Closer look at the Polanski sex case

Roman Polanski. You can start a heated conversation just uttering his name. He has led a life so large that it's often chopped down to a few phrases: Oscar-winning director of such film classics as "Chinatown," "Tess" and "The Pianist." Survivor of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Married to actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed to death by members of the Manson Family. Had sex with a 13-year-old and, after being convicted of unlawful intercourse with a minor, fled the United States for Paris, where he has been for the last three decades.

This last bit is both the catalyst and subject of Marina Zenovich's compelling documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," which premieres tonight on HBO. A surprisingly haunting examination of the politics, personalities and legal complexities of the 1977 case, the film dispels the conventional wisdom that Polanski ran away to France simply to avoid serving time.

Through extraordinary interviews with friends, colleagues, journalists, as well as both the prosecuting and defense attorneys, Zenovich contends that it was nowhere near as simple as that. Plagued by a rabid American media and put in the hands of a judge known for his love of the spotlight, Polanski came to feel that his chance for equal treatment under the law was slim to none.

The most astonishing moment of the documentary occurs when the lead prosecuting attorney, Roger Gunson, then a rising Robert Redford-handsome legal star and a Mormon to boot, says even he understands why Polanski fled.

Neither Polanski nor Judge Laurence J. Rittenband were interviewed (Rittenband died in 1993), but Zenovich has made good use of archival interviews of the director and spoken to virtually everyone else connected with the case and/or Polanski, including Rittenband's former girlfriends, producer Daniel Melnick and Mia Farrow.

Not everyone is sympathetic; former Los Angeles Police Det. Philip Vannatter (who was also involved in the O.J. Simpson murder trial) and retired Assistant Dist. Atty. David Wells believe Polanski was never dealt with harshly enough given the severity of the crime.

Far from a tedious legal deconstruction, "Wanted and Desired" captures Hollywood and California in the midst of the first of many celebrity-driven international media swarms. Still reeling from the 1969 Manson murders, at once envious and judgmental of the swinging Hollywood scene, many saw in Polanski a nexus of unsettling forces.