“At what point did your clothes come off?”
“Have you experienced sexual intercourse before?”
“Are you married to Roman Polanski?”

Such were just a few of the questions Los Angeles police detectives asked Samantha Gayley in 1977, when she was a week shy of her 14th birthday. They are pointedly, and poignantly, highlighted in a superb documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which sparked a sensation earlier this year at Sundance and has since premiered to widespread critical acclaim on HBO this past June. Director Marina Zenovich-who cowrote the film in close partnership with her editor, Joe Bini, and her producer (also her husband), P.G. Morgan-devotes a brief, ironic montage solely to these questions, which float at us, white letters against black, as if we're the ones being grilled. Ms. Gayley's answers are highlighted in a separate sequence. Her answers matter, but the mystery Zenovich and her partners wish to explore is not the crime per se, but the grotesque and culturally revealing derailment of justice which followed.

No one disputes that on March 10, 1977, filmmaker Roman Polanski had sex with Ms. Gayley, then an aspiring actress, whom he was photographing on assignment for French Male Vogue. Not even Polanski disputes this-he answered the police honestly when arrested, and later pleaded guilty to Unlawful Sex With a Minor. (No violence was involved; the filmmaker thought it a successful seduction; the teenager felt cornered and out of her depth.) No one disputes that Polanski fled the country on the eve of sentencing a year later, and remains a fugitive. What has been disputed is why.

Speaking as one who's written a short book about Polanski, his infamous escape has up to now been a reliable sore point in any public discussion of the case -not to mention any essay about the man's work as an artist. The scandal has entirely eclipsed the fact that, literally up to an hour before he fled, Polanski had fully cooperated with authorities. He'd admitted his wrongdoing, waived any right to a trial (to shield Ms. Gayley's identity from the firestorm of media attention), spent six weeks in prison (Chino, maximum security), and was standing ready to pay a fine and restitution to his victim.

Photo: Julian Wasser/Time & Life pictures/Getty Images  Polanski, right, with his attorney, Douglas Dalton.

Rittenband angrily disregarded the psychiatric report-which concluded Polanski was neither a pedophile nor a habitual sex offender, but a normal adult male who'd made a reprehensible choice against a minor under his protection. Thus when Polanski came before him in chambers the morning after his release from Chino, Rittenband declared he was planning to send him back to prison again for “an indeterminate time.” He would reduce this second stretch to a matter of weeks if the filmmaker agreed to let himself be deported permanently at the end of it. Polanski asked himself, “Why wait?” and boarded a plane to Europe directly after leaving that meeting.

The Judge's capricious behavior was protested not only by Polanski's lawyer, Douglas Dalton, but by Roger Gunson, the assistant District Attorney prosecuting the case. Rittenband, surprised but seeing he was likely to be removed, and publicly embarrassed, stepped down from the case too late. Polanski, by then committed to making his life in Paris, has never returned to the U.S., not even to collect his Oscar for directing The Pianist [written by Ronald Harwood] in 2002. The very fact of his being nominated aroused fresh whoops of controversy, and widening spirals of ignorance, to the point where I would hear more than one newscasters blithely, and wrongly, tell viewers, “Polanski fled the country to avoid arrest.”

The clearest, sanest voice in this hubbub belonged to Polanski's victim. Samantha Gayley Geimer, now a woman in her 40s and a mother of three, who wrote in the Los Angeles Times that she had long ago forgiven Polanski, convinced he genuinely regretted what he'd done, and that the director already paid a huge price, as she had: “Sometimes I feel like we both got a life sentence.” She asked: “Who wouldn't think about running when facing a 50-year sentence from a judge who was clearly more interested in his own reputation than a fair judgment or even the well-being of the victim?”

CONFESSIONS OF A TALKING HEAD.

In 2004, as my Polanski book neared publication, I found myself defending him on Court TV, on a program devoted to crimes against women. The topic was Polanski's victorious lawsuit against Vanity Fair, which had published an article stating he had stopped in New York on his way to the funeral of his wife Sharon Tate in August of 1969, and while there drunkenly offered to make a Danish model “the next Sharon Tate.” An absurd error-and actionable, because it was so easy to fact-check. Every previous account of Polanski's doings in that terrible month indicate he flew straight to L.A. from London, often supported on his feet by Warren Beatty and other friends for the first few days, because he was so crippled by grief.

Photo: Evening Standard/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images Polanski and Sharon Tate on their wedding day.

One asked me in horror, By what possible definition of justice does a convicted rapist have the right to sue anybody for slander?

“The murder of Sharon Tate and Polanski's unlawful sex with a minor are two completely different issues,” I replied. “Remember, he has a deep and abiding outrage at the American news media for the way Tate and several of their closest friends were repeatedly blamed in print for their own murders, in the months before Charles Manson and his gang were identified and caught. For Polanski to be so falsely, and sexually, characterized in that week of his life is just more of the same. Talk about him and the 13-year-old, and he'll silently take it on the chin. Defame him in relation to Sharon Tate, and he's going to sue.”

This was an angle my hosts weren't too willing to consider, and our interview ended shortly thereafter.

Earlier that same month, I had been filmed by Marina Zenovich. We'd met at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where a documentary I co-produced, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, was showing out of competition-its world premiere. She and I had earlier communicated via e-mail, as I was finishing my Polanski book. (A mutual colleague, Paul Cronin, editor of the Roman Polanski Interviews, had shared his archive of clips with both of us, and we needed to coordinate the xeroxing.) It was interesting to watch Zenovich in action, schmoozing that big IFC party at the Hotel du Cap like a friendly heat-seeking missile. One by one, she harvested fresh contacts, charmed folks like myself who were already halfway on the hook, and at all times stayed on-message: “I'm making a documentary about Roman Polanski, focusing on the trial.”

I was cordial, but wary. There were a million ways to go wrong with this topic, as I knew from struggling with my own essay. One huge technical problem was keeping Polanski's dramatic life story from running away with the discussion. His mother was killed by Hitler, his wife and unborn son were killed by Charles Manson, and he himself had made a catastrophic, toxic choice when a hot tub, half a quaalude and a teenager he presumed to be willing (“in a moment of unthinking lust,” as he would later write) were all too freely available. How do you keep your balance and discuss a filmmaker's art while juggling those giant manhole covers?

WHAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T HAVE TO FACE

One key for me was to bear in mind the great line, written by Robert Towne, which is spoken by the wealthy, wise monster Noah Cross to the chivalrous detective Jake Gittes at the climax of Chinatown: “Most people don't have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ...anything.” Polanski's whole body of work rises to the truth of that line, or stands on the shoulders of it. (Bearing this theme in mind, see Polanski's 1994 film of Death and the Maiden, based on the play by Ariel Dorfman, adapted by Dorfman and Rafael Yglesias. It's as if the meaning of Towne's line has been expanded to feature length.) My feeling was that anyone taking on Polanski as a topic would have to be equal to the mystery of that line.

I was also shy of pressing my luck. I had been just as wary with director Xan Cassavetes, when she first approached me about doing the Z Channel documentary. There again, the riddle of what people are capable of: My late friend Jerry Harvey, the genius behind Z's inspired and inspiring track record of restoring films and rediscovering lost classics (a virtual second film- industry, these days), also ended his life in act of tragic madness, killing his wife Deri Rudulph and himself one sudden afternoon in 1988. When I (belatedly) replied to Xan's first e-mail, I challenged her, wondering aloud if she or anybody could be equal on film to the complex legacy of such a man. She persuaded me she could -- and the proof is in the film itself, which honorably refuses to “explain” Jerry, or make a hero of him, though it illuminates the tragedies in his life (both his sisters committed suicide) in the same breath it makes contagious his ecstasy before the creative spirit in others. Premiering in a cathedral-city of movie love such as Cannes had me feeling, rightly, that I'd found an interpreter in a million in Xan, but it also had me superstitiously fearing there was no way could this Marina Z be equal to the gnarliness of Polanski's particular story.

She has proved me wrong, to my great admiration. Her approach, as she described it from the outset, resonated with mine: Don't focus on the crime, focus on the trial. Don't condone or excuse Polanski's act, but take strength that he doesn't condone it, either. He pleaded guilty, the victim has let it go: Case Closed. What remains dramatic and unexplored is why he ran, after a year of effort.

Toward this end-and I found this most satisfying-Zenovich has managed, by the same diligence she showed at that long-ago Cannes party, to wrangle the case's key players in front of her camera, particularly the prosecutor, Gunson, and the defending counsel, Douglas Dalton. These men form the spine of the film's narrative-so much so that Zenovich was obliged to delete worthy interviews with Robert Towne, David Thomson, Nastassja Kinski, and myself (I must say, I'm in wonderful company on the cutting room floor) to make room for these two giants and their firsthand accounts of the trial.

TELLING THE TALE

What follows is a conversation I had with Zenovich, Bini and Morgan after the film was screened for Written By at HBO:

F.X. Feeney: The film opens with a set of photographs-Samantha Gailey [later Geimer] in the mid 1970s. You wonder: Are those the photos Polanski took that day?

Marina Zenovich: No. I tried to get the photos Polanski took, but they were never made available. When we started shooting, I gave it the old college try: 'Can I use those photos?' By the end I was like: 'Can I even see those photos?' Instead we used some other photos Samantha gave us from that time. She was an actress. She had a lot of head shots. They worked just fine.

Her fighting spirit emerges most winningly in that moment when she tells a reporter, “Give my Mom a break.”

Joe Bini (editor, cowriter): Working with her footage, I remember being very surprised by how strong she is, and how well-adjusted.

Marina, were you aware of the case back when you were a teenager?

Zenovich: No. I'm the same age as Samantha -- so that was a little odd, when talking to her. I learned about the case as an adult. I was a fan of Polanski's work, I'd read his autobiography, but that chapter didn't have any special meaning for me. I was drawn into it after he got nominated for Best Director for The Pianist - an article in the L.A. Times about the case caught my eye - but what clinched it was when I Samantha Geimer and her lawyer went on the Larry King show, and the lawyer said 'The day Roman Polanski fled was a sad day for the American judicial system.' That really hit me: 'What does that mean?' I had no idea, so I started investigating.

P.G. Morgan (coproducer, cowriter): Our challenge was just how to yoke together the biography, and the crime. It's like taking one episode, and exploring the bigger story within that frame.

Bini: If you're structuring his story as an editor, you say, 'It begins with Sharon Tate,' because that is the moment when the press becomes interested in him.

Zenovich: I was sorry not to include more about Poland, and his childhood story, but that is not what the film is about, and I couldn't really find a way to include more. You want to give each section of his life the value that it deserves.

Bini: I remember that discussion, because the interesting question is, 'Where does this story start?' We were trying to figure that out. Because you could say it starts in Auschwitz. You could -- I don't know -- go way back. But what we decided is, the story starts with him meeting Sharon Tate.

Mia Farrow and some of the others who were close to him when he was married to Tate give some sense of what he endured as a child, and their awe at what he survived.

Zenovich: With Roman Polanski, you always have to go back in time to understand the actions. Not that we're ever making excuses for him. It's just -- you can't start at the case. You have to go to the beginning, something that I don't know as he does, that much -- or if Polish people do as much as Americans -- but I was trying to analyze what put him in this place.

Did anything you found surprise you?

Zenovich: Yes -- how much hope he had, at a certain point in his life. That was a big discovery for me. Wow, he was this hot young director, and he had this gorgeous wife, and he's on the top of the world. And he is never, ever associated with anything like that. And so that was something that I really wanted to show -- so people could see that. I wanted to have Sharon Tate be, not just as someone who's murdered, but to have her be alive.”

Morgan: We all have this sort of mythology around the case, how we think it was. And then when you actually go back you're confronted with a very different set of details... And that's because of this media howl-around. It is like one of those iconic 'Hollywood Babylon' cases, which is encrusted in myth, and rumor, and innuendo -- and every time it's brought out, it's always with the same cliches. What Marina did was good old fashioned journalism: Go back to the original sources, the people who were in the room. It's like peeling away these layers of -- I would say, 'tabloid varnish,' but I think it's more like 'tabloid ketchup' from the case, and getting back to what's underneath.

Zenovich (reversing my question to her): Knowing your book, I'm curious : Was there anything in the film that surprised you?

Feeney: Yes. What emerges powerfully is the particular integrity embodied by defense lawyer Douglas Dalton and prosecutor Roger Gunson.

Bini: They're adversaries, but they both stand for the same thing. That was an amazing twist in a way. They take over the film.

Feeney: I found Dalton [Polanski's Defense Attorney] a very moving figure, like Gunson a very moral man...

Zenovich: Completely. His line, 'This case will never leave me --' I courted him for two years, and I finally got him to meet me. When he finally opened the door it was 30 years later. It was moving to me that he was still talking about this.FXF. Give me a sense of how you three worked together, with this complex mass of material.

Zenovich: It was Joe who came up with the cards, in terms of moving the story forward. We had a lot of lawyers talking, and -

Bini: When we talk of being the 'writers' of this film, let's be clear that we didn't really script it beforehand. We came up with the structure in the editing room, which is not uncommon for a documentary. Early on, because there was this whole dimension of the law, and a lot of facts the audience had to absorb, we thought it would be a good idea to just sum things up with title cards -- [soft chuckle ] as well as to just get a break from all the talking!

Morgan: I worked with Joe and Marina to refine the cards -- so that they were getting across the right dramatic points, the right story points, the right journalistic points - and making sure they were accurate and clear, and moving the story forward.

So there was a lot of batting back and forth of captions, tweaking of single words, and tenses, just to make sure that each one had the maximum impact. A very enjoyable process, because I think in the final film it gives it a real momentum, but a very delicate and tricky process of getting them all to work.

Bini: I think it's also a very, very strange kind of writing that you don't really do anywhere else. Because sometimes it's really based on the picture, it's based on the cut. You wouldn't necessarily write some of these the way we had to, if you were not doing it based on picture. And I remember Peter, and sometimes Marina as well, saying, 'Why do we really need to have a card here?' And it was like, 'Because we just do.' There were moments when you needed a break. You needed something to be just reinforced, or whatever.

Morgan: There's that old journalistic adage, 'One thought per sentence.' That was our rule of thumb, I think.

The montage of the detective’s questions to young Samantha is particularly effective, ending with, “Are you married to Mr. Polanski?

Zenovich: We had to end it with that zinger. That sequence was a particularly difficult one to get the tone right.

The use of clips from Polanski's films is constently witty. When Dalton says, 'It got surreal, you cut to the spiraling staircase in The Tenant. Or when the Judge is capriciously changing his mind, we hear the beating drum from The Fat and the Lean, with Polanski doing all those ballet steps in the grass. These touches add a form of testimony from Polanski's imagination. One that's completely appropriate.

Zenovich: The decision to integrate first-person accounts with clips from Polanski's films was a really amazing moment in the 'creative discovery' process. We were having a really hard time, trying to figure out what to use, and all we had were pictures of the judge. We didn't even want these, but there wasn't that much video. So I went back to his short films, saw The Fat and The Lean, and thought, Oh-my-God. 'That's it. That's IT. '

Bini: As the pressure builds in the case, and Rittenband keeps going back and forth, putting Polanski through these hoops, we used [the tyrannical figure] beating on his drum while the [young, puppet-like figure played by Polanski himself] is forced to dance. We just kind of play that, and then there's a pause -- and here's where titles became especially important. What we came up with was, “All Polanski had to do was trust the Judge.” [General laughter.]

It's like the structure of a joke -- not that we're telling a joke, but the feel of it has to be that effective.

Morgan: Right at the end, our cards tell of Polanski now, and the recent offer that he could come back, on condition that the trial be televised. I remember we discussed whether that should all run on as one line, to: “He declined.” And then we ended up making it so that “He declined,” comes on by itself, as a final reveal. And it was great when we saw it at Sundance, 'cause that gets a laugh. And I thought, 'Oh good, that worked as a properly structured little payoff.'

Zenovich: It was wild, and quite interesting, how many lawyers were at Sundance, and who were outraged. This was quite shocking to me. My Dad is a former lawyer, and judge, and he was saying all along -- he's 85 -- 'Oh my God, you've gotta show this to law schools. And the Commission on Judicial Performance. People need to see this, for what was going on!'

END.