's fresh disclosures, Hummel and Dalton separately met with the prosecutors to whom the Polanski file had been passed. (Gunson had retired in 2002.) Their answer was the same as their predecessors': no deal until Polanski returned. The question for his lawyers now became whether the misconduct by Wells and Rittenband was so egregious that a judge might dismiss the case even in the face of Polanski's refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of American courts.
There was a precedent of sorts. In July, 2002, Vanity Fair had run a long article about the restaurant Elaine's, in New York. The piece included an anecdote from Lewis Lapham, then the editor of Harper's, who said that Polanski, while in New York on the way to Los Angeles for Sharon Tate's funeral, had made a pass at a woman at Elaine's, telling her, "I will make another Sharon Tate out of you." Polanski denied it, noting that he had not stopped in New York on his way from London, and sued Vanity Fair's parent company, Condé Nast, in British courts. (Condé Nast also owns The New Yorker.)
In light of Polanski's checkered personal history, his decision to sue for injury to his reputation was presumptuous, to say the least. This was especially true because Polanski was what's known as a "libel tourist," who was using Britain's libel laws, which favor the plaintiff, to sue an American magazine. Even more audaciously, Polanski declined to go to England, fearing extradition in his statutory-rape case. Vanity Fair asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, but in February, 2005, the Law Lords, Britain's highest court, ruled that Polanski did not have to appear in person in order to pursue the case. (After a trial in which Polanski testified by video link, the jury awarded him about ninety thousand dollars.) The British decision was obviously not binding on an American court, but it suggested that he might be able to win in the United States, too, without showing up.
In December, 2008, the Polanski defense team filed a motion in L.A. County Superior Court, asking that the case be dismissed on the ground that Polanski had been deprived of due process of law. (The lawyers submitted Zenovich's documentary as an exhibit.) On February 17, 2009, Hummel appeared before Judge Peter Espinoza to argue the case. (The transcript noted, "Defendant Polanski not present in court.")
The diagnostic session at Chino, Hummel told Judge Espinoza, "was intended to be his entire sentence. . . . So this notion that somehow there was a fleeing from a sentence is not true." Hummel went on, "In our system, we simply cannot tolerate back-room communications between prosecutors and judges that influence a sentence and that cut out the defendant and his counsel from those communications. . . . That's at the heart of this request." Lawrence Silver joined in Polanski's motion, saying, "The time has come for this case to end, Your Honor."
The D.A.'s office responded with barely concealed rage. "This case is about a 44-year-old defendant who plied a 13-year-old girl with drugs and alcohol, then against her consent, committed acts of oral copulation, sodomy and sexual intercourse upon her," the attorneys wrote in a brief. "Petitioner's flight, whatever his motivations, and his failure to take responsibility for his crimes is at the heart of the extraordinary delays in this case."
Polanski's lawyer clearly made an impression on Judge Espinoza, who said that there had been "substantial . . . misconduct that occurred during the pendency of this case." Ultimately, though, he rejected Polanski's motion, under what is known as the "fugitive disentitlement doctrine." Espinoza ruled that Polanski "is not entitled to request any affirmative relief from this Court, as he remains at large." Polanski's team asked a three-judge Court of Appeal panel to intervene, and on July 30th that court gave them a surprising victory. In a departure from its usual practice, the court directed Espinoza to show cause why he should not hold "an evidentiary hearing, without requiring [Polanski's] physical presence, to determine whether the case should be dismissed in furtherance of justice." The Court of Appeal may have been subtly inviting the trial court to throw out the prosecution. It was perhaps Polanski's biggest court victory in thirty-two years—and, in the upside-down world of his case, the worst thing that could have happened to him.
Steve Cooley, who was elected in 2000, is the fifth Los Angeles County district attorney to preside over the Polanski prosecution. Cooley first won the job as the law-and-order alternative to his predecessor, Gil Garcetti, who was widely criticized for his handling of several high-profile cases, most notably the O. J. Simpson trial. Notwithstanding the passion of Cooley's argument, Polanski appeared to be making progress in the courts in the summer of 2009. Cooley had to respond.
Over the years, the district attorney's efforts to bring Polanski back to the United States seem to have been halfhearted. According to a chronology released by the D.A.'s office, prosecutors have made only a handful of significant gestures to international authorities, and there have been long gaps in even this effort. (The chronology lists nothing, for example, during the periods 1982 to 1985, 1989 to 1993, and 1995 to 2004.) The first time a provisional request for Polanski's arrest in Switzerland was actually prepared was on September 22, 2009. E-mails obtained by the Associated Press show that prosecutors in Los Angeles tracked Polanski as he moved between Austria and Switzerland in late September and weighed which country had a better extradition arrangement with the United States. "I don't have experience with any Austrian extraditions so I don't know how 'friendly' they would be to extradition on such a case," Diana Carbajal, a deputy district attorney, wrote in one message. This sudden rush of interest ended with Polanski's arrest on the night of September 26th, as he arrived at the Zurich airport, to attend a ceremony in his honor at that city's film festival.
The timing clearly suggests that the Los Angeles District Attorney's office moved to arrest Polanski because he seemed to have a real possibility of winning in the courts. Cooley has said, "It's about completing justice. Justice is not complete when someone leaves the jurisdiction of the court." Polanski's lawyers thus have to wonder whether, by bringing the motion to dismiss the case, they effectively prompted their client's arrest. Did Polanski's motion, meritorious though it might be, backfire? "There was prosecutorial misconduct and we felt we had to bring it to the court's attention," Dalton told me. "We had to do it."
After Polanski's arrest, the value of his celebrity went through its most precipitate rise and fall. Polanski's friends, many of them also celebrities, swept in with public, fervent support. The S.A.C.D., the French dramatic writers' guild, sponsored a petition, which said that Polanski had been arrested "in a case of morals." It went on, "Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him." Signers included Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, and eventually several hundred others from around the world. Bernard-Henri Lévy organized another petition, drawing support from Steven Soderbergh, Neil Jordan, Sam Mendes, Diane von Furstenberg, and Mike Nichols as well as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. This one said, "We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it." Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, called Polanski's arrest "not a good administration of justice." The producer Harvey Weinstein wrote about Polanski's "so-called crime."
With equal rapidity, an anti-Polanski backlash swept in. The petitions made no reference to the facts of the case, no acknowledgment of the seriousness of his crime, and no recognition that sex with a child—the rape of a child—was worthy of condemnation. Columnists across the political spectrum, from feminists on the left to conservatives on the right, found common cause in revulsion at both Polanski and his famous friends. Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation, "It's enraging that literary superstars who go on and on about human dignity, and human rights, and even women's rights (at least when the women are Muslim) either don't see what Polanski did as rape, or don't care, because he is, after all, Polanski—an artist like themselves." The Wall Street Journal's drama critic wrote, "Anyone who lives in a tightly sealed echo chamber of self-congratulation, surrounded by yes-men who are dedicated to doing what he wants, is bound to lose touch with reality." Polanski's public supporters, from Sarkozy to Weinstein, decided to discuss the matter no further. In the court of public opinion, the backlash won. The legalities were left to the Swiss courts.
As in the United States, the advantage in the legal battle in Switzerland shifted, over time, to Polanski. He was initially denied bail—understandably, as there was a "risk of flight"—and incarcerated in a small prison, built around a stone-paved courtyard. He could see the tops of a few trees and a bit of the sky from the barred window of his cell, and was allowed an hour of exercise per day. On October 2nd, Dalton, Hummel, and Reid Weingarten, a Washington lawyer, met with Justice Department officials to ask them not to make a formal extradition request. The lawyers did not succeed, but the official demand for extradition did not go to the Swiss until three weeks later. Polanski's lawyers put together a package of guarantees that included electronic monitoring and most of his personal financial assets, and that persuaded an appellate court to release him to his chalet. His legal challenges to the extradition order have only just begun, and probably will not be resolved until next spring.
Still, it appears likely that at some point Polanski will be returned to California, and there he will face a legal situation of daunting complexity. So much time has passed that it is difficult to know for sure how a court today would apply the rules in effect in 1977. Some sort of settlement—an agreement on a short prison term, perhaps—remains a theoretical possibility, but according to one member of Polanski's camp, "We have basically given up on making any sort of deal with Cooley. He won't talk to us." On December 10th, the Court of Appeal will hear arguments on the question of whether an evidentiary hearing can be held in Polanski's absence. If the court grants such a hearing, Polanski will be able to call prosecutors to the witness stand, including perhaps Cooley himself. The prospect of a hearing about government misconduct may bring the district attorney's office to the bargaining table at last.
If Polanski were to lose his case in the Court of Appeal, the advantage would shift to Cooley. A trial may be complicated, or perhaps even impossible, because the original file in the case went missing, and had to be re-created years later. It appears that Polanski will face some time in a California state prison upon his return: the extradition request stipulates, "The maximum time that Mr. Polanski could be sentenced to prison . . . is two years." Meanwhile, the director, who is wealthy but not nearly as rich as such near-contemporaries as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, has had lawyers in Paris, Zurich, Washington, Los Angeles, and Dallas, where Dalton's son works on the case.
Polanski will await the next turn in his own story in the elegant confines of Milky Way, which has a spectacular view of the Alps. Shortly before his arrest, Polanski had nearly finished editing his latest film, "The Ghost," a political thriller starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, and Kim Cattrall. The story concerns a former Prime Minister of Great Britain, whose troubled tenure leads him to settle in the United States to write his memoirs. According to the trailer, the protagonist's flight into exile came about because of "one decision I made . . . which wasn't in the interests of the U.S.A." It is Polanski's first film since "Chinatown" to be set primarily in the United States, but, given his legal difficulties, he had to use locations in Germany as substitutes for the New England setting. Through intermediaries, Polanski worked on the post-production process from his prison cell, and he will complete the project from the more congenial surroundings of his vacation home. Given the vertiginous shifts in fortune that he has endured throughout his life, Polanski is well suited to live with the current uncertainties, and the movie will be released, on schedule, early next year. ♦
Published in the print edition of the December 14, 2009, issue.
Jeffrey Toobin, the chief legal analyst for CNN, was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1993 to 2020.
More:CelebritiesCharles MansonCourt of AppealsCrime, CriminalsJack NicholsonLawsuitsLos Angeles, CaliforniaMovie DirectorsRapeRoman PolanskiVanity Fair


text:
, which described gravity as a fundamental property of space-time. He came up with a set of equations that relate the curvature of space-time to the energy and momentum of the matter and radiation that are present in a particular region.
Today, 100 years later, Einstein's theory of gravitation remains a pillar of modern understanding, and has withstood all the tests that scientists could throw at it. But until recently, it wasn't possible to do experiments to probe the theory under extreme conditions to see whether it breaks down. [6 Weird Facts About Gravity]
Now, scientists have the technology to begin looking for evidence that could reveal physics beyond general relativity.
"To me, it is absolutely amazing how well general relativity has done after 100 years," said Clifford Will, a theoretical physicist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "What he wrote down is the same thing we use today," Will told Live Science.
A new view of gravity
General relativity describes gravity not as a force, as the physicist Isaac Newton thought of it, but rather as a curvature of space and time due to the mass of objects, Will said. The reason Earth orbits the sun is not because the sun attracts Earth, but instead because the sun warps space-time, he said. (This is a bit like the way a bowling ball on an outstretched blanket would warp the blanket's shape.)
Einstein's theory made some pretty wild predictions, including the possibility of black holes, which would warp space-time to such a degree that nothing inside — not even light — could escape. The theory also provides the foundation for the currently accepted view that the universe is expanding, and also accelerating.
General relativity has been confirmed through numerous observations. Einstein himself famously used the theory to predict the orbital motion of the planet Mercury, which Newton's laws cannot accurately describe. Einstein's theory also predicted that an object that was massive enough could bend light itself, an effect known as gravitational lensing, which astronomers have frequently observed. For example, the effect can be used to find exoplanets, based on slight deviations in the light of a distant object being bent by the star the planet is orbiting.
But while there hasn't been "a shred of evidence" that there's anything wrong with the theory of general relativity, "it's important to test the theory in regimes where it hasn't been tested before," Will told Live Science.
Testing Einstein's theory
General relativity works very well for gravity of ordinary strength, the variety experienced by humans on Earth or by planets as they orbit the sun. But it's never been tested in extremely strong fields, regions that lie at the boundaries of physics. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]
The best prospect for testing the theory in these realms is to look for ripples in space-time, known as gravitational waves. These can be produced by violent events such as the merging of two massive bodies, such as black holes or extremely dense objects called neutron stars.
These cosmic fireworks would produce only the tiniest blip in space-time. For instance, such an event could alter a seemingly static distance on Earth. If, say, two black holes collided and merged in the Milky Way galaxy, the gravitational waves produced would stretch and compress two objects on Earth that were separated by 3.3 feet (1 meter) by one-thousandth the diameter of an atomic nucleus, Will said.
Yet there are now experiments out there that could potentially detect space-time ripples from these types of events.
"There's a very good chance we will be detecting [gravitational waves] directly in the next couple of years," Will said.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), with facilities near Richland, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, uses lasers to detect miniscule distortions in two long, L-shaped detectors. As space-time ripples pass through the detectors, the ripples stretch and compress space, which can change the length of the detector in a way that LIGO can measure.
LIGO began operations in 2002 and has not detected any gravitational waves; in 2010, it went offline for upgrades, and its successor, known as Advanced LIGO, is scheduled to boot up again later this year. A host of other experiments also aim to detect gravitational waves.
Another way to test general relativity in extreme regimes would be to look at the properties of gravitational waves. For example, gravitational waves can be polarized, just like light as it passes through a pair of polarized sunglasses. General relativity makes predictions about this polarization, so "anything that deviates from [these predictions] would be bad" for the theory, Will said.
A unified understanding
If scientists do detect gravitational waves, however, Will expects it will only bolster Einstein's theory. "My opinion is, we're going to keep proving general relativity to be right," he said.
So why bother doing these experiments at all?
One of the most enduring goals of physics is the quest for a theory that unites general relativity, the science of the macroscopic world, and quantum mechanics, the realm of the very small. Yet finding such a theory, known as quantum gravity, may require some modifications to general relativity, Will said.
It's possible that any experiment capable of detecting the effects of quantum gravity would require so much energy as to be practically impossible, Will said. "But you never know — there may be some strange effect from the quantum world that is tiny but detectable."
Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
It Could Be Thousands of Years Before Physicists Devise a Theory of Everything
Historic First Images of a Black Hole Show Einstein Was Right (Again)
Einstein's Theory of General Relativity Just Survived a Massive Crash in Outer Space
Why Relativity's True: The Evidence for Einstein's Theory
Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer
Tanya was a staff writer for Live Science from 2013 to 2015, covering a wide array of topics, ranging from neuroscience to robotics to strange/cute animals. She received a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a bachelor of science in biomedical engineering from Brown University. She has previously written for Science News, Wired, The Santa Cruz Sentinel, the radio show Big Picture Science and other places. Tanya has lived on a tropical island, witnessed volcanic eruptions and flown in zero gravity (without losing her lunch!). To find out what her latest project is, you can visit her website.
Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer on
Science Newsletter: Subscribe
Fugitive Bear Escapes Jail Cell, Scales 3 Electric Fences and Is Now on the Run
Why JFK Believed His Bold Moonshot Could Actually Happen
Mysterious, Glowing Tardigrade May Have Swallowed Part of Its Own Mouth
Dozens of Pilot Whales Washed Up on Georgia Beach, and Beachgoers Came to the Rescue
5G Network: How It Works, and Is It Dangerous?
Dignifyed

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Mar. 09-11, 2018: Chueh group retreat to Santa Cruz with a hike in the Wilder Ranch State Park.
February 7, 2018: Will Chueh was one of two recipients of the 2018 Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the Materials Research Society.
November 1, 2017: Will Gent is one of 16 Stanford students honored with a Siebel Scholar award.
October 27, 2017: Madhur Boloor's PhD oral examination! His dissertation is entitled, "Solid-State Architecture for an Elevated-Temperature Photoelectrochemical Cell."
June 23, 2017: Yiyang wins the Young Scientist Award from the International Society of Solid State Ionics at SSI-21 in Padua, Italy.
January 23, 2017: Michael Machala's PhD oral examination! His dissertation is entitled, "Engineering Active and Stable Perovskite Oxide Catalysts through Fundamental Insight."
Jan 4, 2017: Kipil Lim receives a 2017 Ludo Frevel Crystallography Scholarship Award from the ICDD.
November 22, 2016: Will Chueh receives the BASF/Volkswagen 2016 "Science Award Electrochemistry" in Berlin, Germany for the group's insights on the fundamental dynamics in Li-ion batteries.
July 28, 2016: Will Gent receives the ALS Doctoral Fellowship in Residence to build on his use of cutting-edge synchrotron techniques to study batteries.
May 14, 2016: Will Chueh is one of 13 young faculty in the chemical sciences to receive a 2016 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.
May 13, 2016: Yiyang Li's PhD oral examination! His dissertation is entitled, "Ion Insertion and Phase Transformations in LixFePO4 at Multiple Length Scales."
April 18, 2016: Yiyang wins the Daniel Cubicciotti Student Award from the Electrochemical Society.
February 23, 2016: Will Chueh is one of 126 early-career scholars to receive a 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship.
Dec. 8 2015: Zixuan presents his first talk at the APXPS workshop.
Dec. 4, 2015: Chueh group holiday dinner, Korean bbq at Jang Su Jang.
December 2, 2015: Xiaofei Ye wins the MRS Gold Graduate Student Award.
Nov. 5, 2015: Xiaofei Ye's PhD oral examination! His dissertation is entitled, "Elevated Temperature Photo-electrochemical Water Splitting," co-advised by Will Chueh and Nick Melosh.
June 17, 2015: BG wins an SSI-20 Poster Award for his poster entitled "Direct quantification of surface capacitance in ceria using ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy."
April 7, 2015: Yiyang Li wins the MRS Gold Graduate Student Award.
June 16, 2014: Xiaofei Ye wins the Stanford MS&E department's 2014 O. Cutler Shepard award for outstanding graduate student.


text:
Employment law is intrinsic to all organisations and affects every working member of the population. It is subject to more changes than any other area of law and can be highly political. It is often litigious. We believe that keeping our clients abreast of the most important developments and providing them with the tools and knowledge to handle everyday issues for themselves is a crucial part of our role as advisers and advocates.
Mishcon Enable is our range of interactive training services designed to help clients avoid common pitfalls, and negotiate situations in-house, saving time and money. Where claims do arise, appropriate training programmes will help your defence, protecting your business and reducing legal costs.
We take a practical, case study based approach to training and can train your managers, your workforce and your HR or legal teams. Training is delivered by knowledgeable lawyers, illustrating issues with their own experience, enabling you to manage employment issues fairly and effectively.
We work with our clients to understand their issues and objectives and tailor our training accordingly. We have outlined some common training topics below, however we are happy to discuss specific areas of concern for your business.
Appropriate preventative measures such as training and well drafted contracts and policies can save you money and protect your reputation by:
Reducing the risk of claims
Helping you to defend claims
Saving on legal costs
Potentially reducing your insurance premiums.
Disciplinaries and Grievances
Warren is suspected of e-mailing confidential information to his personal e-mail account. Following an investigation, you also have reason to believe that he has printed off the company's client database. You invite him to a disciplinary hearing. The next day Warren calls in sick, explaining that he suffers from work related stress. Two days later he submits a lengthy grievance in which he claims that he has been bullied by a senior manager.
Each workplace dispute is different but knowing which steps to take to deal properly with disciplinary matters and grievances will help an employer to resolve them at an early stage. Where a dispute cannot be resolved internally, a properly conducted process will help protect the business if an employee brings a claim.
Our practical, case study based training will ensure your managers understand the proper procedures and processes to follow, can deal with grievances quickly and effectively, and can spot when to ask for help, before a problem escalates. Training is tailored to the particular needs of the business and the audience and is suitable for your HR or legal teams, as well as managers within the workforce. We can also review your policies and procedures to ensure you are protected.
"A very informative and practical seminar, delivered in an entertaining style."
European HR Manager, Banking & Finance
Managing Redundancies
Your business is going through a restructuring which will affect ten of its sites. A number of jobs are likely to be lost as a result. You have been tasked with co-ordinating the redundancies and are thinking about applying the "last in, first out" principle.
Is this an acceptable approach? What other issues should you consider before embarking on the exercise?
Carrying out redundancies can be complex and requires careful planning. Furthermore, where 20 or more redundancies are proposed, an employer will be subject to a number of additional obligations. Getting it wrong could be costly, both financially and to the reputation of the business.
Our training will protect your business by ensuring that your managers understand their obligations and the common pitfalls when managing a redundancy process. Training is tailored to the particular needs of the business and the audience. It is suitable for your HR or legal teams, as well as managers within the workforce. We can also review any policies you have in place to ensure you are protected.
"A useful educational tool linking relevant practical examples which create an HR professional's guide to contemporary HR issues in a concentrated snapshot."
Head of HR, A Government Regulatory Authority
You are the manager of a large customer relations team. A member of the team has told you that Gemma, a long-serving employee, has made disparaging remarks about the company on Facebook. You are also told that Gemma has joked about an incident with a client. Other members of the team are Gemma's "friends" on Facebook but you are not, so you cannot access the comments.
What do you do next?
Issues involving social media are becoming increasingly common in the workplace. They can range from disclosure of the employer's confidential information on social networking sites, to employees revealing their own wrongdoing on Facebook, and to the misappropriation of business contacts built up on networking sites such as LinkedIn. Knowing how best to deal with these issues, while ensuring appropriate policies are in place, will go a long way towards protecting employers against the risks posed by employees' use of social media.
Our practical, case study based training will give your managers the tools to address the specific workplace issues that apply to social media, while avoiding the numerous pitfalls. Training is tailored to the particular needs of the business and the audience. It is suitable for your HR or legal teams, as well as managers within the workforce. We can also review any policies you have in place to ensure you are protected.
"Noticeable 'a-ha' moments around the room and up to the minute context. Good stuff!"
Group HR Director, Fashion and Retail.
Appropriate Performance Management
Yasmine has been in the same role for four years. There have been some problems with her performance throughout her employment and she is often abrupt towards her colleagues. However, these concerns have been largely ignored. She now has a new manager who wishes to dismiss Yasmine and replace her with a more junior colleague whom the manager thinks will perform much better.
Can the manager dismiss Yasmine and, if so, how?
Dealing with poor performers is an important part of managing a business efficiently. However, in order to protect the business from disputes with employees who feel they have been treated unjustly, the performance process must be carried out properly and fairly. By knowing when and how to raise performance issues and how to support employees in addressing them, managers will be better placed to deal with and resolve problems at an early stage, before they escalate.
Our training will ensure managers understand how to manage poor performance fairly and in a timely manner, helping to protect your business from claims.
Training is tailored to the particular needs of the business and the audience. It is suitable for your HR or legal teams, as well as managers within the workforce. We can also review any policies you have in place to ensure you are protected.
"Ignoring or circumventing the procedures when dismissing an employee is likely to have a bearing on the outcome of any subsequent employment tribunal claim…"
Managing Sickness Absence
A manager is concerned about the level of absence of two employees. John has been off for a total of 15 days this year, one or two days at a time with various seemingly minor ailments. Jane started suffering from a bad back last year and after being signed off, has now been on sick leave for seven months. The team is short staffed and struggling to manage the workload.
What should the manager do?
Managing sickness absence is one of the more difficult areas both for HR and managers, even more so if the employee suffers from a disability. Line managers play a central role in managing employees' absence and their resumption of work. Having effective policies in place and ensuring that all concerned know how to deal properly with sickness absence will help reduce it.
Sickness absence can be a significant burden for employers. Actions taken in the early stages of sickness absence can result in an early return to work and be more cost-effective than bringing in somebody new.
Our practical, case study based training will give your managers the tools to manage sickness absence fairly and effectively. Training is tailored to the particular needs of the business and the audience. It is suitable for your HR or legal teams, as well as managers within the workforce. We can also review any policies you have in place to ensure you are protected.
"Well structured, concise and informative. Issues were raised intuitively, resulting in thought provoking dialogue."
Group HR Director, Fashion and Retail
Zaid is a long serving employee. He recently celebrated his 65th birthday, which has prompted jokes from some of his colleagues that he should retire. He has also found brochures on his desk with details of retirement properties for sale. Zaid has not complained but a junior colleague has contacted HR to say that she is finding this behaviour offensive.
Should HR take any action and if so what?
Knowing where to draw the line between playful banter and harassment is not always easy. Dealing properly with complaints of harassment and discrimination is important, as are promoting equal opportunities and taking steps to prevent discrimination. Effective policies are only the start: managers also need to be thoroughly trained on those policies. This will help employers increase their chances not only of avoiding claims in the fist place but also of successfully defending claims if they do arise.
Our practical, case study based training will give your team an understanding of how their (often 'innocent') jokes or actions may be construed as harassment, an understanding of how to deal with complaints sensitively and appropriately, and how to prevent discrimination occurring.
Training is tailored to the particular needs of the business and the audience. It is suitable for your HR or legal teams, as well as managers or the workforce as a whole. We can also review any policies you have in place to ensure you are protected.
"Educational and fun."
Susan is on maternity leave. During that time, Valentina is covering for Susan as well as carrying out her own duties. Valentina's performance is excellent and she is managing both roles with ease. Susan has indicated that she is returning to work next month but the head of the department wants Valentina to carry on with both roles. At the same time, another employee in the team has requested to reduce his hours to enable him to look after an elderly relative.
What options are open to the head of department? What should she do next?
Most employers will have to deal with pregnancy, maternity and flexible working issues at some stage. With new rules allowing fathers to take extended paternity leave, as well as proposals for shared parental leave and more flexible working rights, knowing how to act appropriately will become ever more important.
Our training will ensure your managers understand the rights and obligations of both the employer and employee, and how to deal fairly with flexible working requests.
"Good training helps managers achieve positive outcomes… Those responsible for using and operating the disciplinary rules and procedures, including managers at all levels, should be trained for the task."
Conducting Investigations
A team leader has received an anonymous letter with allegations against Gerard, an employee in his team. The letter claims that Gerard has made a large number of false expense claims and that he has worked for another business on days taken as sick leave. The team leader wants to call Gerard to a disciplinary hearing immediately.
Is this the right course of action?
When allegations are made against an employee, the employer may need to consider a number of issues. Is it appropriate to suspend the employee; how do you deal with an anonymous tip off; and how far do you have to investigate the allegations before you can proceed to a disciplinary hearing? Knowing how to conduct an investigation properly is an essential tool in ensuring that any subsequent disciplinary (procedure and dismissal) is fair.
Our training will ensure your managers understand when and how to conduct investigations, and that they can do so in a sensitive and fair manner. Training is tailored to the particular needs of the business and the audience. It is suitable for your HR or legal teams, as well as managers within the workforce. We can also review any policies you have in place to ensure you are protected.
The Boundaries of Bribery
A senior manager at a marketing agency is planning an event for its top five clients as part of the launch of a new product. He is arranging a luxury golfing weekend in Mallorca with a stay in an all inclusive five star hotel. The clients will be flown first class and may bring their spouses.
Should the managing director be concerned?
The line between corporate hospitality and bribery is not always clear and the consequences of getting it wrong can be significant. The relatively new offence of failing to prevent bribery means that a business can be criminally liable for the acts of its employees. However, it can protect itself against liability by having adequate policies and procedures in place and by training its staff.
Our practical, case study based training will ensure your team understands the line between bribery and corporate hospitality, what to look out for and what their obligations and liabilities are.
Get it in Writing
Every employee must be provided with a written statement of their key terms and conditions. However, this basic document will rarely be sufficient to regulate the employment relationship or protect the business in a robust way.
Properly drafted employment contracts, both for senior and junior employees, along with sound employment policies and procedures, should be put in place to cater for the eventualities of employment (including when things go wrong) and to safeguard the business.
Our bespoke employment document packages will help you do just that, by providing you with documents tailored to your business at a competitive fixed fee.
You can opt for the basic level package where we draft template documents for you to implement, or you can choose to supplement the package with technical training and advice. We will walk you through the documents, explaining the significance of each of their provisions. This will help you understand the documents and put you in an excellent position to negotiate their terms with employees. Either way, you will receive a quality product that will help protect your business and reduce costs.
You can choose one or more of the following:
Contracts of employment
Executive service agreements
Staff handbooks
Compromise agreements
Dealing with Sexual Harassment
You are the HR Manager and have received two separate complaints from two female members of staff, alleging sexual harassment by John, a senior manager. One relates to an incident at an office Christmas party 14 years ago and the other to a series of alleged acts over the last few months. Both employees wish to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. What should you do?
Dealing with sexual harassment complaints can be complex and requires a careful and balanced approach. Particular difficulties may also arise when handling historical allegations. The investigation into alleged sexual harassment is a vital part of the procedure and it is essential that this is conducted sensitively and methodically.
However, tackling sexual harassment in the workplace is about more than dealing with complaints appropriately. Taking steps to prevent harassment is key to employers, not only to protect staff and create a better working environment for all but also to protect the employer against liability.
Our practical, interactive training will give your delegates valuable knowledge on what constitutes sexual harassment, how to spot it and how to deal with it effectively, while demonstrating your organisation's zero tolerance approach to harassment. The training is tailored to the particular requirements of the business and can incorporate your own internal policies to raise awareness and improve compliance. The training can be designed to suit different levels and responsibilities of staff within your organisation.
Unconsious Bias and Avoiding Discrimination
We all make decisions that we think are rational, objective and free from bias. But the reality is that everyone is affected by unconscious bias, which can in turn lead us to make bad choices. We offer training on how to identify unconscious bias, and how to put in place measures that are designed to reduce its impact on our behaviour. This will help to improve your ability to recruit and promote the right person for the role, to manage teams fairly and avoid discrimination.
The cost for your training will depend on the number and length of the sessions and the number of participants. We always provide a fixed cost upfront to include preparation and delivery of the sessions.
If you would like to discuss the HR training needs of your business, please contact Will Winch.
Daniel Naftalin Partner, Chair of Employment
corridors of
Discover what you can do with transformation
Now & NextA Gender for Change – in partnership with The Economist
Now & NextWork: In Progress – in partnership with The Economist
The team at Mishcon de Reya are top-notch - it would be hard to find a more dedicated, talented and fun team to work with.
Chambers and Partners - 2017
Their employment team is phenomenally strong. They are well known for complex or difficult litigation, and they have aggressive but sensible employment litigators.
A strikingly good team for both employers and employees alike and is fantastic for contentious matters
Legal 500 - 2016
Employment > Businesses
Employment > Individuals
Recruitment firms and furlough
Mishcon Academy: Digital Sessions - Delivering a UK digital revolution powerhouse: bridging the talent deficit
IP Annual Review: Trade Marks, Designs & Copyright
Issue 4 | Feb 2021
Recruitment Watch
Issue 20 | Feb 2021
Confirmation from the High Court that Independent Contractors are covered by the Recruitment Industry Regulatory Regime
The new post-Brexit sponsorship system
"Contracted Out" Services under the New IR35 Off-Payroll Working Rules
Welcome clarification for employment businesses and hirers on the practical application of the Agency Workers Regulations 2010
Brexit and Trade: Goods and Services
ASA reviews ban on harmful gender stereotyping
Government responds to transparency in supply chains consultation
Issue 19 | Oct 2020
Looking forward to…. future equity fundraisings
Looking forward to…. a new way of working
Looking forward to…. incentivising employees during COVID-19/ in challenging economic times
The Recruitment Services Sector and the IR35 Off-Payroll Working Rules – Where are we now?
Innovation in the Recruitment Sector with LaunchPad acquisition by OutMatch
Schrems II – sending data to the US (and other non-EEA countries) is now a major challenge
Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act – Ipso Facto Termination Clauses
Brand identity and advertising during a pandemic
Issue 18 | Mar 2020
The year ahead in employment law
Working time declaration – Avoiding the pitfall
Capital Gains Tax - Entrepreneurs' Relief
Virtual reality and the recruitment sector
IR35 – where are we now?
Issue 17 | Dec 2019
Shining a light on sexual harassment in the workplace
Issue 16 | Sep 2019
Incentivisation in the Blockchain era
Settling the Unsettled: Pre-Settled and Settled Status for EU nationals
Weathering uncertainty through technology and growth
April 2020 Changes to IR35 for the Private and Public Sectors
Digital disruption and discrimination in the workplace
It's a numbers game


text:
Mantle - Various - Sonic Boom: The Art Of Sound (CD)
Label: Hayward Gallery - ISBN 1-85332-208-3 • Format: 2x, CD Compilation • Country: UK • Genre: Electronic, Rock • Style: Experimental, Avantgarde
Seething Reel - Trauma Club - Headology (CD), Nothingness - Malegoat - Plan Infiltration (CD, Album), Somebody - Aerosmith - Aerosmith (CD, Album), 夢ん中 - 山崎ハコ* - 歌っ子 (CD, Album), Intro - Gutted Corpse - Human Remains (Cassette), On Fire - Price Of Silence - Demo (Cassette, Album), Packet Prelude - Digital Underground - Sex Packets (Vinyl, LP, Album), Hmm Conduit (Finale), Sä Oot Mun Unelma, Beibe - Gim Kordon - Ei Ole Helppoo (Vinyl, LP), What A Difference A Day Makes - The Bob Wilber All Star Jazz Band - Sing Or Play With A Band! (Vinyl, Walkin With Jesus, Cenotaph - Bolt Thrower - War Master (Cassette, Album), Secret Rock N Roller - Citizen (14) - Sex And Society (Vinyl, LP, Album), Jane Morgan - The Sounds Of Silence (Vinyl, LP, Album), I Know That My Redeemer Liveth
9 thoughts on " Mantle - Various - Sonic Boom: The Art Of Sound (CD) "
Sonic Boom has been published to accompany an exhibition of sound art selected by the musician and writer David Toop. Focusing on the work of twenty-six artists, it includes texts on each and an essay on the history of sound art by David Toop, who has also compiled a double CD of work by the artists/5(14).
Sonic the Hedgehog is an album that was made by Arcade Music Co. in the year It has various songs on it, some based on music from Sonic games, others not. It has a music video for the album's single "They Call Me Sonic" (that uses some footage from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and the scrapped game Sonic Ride) and a demo for the game Comix centsilohougusa.outammogputiparockstaninosviecont.co cover artwork for the album is the Catalog No.:
Zulutaur says:
The Rugby psychedelicists' third album, released in , takes their minimal sound to various extremes. Peter Kember aka Sonic Boom provides the harsh fuzz of single Revolution and the blissed-out pulsations of How Does It Feel?, and there are several examples of Jason Pierce's proto-Spiritualized acid gospel anthems.
Aug 30, · The Album is mostly the (superior) Japanese soundtrack, but they also include American fan favorite "Sonic Boom". The culmination of Sonic's 20th anniversary was the game "Sonic Generations" and I wish they had also released that soundtrack for that game with the excellent remixes/5.
Oct 09, · This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does.
Oct 18, - Explore Merry Sioux's board "Sonic References" on Pinterest. See more ideas about Sonic, Sonic art, Sonic fan art pins.
Product Title Sylvania SRCDM Portable CD Boom Box with AM/FM Radio Average Rating: () out of 5 stars ratings, based on reviews Current Price $ $ 99 - $ $
Sonic the Hedgehog is an American comic book series based on Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog video game franchise and the successor of Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog. It is distributed by IDW Publishing and began on 4 April The comic series began with the first four issues being released each week in April, followed by a monthly release of subsequent issues starting in May
Russell Mills is a British artist who was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, United Kingdom in He has produced record covers and book covers for Brian Eno, the Cocteau Twins, Michael Nyman, David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel, and Nine Inch Nails.. As a recording artist he has collaborated with many musicians, for example David Sylvian, Ian McCulloch and Peter Gabriel.


text:
Asia News Network
Doors 'Saigon' opened for Filipino actress
By Chung Joo-won
Published : Oct 28, 2014 - 20:40
Updated : Oct 28, 2014 - 20:40
Her "Miss Saigon" character Gigi opened the door to "amazing" opportunities for Rachelle Ann Go. Thus, although she has until May 2015 to play the jaded bar girl, the 28-year-old Filipino singer-actress said she was exploring options that would require her to either stay in London or come home to Manila after her stint in the musical's West End revival.
Rachelle flew in recently for a three-day engagement with a new clothing brand, and met reporters in a media gathering. She said auditions for new cast members for the musical's next run had started. "We were told not to worry because not everyone will be replaced, and that we will be asked if we want to keep our current roles or consider others."
While the role of Kim, currently being played by 18-year-old Filipino-American Eva Noblezada, would seem desirable, Rachelle said, "I see Eva perform onstage and her job is so vocally and emotionally draining."
She is looking for an agent, she said, "Because you need one in order to try out for other productions." Another attractive prospect for her is the role of Eponine in "Les Miserables." She's watched several other musicals, besides, like "Phantom of the Opera," "Matilda," "Wicked" and "The Bodyguard."
The most unforgettable part of her "Miss Saigon" journey so far was the 25th anniversary gala show, which was joined by original lead cast members Simon Bowman (Chris), Jonathan Pryce (The Engineer) and Lea Salonga (Kim).
Rachelle is thankful that "The Movie in My Mind" ― her character Gigi's show stopper ― was among the numbers picked for the special program. She performed it with Lea, who told her that she was amazing. "I wept tears of joy," said Rachelle.
The reviews were just as encouraging. "I'm so grateful; I didn't think I would be noticed ― it's really a small role," she said.
She has yet to reward herself for this accomplishment. "I'd like to build my dream house for my family," she said. "I'm saving up for that."
The onset of winter reminds Rachelle that she should take extra care of her voice. "Cold weather makes singing a little more difficult. I have to be very disciplined," she pointed out. "I can't afford to be sick because no one will take care of me."
She does eight shows a week, and on at least two occasions, she had to will herself into performing. She related: "I fell ill on Aug. 30, a day before my birthday. I had a cough, which made my voice hoarse ― and I was supposed to do two shows, that day. I was crying while singing during the matinee show, because I couldn't reach the notes. I had to excuse myself for the second show because I didn't want to ruin it."
The second time her health failed was, mercifully, after the 25th anniversary show. "We were rehearsing every day. It was a combination of stress, nerves and lack of sleep," she recalled. She has since learned not to push her body.
"It's better to rest than risk getting sidelined for much longer."
Rachelle trains with Mary Hammond (one of Lea's teachers) whenever her schedule permits. "I'm learning new techniques and my vocal stamina has improved," she said.
By Allan Policarpio
(Philippine Daily Inquirer)


The Raspberry Pi Zero's best feature is its size, and DIYer Frederick Vandenbosch took advantage of that by using the Zero as a tiny little information display.
The idea here is to simply create a little information display powered by the Zero that'll display just about whatever you want. Using an OLED screen and a 3D printed case, Vandenbosch shows you how to display a wide variety of potential info, but you can edit it with just about whatever you want. Head over to Vendenbosch's site for the guide.