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"FacebookPinterest\n\nJust for the hell of it, let\u2019s pretend Sharon Tate is a grandmother in Encino. Sure, her bigscreen career fizzled after Francis Coppola cast her in Looking for Mr. Goodbar back in 1977. But people still talk with affection about how great she was on Falcon Crest. Because no one remembers a psychotic drifter who dropped acid and walked into traffic one day during the Summer of Love, the name Charles Manson means nothing to either her or you. Tate and her exhusband still get along. He lives in their old house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Air. Yes, they had to split up once she caught Roman snapping naked pictures of their babysitter. But even though Polanski, too, has had his Hollywood ups and downs, he\u2019s not doing badly right now. Everyone but Emma Watson (&amp;quot;No comment&amp;quot;) agrees the old guy did a terrific job of directing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.\n\nIt didn\u2019t work out that way. Polanski starred instead in both Hollywood\u2019s ultimate reallife \u201960s horror story and its dirtiest cautionary tale about \u201970s decadence. The first one wasn\u2019t by choice: Eight months pregnant in August of \u201969, his wife was the Manson &amp;quot;Family\u2019s&amp;quot; bestknown victim, butchered along with four other people in and around the Cielo Drive house. Having recently scored big with Rosemary\u2019s Baby, Polanski was in London. Just under a decade later, he bolted from Los Angeles to Paris\u2014still his residence today\u2014while facing sentencing for unlawful intercourse with Samantha Gailey, a 13yearold he\u2019d allegedly drugged and sodomized at the home of his Chinatown star Jack Nicholson while Nicholson was away. Samantha Gailey Geimer is now almost twenty years older than Sharon Tate was when she died.\n\nLooking reassuringly welladjusted and sensible, she\u2019s one of the main talking heads in HBO\u2019s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a look at the case that features new interviews with nearly everyone involved except Polanski himself. To anyone who remembers the rumors that swirled for years about The Girl\u2019s identity\u2014the most famous one was that Polanski\u2019s prey was future Family Ties star Justine Bateman\u2014it\u2019s mesmerizing to watch her talk placidly oncamera. So is seeing some of the photos (not the revealing ones) he took of her that afternoon; looking ever so slightly apprehensive, there The Girl is, gazing into Roman Polanski\u2019s lens all of an hour before he allegedly fed her that alleged fateful quaalude. The adult Geimer doesn\u2019t have it in for Polanski, for whom she says she feels neither sympathy nor ill will. That\u2019s her business, but what\u2019s problematic is that the doc doesn\u2019t condemn him either.\n\nPolanski thought then\u2014and presumably still thinks now\u2014that he got trapped in a game of cat and mouse by a limelighthungry judge, and not only his own lawyer but Geimer\u2019s and the upright Mormon D.A. who prosecuted the case agree. After pleading guilty to charges considerably reduced from the original indictment, whose multiple sexual specifics are on the appalling side, he jumped the country only when the sentencing goalposts got moved one time too many. But the case is still outstanding, the reason he didn\u2019t return to the States to collect his bestdirector Oscar for 2002\u2019s The Pianist.\n\nAll the same, that Holocaust epic was blatantly and a bit too blandly devised as Polanski\u2019s testament. He\u2019d evaded the Nazis as a boy, but his mother died in Auschwitz. Tellingly, The Pianist was also his first movie in something like a quarter century to gain much critical traction or audience interest. The question Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired never asks but can\u2019t help raising anyway is whether we\u2019d still have a compelling interest in him as a filmmaker if he weren\u2019t a haunting, sometimes repellent archetype. He\u2019s the Man Who Survived the Twentieth Century, from Hitler and Manson to fleeing the Los Angeles court system just as the anythinggoes \u201970s went sour. The flip side is that it\u2019s impossible to tell what we\u2019d make of his movies if we weren\u2019t aware of his biography, a confusion Polanski has never exactly discouraged.\n\nAs if he\u2019d been hellbent on proving nothing daunted him, his first project after the TateLaBianca murders was 1971\u2019s grisly Macbeth. On one level, the movie\u2014produced, I swear, by Hugh Hefner\u2014is just the period\u2019s ridiculous idea of hip Shakespeare. If we didn\u2019t know Polanski had directed it, we\u2019d probably shrug. But since we do know, the gore is a creepy selling point\u2014especially the slaughter of Macduff\u2019s wife and children, with looming assailants, screaming women, and torn bodies glistening with blood. Wouldn\u2019t you have liked to be on the set that day Worse, the psychological interpretation that makes the most sense to me is pretty hideous: Lady Macbeth = Sharon Tate, luring Macbeth/Polanski to Hollywood, hubris, and chaos.\n\nEven in Chinatown\u2014not only an infinitely better movie but a more Shakespearean one, steeping us in the bright rot of L.A. in the \u201930s\u2014there\u2019s the tawdry kick of knowing the hood who slits Nicholson\u2019s nose open is the actor whose beautiful young wife got stabbed to death. Only five years after Tate\u2019s murder, Polanski knew we\u2019d know it. Yet the proof of his maddening brilliance is that his cameo isn\u2019t meretricious. Linking the corrupt Los Angeles of a bygone day to the L.A. of the audience\u2019s present, unnerving us with the added twist that Sharon Tate\u2019s ex isn\u2019t casting himself as one of Tinseltown\u2019s casualties but a nasty little villain, his few minutes onscreen are the themes of Chinatown boiled down to a tabloid haiku.\n\nThat\u2019s just the most famous example of how he tempts us to conflate his movies and his life. But to see how complicated all this can get, consider The Tenant, a littleknown effort that from today\u2019s perspective looks like a fascinating spin on his distress in exile. It\u2019s a claustrophobic persecution fantasy about losing your identity, and not only is it set in Paris but Polanski plays the lead. Then you remember it was made in 1976\u2014before he\u2019d laid eyes, or anything else, on Geimer and two years before he drove to LAX and fled to France for good.\n\nAs creepy as it is amusing\u2014and it\u2019s very amusing\u2014Rosemary\u2019s Baby (released a year before the Tate murder) captures the menace hidden in \u201960s giddiness just as flavorfully as Chinatown evokes the Watergate era through a 1930s prism. It\u2019s both a terrific comicbook flick\u2014you can\u2019t really take horny Satan seriously, can you\u2014and a great pop metaphor for maternal and marital paranoia. The Polanski touch is that Mia Farrow is such an odd duck you aren\u2019t sure what Satan sees in her. Yet Rosemary\u2019s Baby was also retrospectively colored by a gruesome history: The TateLaBianca murders didn\u2019t need any help to be horrific, but their vibe in the public mind would have been different if Polanski\u2019s big hit in 1968 had been, say, The Love Bug. If you were Roman Polanski, wouldn\u2019t you feel a little spooked about which scripts you agreed to direct next\n\nSo far as I can tell, he never has, because he\u2019s very tough. (That\u2019s an evaluation, not a compliment.) An assumption that civilization is the cork in a wine bottle bursting with perversity was his calling card from his first feature, 1962\u2019s Knife in the Water, made in his native Poland before he slipped across the Iron Curtain. All of his gifts\u2014the command of tone, the attentiveness to the perturbing undercurrents of people\u2019s  gestures and demeanor, the fascination with antlike human activity\u2014are on full display. But so is the quality I suspect might have stopped the later Polanski short of true greatness even if Samantha Gailey had never been born: a hardheartedness that gets less interesting once you catch on that it\u2019s immutable. He\u2019s never thought people have anything to teach him about life, and it shows.\n\nEven though Wanted and Desired softpedals it to keep our focus on the courtroom shenanigans that pushed Polanski\u2019s &amp;quot;escape&amp;quot; button, something that\u2019s fairly clear about that notorious afternoon at Jack\u2019s pad is that Roman wasn\u2019t a guy rashly succumbing to an impulse he\u2019d never felt before. More to the point, his milieu put him under no pressure to find it abhorrent. To those of us who were around then, the doc\u2019s big frustration is its failure to come to grips with the lunacy of \u201970s permissiveness. Not only were egregious nudie books featuring barely pubescent girls being peddled as coffeetable connoisseurship, but in a just world, any number of aging rock musicians would be living down the block from Polanski in Paris today. As late as 1979, Woody Allen didn\u2019t even think once about having the highminded hero of Manhattan play hide the salami with plainly underage Mariel Hemingway, and why he isn\u2019t living in Paris beats me.\n\nThose were different times, as Lou Reed once put it, and so much for morality. From a movie lover\u2019s point of view, the question is what we\u2019ve been deprived of by Polanski\u2019s flight from justice. In the three decades since, he\u2019s never stopped working; whatever you think of the results, his determination to stay in the game is as commendable as, say, the late Robert Altman\u2019s tenacity even after he went out of fashion. Hampered by his inability to shoot in countries where U.S. extradition treaties apply, he has benefited from the eagerness of name actors\u2014Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate for one, and I bet Depp regrets it\u2014to be directed by a legend. Yet Polanski\u2019s post1978 filmography is mostly to wince at: swank literary adaptations (Tess) in which he has no noticeable stake but lends his prestige to, odd ventures like Bitter Moon that reprise his old perversity without his old savvy. It\u2019s no surprise he\u2019s a cynic; he probably became one at the age of 6, and with good reason, too. What you didn\u2019t expect was that he\u2019d turn into a feckless one.\n\nEven so, I\u2019m not sure the story would be much different if he\u2019d stayed in Hollywood. His later films don\u2019t communicate the sense of being part of our present that made his earlier ones exciting. But from Coppola on down, plenty of \u201970s directors who aren\u2019t under Polanski\u2019s constraints lost their way when tastes and the market changed. At best, with his relatively narrow range of specialties, he might have ended up as an improved Brian De Palma\u2014and while I agree we could use one, that\u2019s not the point.\n\n Despite having four or five certified film classics to his name, even he probably realizes that the Roman Polanski Story is his best shot at immortality. I doubt there\u2019s another living director HBO would run a splashy featurelength documentary about. As for us, we\u2019ll never know how things would have played out if Sharon Tate were a grandmother in Encino. But isn\u2019t that just the miniature version of wondering what Polanski\u2019s life would be like if the Holocaust had never happened\n\nTom Carson is a GQ correspondent. To see his musthave DVD picks, click here."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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