A Superior Court judge in LA told Roman Polanski yesterday he could challenge his original sentencing judge’s behavior—if he surrendered first. Salon just published a piece of mine on the ruling here.

The LAT runs a typically unquestioning laudatory piece about the director of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired; the star-struck documentarian, who ignored many facts in her largely smoke-blowing film, can speak with some authority.

I watched the movie again recently and was struck by how detached Zenovich stays from the victim, and how it undermines her in subtle ways.

The tone is set early on, when a friend of Polanski’s tells of being woken up and informed that the director had been arrested. It’s played for laughs, with interspersed shots of Mia Farrow on the phone from Rosemary’s Baby.

That film is about a scared and abused woman, but the scene isn’t about the girl Polanski assaulted; it’s about poor Roman. It’s an odd juxtaposition when you think about it.

Then, the friend is allowed to say something to the effect of, “Rape? Roman would never rape anyone!” Here, Zenovich is playing with the fungible definition of rape; I doubt Roman Polanski would “rape” anyone in the sense of the word the friend was using, meaning he didn’t follow a woman down the street and grab her in an alley.

If Zenovich wasn’t tipping the scales in Polanski’s favor, she could have asked the guy, “Well, what about statutory rape? Could you imagine him doing that?”

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Previously in Hitsville:

More tears for Roman Polanksi
Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor
The Polanski whitewash continues
P.S. on ‘The Polanski whitewash’
Whitewashing Polanski, continued

The NYT story on Roman Polanski’s absurd ongoing legal attempt to get his child-sex conviction overturned continues many papers’ Polanski-centric view of the case.

The story is interesting for two reasons. One, while superficially making clear that Polanski is a fugitive and had been convicted, it’s told throughout as if something strange is afoot.

Example:

Although this is happening long after Mr. Polanski admitted guilt in the original incident, the effort has raised uncomfortable questions about how justice operates in a legal system that has never quite come to terms with Hollywood, despite this city’s long, and growing, list of famous malefactors.

Emphasis added. As we have seen myriad times, the chief “uncomfortable question” raised by such cases is how rich and famous people manage to get off most of the time. Here, Polanski didn’t, so he skipped town, and hasn’t exactly been living off the land since. The legal issues Polanski has been trying to raise are largely invented, and even if they weren’t Polanski had the money to pursue an appeal. But he didn’t appeal; he left town.

Yet Mr. Polanski’s case has only become more troubling over the years. That happened as tawdry details of his behavior — some of them described in grand jury testimony that was made public only in 2002 — were matched by accounts of official wrongdoing that occasionally seemed to mirror the tone, if not quite the magnitude, of dealings portrayed in Mr. Polanski’s Los Angeles noir classic, “Chinatown.”

Note how this “uncomfortable” case has become “troubling.” We’ll get back to the tawdry details in a minute, but let’s take a look at the Chinatown-like wrongdoing. Since Chinatown involved murder, massive fraud, suborning of governmental processes, and one rococo scene of nostril-splitting, even something not quite of that magnitude seems promising. “Among other things,” the Times tells us,

… Mr. Wells [a prosecutor], in an interview in the film, said he prodded Judge Rittenband with a photograph of Mr. Polanski in the company of two girls, taken in Germany before the sentencing. “‘Judge,’ I said, ‘Look here. He’s flipping you off,’ ” Mr. Wells recalled.

Mr. Wells has also recalled that the remark was routine and that he said it in open court, but the Times story doesn’t say that. Not very Chinatown-esque. The risibly one-sided HBO film, incidentally, spends a lot of time trying to explain away the photo of what seemed to be Polanksi having a very gay time in a German beer hall. The film fell off my tivo so I don’t have it available right now, but I’m not sure that the Times’ use of the word “girls” in that passage is correct, unless the paper is using it in a Polanskian, continental sort of way.

(Incidentally, while the HBO film tried to portray the judge as something of a buffoon, it didn’t tell viewers that he was smart enough to have entered Harvard Law at 15 years of age.)

The other matters in the case seem small as well, as Polanski’s lawyers have seized upon this or that word in email messages from the court in an effort to divert attention to the main issue in the case, which are that he’s a fugitive and that fugitives don’t get to dictate terms when they finally get hauled back before a judge.

Finally, those “tawdry details”: The story ends with these grafs, the first time I think that a major U.S. paper details exactly what Polanski was accused of, emphasis added.

If anything, the case may have become more difficult to resolve over time. The sexual abuse of minors has become a more potent concern, and the recently released details of Mr. Polanski’s relationship with Ms. Geimer cast a particularly sordid light on the incident. By her account before grand jurors at the time, Ms. Geimer was plied with alcohol and Quaaludes, and objected repeatedly as she was subjected to vaginal and anal sex.

The details were not “recently released,” incidentally, and the story doesn’t mention that the documentary didn’t detail these charges either.  And note how the writer lets Polanski’s attorney get the last word:

For the elder Mr. Dalton, who urged Mr. Polanski to pursue redress after reviewing the documentary, however, the issue turned from the original crime to questions about the way authorities here handled it.

“This case before the court is not about him,” Mr. Dalton said. “It is about the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County.”

Dalton was given a lot of time in the documentary to spin wildly for Polanski, so it’s not surprising that he managed to convince himself that he was correct after seeing it.

And again, the issue is framed in a way that’s kind to the director. A more detached account might go, “Polanski’s attorneys, in the HBO documentary and in the time since, have been trying to keep the focus off the crimes the director was accused of and on whatever challenges they were making at the time to the proceedings.”

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Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor
The Polanski whitewash continues
P.S. on ‘The Polanski whitewash’
Whitewashing Polanski, continued

The fugitive director is continuing to use the HBO documentary that comically distorted the facts of his case as grounds that his child-sex conviction be set aside. A new motion was filed in LA yesterday.  I don’t care about Polanski personally, but the media coverage of the case continues to gloss over what exactly the director did and the crazy stuff in the documentary.

The LAT says he was accused of “unlawful sex with a minor”; the NYT says it was “statutory rape.” That’s the impression you get if you watch Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the HBO doc. In reality, Polanski doped the girl with liquor and a Quaalude, had sex with her, and then anally raped her.

The girl, as the papers describe in detail, has forgiven Polanski, and again I personally don’t care what happens to him. But the affair remains a case study in how the bad journalism of that documentary begets more bad journalism.

The LAT is particularly credulous with Polanksi’s attorneys’ claims:

The request to dismiss the charge, which took court officials and prosecutors by surprise, is based on revelations in a documentary broadcast in June on HBO. The film, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” portrayed the legal proceeding as hopelessly tainted by backroom dealings between a vindictive judge and a deputy district attorney meddling in his colleagues’ case.

Actually, the film tried to smear the judge with extralegal issues and raised one or two actual, if minor, legal points, one notably involving interactions between the original judge in the case and one of the prosecutors. The prosecutor, David Wells, has said the communications were routine. In any case, it’s hard to see how they “hopelessly tainted” a case that featured a 13-year-old girl telling police, “He stuck his penis in my butt.”

Further, the LAT story presents the issue of whether Polanski needed to appear in court (and thus be taken into custody) this way, emphasis added:

Whether Polanski must appear in court to ask for the dismissal appeared to be in dispute. As a fugitive, he would be arrested upon arriving on U.S. soil. A court spokesman said that in past attempts to settle the case — including the failed 1997 negotiation — Polanski’s presence in Los Angeles was required.

“It has been the court’s position consistently for several years that in order to pursue dismissal, or sentencing, Mr. Polanski must personally appear,” court spokesman Allan Parachini said in an e-mail.

The district attorney’s office agreed. “We believe that if he is a party to the action, he should be here,” Gibbons said.

But Polanski’s lawyers suggested in court papers that the judge could toss the charge on his own initiative without ever hearing from Polanski.

“In dispute” doesn’t seem to me to be the bon mot for a situation in which both a court and a prosecutor’s office have taken a position. The Polanski attorneys can wish that a judge will change that position, but that doesn’t make the matter “in dispute.”

—————
Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor
The Polanski whitewash continues
P.S. on ‘The Polanski whitewash’

Not every documentary has to be fine journalism, of course, but, lacking claims to some aesthetic extra-reality ineffability, they should offer the basics.

That was my complaint about the Roman Polanski thing on HBO. You don’t have to agree with the facts. You can refute them. But not to mention them is tantamount to fraud.

Reviewers don’t always have the inclination or wherewithall to check them, however. Tom Shales does, in his review of a new HBO documentary on Helen Thomas:

What’s disappointing about Thomas, and troubling about the film, is her stridency in criticizing Israel and defending its enemies. Other than a passing reference to Thomas’s parents as having been Syrian immigrants, the film never hints at Thomas’s anti-Israeli rhetoric. In her writings, she’s already dismissed both John McCain and Barack Obama as being friendly to Israel and hostile to the Palestinians, “so the Israelis have no worries about the November election.”

Especially during the current administration, her “questions” at press briefings have been more like tirades, on one occasion prompting Tony Snow, the late journalist who was then press secretary, to respond, “Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view.” This would have been a pertinent and amusing clip to include in the film. Not for nothing was Thomas recently hailed as “the epitome of journalistic integrity for over 57 years”—by the Arab American News.

You don’t have to disagree with Thomas to acknowledge that it should have been in the film.

Taken with the Polanski issue, you have to wonder whether HBO’s highpowered (and press-friendly) documentaries chief, Sheila Nevins, should be held accountable to the declining standards in the division.

—————
Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor
The Polanski whitewash continues
P.S. on ‘The Polanski whitewash’

John Cooper writes:

I’m unconvinced. Bill, you wrote in your first post on this subject that it was irrelevant that the judge had two girlfriends - you even went so far as to say that if the judge were married, it would still be irrelevant. So how are the facts of the judge’s achievements early in life any more relevant?

Likewise, how is it fundamentally dishonest for the film to present what is essentially a defense case for Polanski? You make the point repeatedly that the film doesn’t offer a raw description of what Polanski did with the girl, but your other criticisms seem to center on the tone of the movie, that Polanski is treated with a respect you think he doesn’t deserve, and that figures that you respect, such as the judge, are ridiculed. But there’s nothing dishonest about taking a tone. As for the nature of the sexual act, it’s only relevant if you believe, as you may, that illegal sex that involves the anus is worse than, and should be considered separately from, illegal sex that involves the vagina. That’s something that many would agree with you on, I’m sure, but it’s more of an emotional position than a reasoned one. Let me be clear: sex with a 13-year-old is, and should always be, criminal. But actions that are considered to be aggravating (in the legal sense) should be considered so because of they are cruel and additionally traumatizing, not because they’re outside of the sexual mainstream.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see the film, so I can’t defend it. I’ll just say that based on what you’ve said about it, I can’t tell that it’s dishonest. In the legal system, the prosecution presents its case, and leaves out details that could lead the jury to sympathize with the defendant, such as a 60s bomber’s fifteen years of charity work before apprehension. Likewise, the defense omits details that might sway the jury the other way. The case against Polanski has been covered in the media - anybody in the US who’s heard of Polanski knows that he fled the country after having sex with a minor child. Until now, I don’t think the defense case has been presented. I suspect that your great revulsion toward Polanski’s crime, Bill, may cause you to condemn any defense case that’s made for him.

The trouble with having to write about such stuff is that one can sound moralizing, when I really just care about the journalism. My complaint isn’t with Polanksi; it’s with the film and by extension the coverage of it. So thanks for taking the time to write and I’m sorry if it sounded like I was het up about the crime itself.

There are some tonal issues; it’s fair comment to question them. In regards to the judge, the movie seems to be making the comical point that here was a rapscallion ladies’ man sitting in judgment of a randy European. But the issue is the abuse of an under-age girl; in that context, doesn’t the comparison verge on the offensive?

The judge’s qualifications are certainly more relevant than the rather benign details of his personal life; that they are also so interesting makes it even more suspicious that the filmmaker didn’t include them in the film. He goes from high school to the NYU law school at 15, and then goes to Harvard because he’s too young to take a bar exam and it doesn’t make it into your film?

In other words, the director, Marina Zenovich elided the most positive thing about the judge’s life and the most prejudicial thing about Polanski’s.

She is welcome to be on Polanski’s side but there’s a point beyond which a documentary maker can be said to be being dishonest. I think she passed it.

The rest of what you’re talking about, again, has more to do with my thinking that the  coverage of the movie didn’t give the full story. It’s not that one sex act is worse than another when the victim is a girl; but it is interesting how, in this supposedly vulgar age, we never seemed to hear what happened. The image of the debonair intellectual shifts radically; that’s why it needs to be mentioned. It’s hiding the facts from readers.

That was the subject of my first post, The Ick Factor. People like Polanksi and R. Kelly end up getting, perversely, a pass because folks just don’t want to think or talk about the facts of their cases.

Roman Polanski is seizing on a scene from the recent documentary about his child-rape case to try yet again to get his case dismissed:

Mr. Polanski and his lawyer have asked the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to review a new documentary in which a former deputy district attorney claims to have coached the judge in the case.

In the film, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” the former prosecutor, David Wells, describes advising Judge Laurence J. Rittenband to send Mr. Polanski to prison for a psychiatric review, though Mr. Wells was not involved with the case.

I like this story because it demonstrates how bad art can have real-world effects. You can read the story and judge for yourself how farfetched this issue is. (Wells, the former DA, says the exchange happened in open court and was routine.)

The film, which was directed by Marina Zenovich, remains fundamentally dishonest; it portrays the judge in the case as a womanizing spotlight-whore, and Polanksi as a benign continental roue who found himself on the wrong side of a moralizing America legal system.

The documentary elides over the fact that the events were far from a romantic evening at Marlon Brando’s Jack Nicholson’s house. The girl in the case told police that Polanski drugged her, photographed her nude, had sex with her … and then anally raped her.

Polanski wasn’t convicted of those charges, but the film is dishonest by not fully detailing what the girl said at the time. (The film uses the word “sodomy” in passing, but that’s a legally ambiguous term. It quotes from what the girl told police, but bowdlerizes her bluntest testimony—”He stuck his penis in my butt”—and doesn’t dwell on the added trauma for the 13 year old of having to speak publicly on such matters.)

The woman was quoted in recent years saying that she forgave Polanski, but that, too, excuses neither the original act nor the film’s essential expurgation of the contemporary facts of the case.

(The movie is doubly complicit by allowing Polanski’s lawyer, Douglas Dalton, a lot of screen time to tell us how honest he’s going to be with us—”You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts,” he intones—though both he and the filmmaker are keeping some of them hidden. Dalton, incidentally, is described as being retired but in fact is still representing Polanski.)

As for the judge, the film systematically ridicules him, right down to playfully numbering the two (!) girlfriends the (unmarried) jurist apparently had. A NYT story about Zenovich and her film last year has a lot of information about the judge that Zenovich shared with the Times reporter but did not, in the end, share with her audience. Like this:

The judge […] was a poor Brooklyn boy who, upon graduating high school at 15, bypassed undergraduate work for New York University Law School; he later attended Harvard, because he was too young to take the New York bar exam, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

Hard to square that with the cartoon presented in the film. The Times story on Polanski’s latest legal gambit does, however, make this observation:

In general, Mr. Dalton acknowledged, fugitives have little standing to press conventional appeals.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor

Hitsville was so grossed out by the R. Kelly case (not the verdict, but just writing about the particulars of Kelly’s predilections) that he didn’t have the stomach to immediately start writing about how repulsive the Roman Polanski documentary on HBO was. (It was first shown a couple of weeks ago, and remains in heavy rotation.)

My interest in the Kelly case came about not because he’s a serial sexual predator who should be put behind bars, but because the press had become so complicit in the celebrity hype machine that the crimes he was accused of had become not even worth mentioning to virtually everyone who wrote about his albums or tours.

It had something to do with a lot of journalists being lazy, but it also had something to do with the Ick Factor.

You’re a pop critic at a podunk paper, and R. Kelly’s coming to town. No one at your paper wants to hear about a child-porn sex tape, much less one that involves the words “urinating” and “on a girl police say is 13 or 14.” It is a firmly held belief of newspaper editors that people don’t want to read about gross stuff over their Rice Krispies. So why not just do the usual fun puff piece promoting the Kelly show, and refer obliquely to some unspecified “legal problems”? It’s a win-win situation.

… Unless you’re the parents of  a teenage girl who goes to the Kelly show, catches the eye of one of Kelly’s henchmen, and gets invited backstage.

But whatever. I feel like I should mention the Polanski case, even though it gets into depressingly similar vomitous territory, because no one else did.

We all know that story: The girl with the stardom-obsessed mother who left her daughter alone with the hedonistic European director so he could do a late-night Vogue photo shoot with her in Jack Nicholson’s mansion. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Nature took its course. Polanski was duly arrested and charged, apparently to his great surprise. (Americains puritains!) Negotiations began for a plea bargain but, as the new HBO documentary demonstrates, Polanski ultimately decided he was about to be the victim of railroaded American justice. You can argue that his fears were well-grounded, as the documentary does, but it’s also true that taking a plane out of LAX and living in luxury in France for the next three decades is an option not generally open to criminals who harbor similar suspicions.

The documentary spends a great deal of time obsessing about Polanski’s endangered legal rights and some amusing footnotes to the case, right down to noting that the judge in the case had a girlfriend or two.

The judge was apparently unmarried, so it’s not clear how this was relevant. (It would actually be irrelevant if he had been married, come to think of it.) Anyway, engrossed in such trivia, the filmmakers nelect to explain properly what Polanski was accused of. He did, as the documentary details, photograph the aspiring young Vogue model naked in a hot tub and then, over her repeated objections, whisk her off to a bedroom for sex.

The fact that he had dosed her with a Quaalude made this all easier. “I was having trouble with coordination like walking and stuff,” the girl later said.

But while the movie mentions the (ambiguous) word sodomy in passing (as only some of the recent coverage of the documentary does) it never explains what that charge stemmed from.

I only know about it because the Smoking Gun web site has posted the original grand jury testimony of the girl. It went something like this:

“Then he lifted up my legs and went in through my anus.”

“What do you mean by that?:

“He put his penis in my butt.”

Polanski was 44 at the time. His difficult life as a Jewish survivor of World War II is mentioned many times in the film, but the fact that the drugged little girl was anally raped isn’t mentioned at all.

Polanski is being protected by the filmmakers, who are unaccountably more entranced with his celebrity than they are with sharing with their audience the salient facts of the case, which makes them both incompetent and unethical.

But Polanski, like Kelly, is also protected by something else: The Ick Factor.

Family activists complain, with some justification, that we live in a coarse world. It’s hard to do anything about it, because the coarseness seems to be what an ever-more-empowered audience demands.

In this context, it’s surprising that men like Polanski and Kelly are able to find themselves charged with deeds that test even today’s broad palette of commonly discussed sexuality. (Entertainers aren’t the only ones, incidentally. There is a certain footnote to the Starr Report, containing words uniquely used there in relation to the Presidency of the United States, that as far as I can ascertain were never repeated in the news pages amid the reams of commentary that that scandal generated.)

But it seems plain that if those charges were repeated as often as we are told of, say, their Grammy and Oscar wins, their diverting music videos or their continental flair, our perception of the men, and their cases, would be somewhat different. In this sense, the true beneficiaries of the Ick Factor are plain.

Wired profiles Errol Morris with a lengthy story. It doesn’t mention the debate over Morris’ paying people to be in his new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure.

But it does have another example of something I’ve mentioned before, namely Morris’s ability to posit seemingly meaningful questions that, if you think about them for about, oh, thirty seconds, really aren’t that profound:

It is one of the outstanding ironies of Morris’ story that the photographs, which were seen by the world as documentary evidence of torture, were used as a way to distract attention from the brutal crimes that took place off-camera. While the low-ranking soldiers caught in the staged pictures went to prison, the teams of professional Army and CIA interrogators who actually tortured and murdered prisoners inside Abu Ghraib were never identified or punished.

First of all, who “used” the photos in that way? The U.S. service people who took the photos were clearly mistreating the prisoners they were supposed to be guarding. They were appropriately punished. But the implication here is that there was a unseen hand (literally absent in the sentence by the use of the passive) “using” the shots to “distract attention.”

There’s a separate issue of how far up the chain of command awareness ran of these activities—I’m talking specifically about the abuse by low-level soldiers and the photo-taking. I haven’t seen the movie, but it doesn’t seem that Morris is making that point.

He’s saying the controversy of the photos is covering up systematic torture and abuse by interrogators. I’m not a big-deal political documentary maker, but hasn’t that been the subject of years of front-page news of scandals, congressional hearings, political maneuvering and court cases? That whole “distracting attention” plan sure isn’t working! And the interrogators haven’t been tried because it’s a U.S. policy that, obviously, is under discussion, though you or I might think it’s wrong.

This is what I mean by Morris’s sophistry. “Isn’t that interesting?” he’s always quoted as saying. Well, no. Imagine a right-winger saying something similar: “The real irony is that the treatment of pregnancy in ‘Juno’ and ‘Knocked Up’ is being used to distract attention from the real crime, which is that 1.5 million innocent babies are brutally murdered in the womb each year. I find that very interesting.” He wouldn’t be taken seriously. Why is Errol Morris?

When Hitsville wrote originally about the fact that filmmaker Errol Morris had paid some of the subjects of his new documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure,” one commenter here took issue with it. He made this remark:

While some documentaries are surely “journalistic,” I would love to meet the first asshole who decided that all documentaries be judged according to the standards of journalism.

Well, I am that asshole. Now that the issue has made it to the New York Times, It’s worth explaining exactly why it’s wrong.

1) You can say that documentary making is a form of journalism, or you can say that they both have the same role, which by definition is to convey some species of factual information. Inherent in that process are certain ethical requirements. The stream of furors over fabricators in the press and in the sleazy world of memoir publishing, and, now, with the interest in this angle, in the documentary world, is strong evidence that people feel the promulgators of such stuff should be honest. Any species of documentary has its parallel in the print world. There is the advocacy piece; there are re-enactments of key scenes, based on the testimony of participants; and of course high-level investigative work. These are all valid, and viewers, like readers, are smart and can easily apprehend the difference between “Woodstock” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Hoop Dreams,” “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Crumb,” and they can surmise on the objectivity of the makers with some reliability as well. But that ability breaks down when a documentary that appears to be operating at a very high level of objectivity was actually put together with some rules broken behind the scenes.

2) When you pay someone to be in a documentary, or a source for a piece of journalism, you create an incentive for them to embellish their story. They are working for you now; maybe they should give value for money. The scene being described might take on a little more drama; the tears for the camera may come a little bit faster. A filmmaker of great integrity might work hard to minimize those corruptions of the truth, perhaps. Others won’t.

3) It creates a market, in the economic sense of the word, for the truth. Many subjects of documentaries are of interest to one person—the documentary makers. Others have a much wider appeal and can make money writing their own book. A wide swath in the middle, however, will be delighted to find a potential new income stream available to them. That’s good for them, bad for the dissemination of information to the rest of us.

4) It’s possible that Morris that opened up a portentous can of worms: Here he has created a market for information of great national import. It’s hard enough for reporters to get information of governmental malfeasance; now American service people in the Middle East know there is a money to be made talking about bad behavior over there. Why should they talk to a legitimate reporter when they might be able to score a documentarian with a checkbook?

Those are the real-world reasons why you shouldn’t pay for interviews. The joke, of course, is that I didn’t even have to make those arguments. Morris knew it was wrong. If paying for interviews is OK, why did Morris just not tell people? When asked about this at a screening of the film, according to the original blog post about it, you can see he didn’t answer the question right away. (”Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because ‘I have a lot of money and want to share it.’)

Here’s what Morris said when he was asked about it by a GQ interviewer:

“I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid.”

This issue has a tangential similarity to the sophistry in the debate about payola in the music industry. It’s not illegal to take money from a record company to play a song on the air; it’s illegal to do that and not tell listeners. The argument isn’t about taking the money: it’s that both parties want to keep it secret. No one’s telling Morris he can’t pay for interviews; and if by his lights it’s ok to do so, why not just tell people at the beginning of the film—”Some of the participants were paid to be interviewed”?

Instead, as I wrote earlier, Morris has a penchant for gnomic utterances that are less than they seem. Here he displays another tick, turning an ethical issue that reflects badly on himself (paying people for interviews in his movies without revealing the fact) into an ethical pat on the back for himself. (”Yes I robbed the bank, but I made a personal vow to myself that I would answer truthfully if asked about it.”)

Morris also retreats into half-truths and semantic games. In a statement made to Hollywood Elsewhere, Morris said he paid Fred Leuchter, the subject of his film Dr. Death, to appear in certain scenes, but not to be interviewed. This is a specious distinction. He also muddied the issue by talking about travel expenses, when travel expenses are a side issue.

And when the NYT wrote about it today, the reporters quote him indirectly saying he had paid interviewers “for their time,” another bit of euphemism. (“We weren’t paying the congressman for his vote, Your Honor; we were paying him for his time.”)

And it’s probable, too, that Morris has been complicit in allowing the impression to get out that he didn’t pay for interviewers. In an extremely favorable NYT feature story on the new film several weeks ago was this passage:

That Mr. Morris was able to wrangle Ms. England—as well as Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib’s former commanding officer, and Tim Dugan, a contract interrogator, among others—came about through a careful and persistent cultivation of their subjects and their lawyers.

It’s possible that the reporter wrote that on his own authority and that the issue never came up in his interview with Morris. Possible, but doubtful.

The final argument Morris puts forth is that he couldn’t have gotten the interviews otherwise. This, too, is intellectually incoherent. (”There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but in any case I had to.”) It is the documentary-maker’s job to find the interviews, just as it is the reporter’s job to get the story. Sometimes, it can’t be got.

In my discussion with the commenter, I said that I hadn’t contended that paying for the interviews affected the content or integrity of the film, though of course it did. Journalism has all sorts of moral issues when it comes to seducing sources, as Janet Malcolm impoliticly noted many years ago. But there are some ground rules, and it helps both the craft and, more importantly, the understanding of audiences to adhere to them. In a world transfixed by reality TV that’s made up, memoirs that aren’t, and a fair and balanced cable channel that isn’t, I’d like to point out that the problem with the world today does not extend to the overstrict observance of such niceties. Where you stand matters.

—————–
Hitsville: “Does Errol Morris pay people to be in his films?”

The original And the Winner Is… blog item.

The original Hollywood Elsewhere item.

NYT: “Film on Abu Ghraib puts focus on paid interviews”

NYT: “Of crime and perception at Abu Ghraib.”

Stephen Whitty, in his New Jersey Star-Ledger blog, goes after Errol Morris for paying for some of the interviews in his new film, “Standard Operating Procedure.” This is his argument against the practice:

Money, however, changes everything. Once cash is involved, all guiding lights are off, and it’s hard to even feel your way to the facts. Is this person saying this because he thinks it’s what I want to hear? Because he suspects it will make a better story? Will the fourth source hold out for more money, knowing what I paid the third one, and will he then feel obligated to exaggerate, so I feel I got my money’s worth?

Your guess is as good as mine—which makes my job, as a reporter, pretty much superfluous. Because if I can’t weigh motives and decide who may or may not be telling the truth, how dare I ask you to do that work for me?

I can think of several other reasons as well, which I list in a discussion with Hitsville commenter Jason Cohn here.

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Previously in Hitsville:

Does Errol Morris pay people to be in his films?

Consider this, from Scott Feinberg, of the “And the Winner is …” blog, which tracks Oscars movies. Feinberg was writing about an early showing of “Standard Operating Procedure” at Brandeis University in NYC Massachusetts and a subsequent Q&A with its director, Errol Morris. The film contains lengthy interviews with some of the American service people who took the Abu Ghraib photos while working as prison guards, most notably Lynndie England, who was seen posing with a leash around the neck of one Iraqi prisoner.

Many grafs down in his discussion, Feinberg writes this:

A side note: I was a bit surprised by the answer Morris gave to a question about the interviews after the film. The questioner, a noted journalist, asked Morris how he convinced these individuals to agree to be interviewed, and specifically if he paid them at all, “which is not okay in my profession.” Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because “I have a lot of money and want to share it.” (He did not disclose an amount of money or if this is his standard practice.) I, frankly, don’t really have a problem with this—it got these people to sit down and talk about their behavior, and I don’t see how it would in any way encourage them to speak anything other than the truth—except for the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, this compensation was not openly acknowledged, as it should have been since this is a documentary that purports not to have any agenda other than seeking the truth, and in my estimation does not. I worry that because Morris did not do so, those who wish to disparage SOP, for whatever reason, may latch onto this as evidence of some secret agenda, just as they do in response to the use of re-enactments in his films, including this one.

Emphasis added. I don’t want to disparage SOP, but I don’t think it’s right for journalists to pay for interviews. But the question here is what Morris meant. A post by Jeffrey Wells, on Hollywood Elsewhere, muddies the waters. He includes the following statement from Morris, one that he apparently solicited:

“As documentaries have become more and more mainstream entertainment, people are aware that there is money involved. The more successful documentaries become, the harder and harder it is to get people to do them for nothing.

“People [are] aware of my success and respond accordingly. I never paid people for the interviews in The Thin Blue Line, but Stephen Hawking was paid a lot of money for the rights to his book and his participation in A Brief History of Time. Fred Leuchter was paid when I asked him to appear in several scenes, e.g., the scene of him riding up and down in a van de Graff generator at the Boston Museum of Science. I did not pay him for the interview, but if he had insisted I might have done so. McNamara was not paid a fee for The Fog of War, but of course we paid his travel and hotel. Why wouldn’t we?

“The professor who asked the question at Brandeis is a print journalist. I don’t know if she has ever done a seventeen-hour interview over two days, as I did with Janis Karpinski. I didn’t pay Karpinski, but we paid for hotel, travel and per diem. It is customary in the motion picture business. To do [otherwise] would be (I believe) unconscionable. It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way—and that may involve paying them.

“I paid the ‘bad apples’ because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it.”

Emphasis added. I find this statement odd. There’s nothing wrong with paying for people’s travel expenses, of course, and if that’s all he did he would have said so. But it certainly looks like he’s clouding the issue by conflating different things. For example, it appears he did pay Leuchter, who was the subject of Dr. Death; I don’t really understand the distinction Morris is making about paying him only for one scene, when Leuchter’s in the entire movie. And then, at the very end of a long response, after yet again making a big deal of paying only for expenses, Morris seems to acknowledge that he did flat-out pay some of his interview subjects.

Even if you’re not as rigid as Hitsville on this issue it’s certainly true, as Feinberg said, that the fact should be shared with viewers.

The NYT did a slavering piece on Morris and his new film last week. Morris has been writing a blog for the paper on its web site. In the story, we were told:

That Mr. Morris was able to wrangle Ms. England—as well as Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib’s former commanding officer, and Tim Dugan, a contract interrogator, among others—came about through a careful and persistent cultivation of their subjects and their lawyers.

It seems that some checkbook journalism may have been involved as well.

Morris’s filmic charms have always been slightly opaque. Looked at one way, his work can seem profound; rearrange your mind slightly, however, and the films can be suddenly trite and vaporous. Morris has a knack, too, for the gnomic utterance that doesn’t really hold up. For example, this, from Feinberg’s piece:

What spurred him to make a film about these particular iconic images, he explained on Thursday, was his amazement that although everyone has seen these images, nobody really knows anything about them.

After that Feinberg asks about thirty questions we supposedly don’t know the answer to, most of which I could pretty much answer off the top of my head. (”What sorts of punishments did the soldiers depicted receive? … Would the public be as enraged about the acts depicted if we had never seen visual evidence of them?”) We know an immense amount about the photos; they created one of the bigest news stories of the year and there were multiple criminal trials held.

Similarly, here’s Morris in the Times story:

“One of the incredibly deep ironies,” he said, “is that the photographs could serve as both an exposé and as a cover-up. That they would encourage people not to look any further and make them think they had seen everything. And that is very interesting.”

That’s not “interesting.” It’s just wrong. How did they encourage people not to look any farther? How did they make us think we’d seen everything? Didn’t they provoke a half-dozen trials and a worldwide scandal?

In this month’s GQ, he’s less evasive:

Morris is fascinated by why nearly every interview in Berlin began with a variation of the same question: How did you get them to talk to you?

“Why is that such an interesting question?” he wonders.

I tell him that I am more fascinated by the question that they didn’t ask. For all their curiosity in this area, not one single journalist asked, “Did you pay them?”

“It is interesting,” he agrees. “I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid.”

It is not the first time he has paid a subject of his films. When he returned to find Fred Leuchter, the subject of Mr. Death who fecklessly becomes a hero in Holocaust-denial circles, several years after first interviewing him, he paid him to continue the project—payments he rationalized in an interview at the time on the basis that he paid actors to act out scenes for his documentaries and he was asking Leuchter to re-create certain images from his life as an actor.

For Standard Operating Procedure, the first of the five “bad apples” Morris interviewed, Javal Davis, asked for a fee and Morris agreed. “The rest just followed in due course.” (Only the bad apples. If other subjects refused to be interviewed without payment, Morris didn’t pay them.) “In this instance, I justified it—I think that’s how the contracts were written—that I was paying them as consultants or advisers to the project. Yes and no. I was essentially, for all intents and purposes, paying them to be interviewed.”

Here again you can see that tic of asking a question that seems to be deep but really isn’t: “Why is that such an interesting question?” He’s even “fascinated” by the question.

Well, because it’s hard to get people to do stuff like that if you don’t pay them.

I want to say Todd Haynes’ ballyhooed Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is disappointing, but what, really, did we expect? A test for films like this is whether, in the end, there is something in the result that the subject would dislike or be offended by, and it’s hard to think of anything here that Dylan, a master controller of his image, or his longtime manager, Albert Grossman, would have blanched at. And there’s many things, too, he would definitely appreciate, much of the result tracking thematically with the images of himself he presented in the PBS film No Direction Home.

Here, Haynes responds to the songwriter’s manifold career with a cubist trope—having Dylan represented not just by different people at different stages of his career, but by entirely different heavily fictionalized characters in what in effect are separate movies, all wound together in a shattered but tangentially chronological order, stretching from his first days on the road to, roughly, the gospel period in the early 1980s. In one, for example, Heath Ledger plays a film star, come to prominence by playing a Dylan-like pop icon in a biopic, who meets, marries, raises a family with, and then splits from a French artist, in what is supposed to represent Dylan’s relationship with his first wife; in another, a campy Cate Blanchett plays the Dylan we know best, the combative press conference jouster and suddenly electric showman.

But in the end, almost all are disappointing. In the most ambitious segments, for example, Richard Gere plays a Billy the Kid-like figure adrift in a frontier town where everyone’s in costume. The scenes conflate Dylan’s work on the Pat Garrett sound track and his Gethsemane with the Band at Woodstock, but in the end it seems as if all Haynes could do with the Basement Tapes was play off the menagerie on the inside cover. The Dylan suckup industry is so huge these days it’s hard not be a little exasperated at the A-list folks lining up just to get a little reflected glory. I mean, you’d think Martin Scorsese or Haynes would at least find it interesting that Dylan married a former Playboy bunny named Shirley Noznisky. But no—she has be made into a famous artist, and be played by Charlotte Gainsborough. Speaking of which, save in those segments in which American piggishness must be portrayed by grotesques, a lot of the supporting players here have suspiciously high cheekbones. That, the hipster appearances (like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in an entirely cuttable segment), the uneven performances, and some jarring moments (like actual footage of Dylan playing, which intrudes, to no purpose, at the end), make this a largely unsuccessful film. Beyond that there’s an air of … not self-indulgence, exactly, but the feel of someone whose ambitions far outstripped his abilities, or whose intentions were never fully formed. The result feels more like a desperate, unfocused tribute to Dylan than an organic (and aesthetically independent) work of art.

All that said, there’s fun to be had here for Dylan fans who don’t care that much about the truth: there are the scraps of Dylan lyrics in magazine ads, passing references to characters in his songs, and some carefully schematized nods to key bits of Dylaniana. (For example, in keeping with the redolence of the film’s title, a heretofore unreleased Dylan bootleg track, Haynes includes not only a careful recitation of a key Rimbaud line, “Je est un autre,” but also the most reverberating Dylan mot from Dont Look Back, the 1966 Pennebaker documentary: “I’m sure glad I’m not me.”) In the Pat Garrett segment, Gere puts on a clear plastic mask similar to the one Dylan sports in some of the more compelling live footage from his Renaldo and Clara movie, which I think was the film’s one reference to the Rolling Thunder era. And I can’t swear to it but I also think Haynes in a couple of the Blanchett scenes took the time to re-create moments from Dont Look Back or other Dylan footage from the time.

p.s. The controversies over Dylan’s epochal switch to electric are I think overplayed, both here and in No Direction Home, which is credited to Martin Scorsese. Haynes has a comic interlude in which Dylan and his band turn machine guns onto the crowd; Scorsese makes the issue the frame of his four-hour film, plainly suggesting the controversy drove him into seclusion. The complaints of a few priggish folk aficionados have now created an image of “Rite of Spring”-like riots. In fact, “Highway 61″’s first single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” became an immediate huge hit; the war was essentially over before he played Forest Hills, a month after Newport. (The best by-the-minute contemporary reportage on this remains Robert Shelton’s biography, also called No Direction Home.) It doesn’t fit into the rock mythos very well, but in large part Dylan stopped touring to lower his fame quotient and raise a family in (relative) peace. It can’t have been easy to be married to Bob Dylan, but Sara (née Shirley) Lownds (née Noznisky) did have her husband around during those years–Dylan didn’t make regular concert appearances again until 1974.

p.p.s. The film No Direction Home really isn’t a documentary. It’s an assemblage, by Scorsese, of a lot of promotional material that the Dylan organization had generated. (The highly unusual sight of Dylan speaking, coherently and at length, about his influences and career, was the product of the simple expedient of the interviewer’s being his manager.) The film, while engrossing, isn’t journalism or a true documentary. That it was awarded a Peabody is a minor scandal.