The screening of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired at UCLA last Thursday was not the Katie-bar-the-door turnout one would have expected, but the James Bridges Theater was a respectable 85 percent full. Director/producer/writer Marina Zenovoch wasn't there; she had been in Switzerland since Tuesday, with plans to shoot there as well as in Paris and Warsaw in the coming weeks.
But it wasn't Polanski's arrest that spurred this sequel; Zenovich had been thinking about it over the past six months, according to P.G. Morgan, one of the writers and co-producers on the film, who presided over the Q&A with researcher/associate producer Michelle Sullivan. As reported in The New York Times last February, Zenovoch was on hand earlier this year to film at the Criminal Courts Building in downtown LA, site of a series of hearings about the case.
At the October 1st screening, Morgan said that HBO, which had acquired the film at Sundance 08 and aired it later that summer, had recently put the film back into rotation, and the film itself had been subpoenaed as evidence by both the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office and Polanski's defense team. With the report last week that former Assistant District Attorney David Wells had lied on camera about coaching Judge Laurence Rittenbrand about sentencing guidelines, this sequel has potential as a post-postmodern, mobius strip kind of work: It was born as a documentary about a famous, still-open case, about which the filmmaker unveils questionable legal wranglings; her film then spurs the defense team to call for hearings about the case, which compels the prosecution team to step up its pursuit of the fugitive defendant, which then calls for a sequel about, in part, a film's impact on its subject. The film takes on a new life as evidence, some of which itself turns out to be tainted.
Sequels about legal cases are not unprecedented--and often necessary: witness Nick Broomfield's films about convicted and executed serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2; in both instances, the filmmakers become part of the story in Act II. Given the breach of trust by one of her subjects, and the role her film has played over the past year in the Polanski case, Zenovich may well become a character she never intended to be.
Photo: Los Angeles Times/UCLA Library Department of Special Collections