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 predilictions) 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!) Negotitations 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.