The tumultuous story of a director whose signature movies - dark,
bleakly funny, shot through with perversity and paranoia - reflect
the sensibility of an artist shaped by circumstances more
harrowing, unpredictable and absurd than any Hollywood
melodrama.Roman Polanski's troubles began in 1939, when the Nazis
invaded his native Poland. The family was confined to Krakow's
Jewish ghetto, and in 1943 his parents were sent to concentration
camps, leaving their ten-year-old son to fend for himself. (After
the war, reunited with his father, he learned that his pregnant
mother had been gassed at Auschwitz.) Cunning and possessed of a
ferocious drive, Polanski eventually attended film school in Lodz,
where he quickly became the star pupil and developed a reputation
for lavish spending, partying and prodigious sexual conquests. In
slyly playful prose, Sandford (McCartney, 2007, etc.) limns the
young artist as a mercurial changeling, alternately arrogant,
tender, hilarious, boorish and charming, always striving for (and
coming thrillingly close to) technical perfection in his cinematic
technique. After he emigrated to America, Rosemary's Baby and
Chinatown helped define a new era in movies and cemented their
director's status as one of the greats. Polanski's personal life
remained gothic: In 1969 his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was
horrifically murdered by the Manson Family; eight years later, the
director pled guilty to the charge of "unlawful intercourse" with a
13-year-old girl, fled the country before sentencing and has lived
in Europe since. Sandford admirably extracts all of the salient
information from the maelstrom of controversy and urban myth
surrounding Polanski's often lurid personal history, neither
damning nor exonerating him. When he won the Academy Award for Best
Director in 2002 for his Holocaust drama The Pianist (obviously, he
could not attend), the driven, 69-year-old director was in Paris,
preparing his next film.Engrossing, lucid presentation of a
uniquely complicated and productive life. (Kirkus Reviews)
Exactly fifty years ago, a young director named Roman Polanski made
his first completed film - a two-minute student exercise which he
called Murder. In the half-century since, Polanski has become an
iconic figure, widely admired for his mordant, sexually charged
films and yet derided as - in his own words - 'an evil, profligate
dwarf'. In January 1978, facing a possible fifty-year sentence for
'unlawful sexual intercourse' with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski
fled the United States and flew to France, where he was a
naturalized citizen. Thirty years later, he remains in exile: the
much revered eminence grise of filmmakers and a criminal fugitive
who complains of harrassement by the US authorities. Others have
told pieces of this story, but Christopher Sandford brings it all
together in one lucid, gripping account, beginning with Polanski's
horrific experience in the Holocaust and ending with his current
life in Paris, where he provides a 'living symbol of
Franco-American misunderstanding.' The book draws on dozens of
interviews with actors, writers and other Polanski collaborators,
previously sealed transcripts of his criminal hearings, testimony
before the California grand jury and the graphic evidence of former
lovers and friends. There is a wealth of unpublished material, too,
on what Polanski has called the 'central tragedy' of his life - the
brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate and others by members of the
so-called Manson Family - an event which, for sheer savagery,
rivals anything in modern criminal history. Amidst the personal
tragedy, the focus is also on the professional triumph. Polanski's
films are seen here anew, with behind-the-scenes stories on
everything from 1962's Knife in the Water to 2005's Oliver Twist.
We follow the director through the backstage feuds of Rosemary's
Baby and Chinatown, his unflinching version of Macbeth, described
by one critic as a 'film exorcism' in the wake of the Manson
murders, and his Holocaust masterpiece The Pianist, which won
Polanski his first and only Oscar. The generally downbeat themes -
betrayal, corruption, satanic worship - are vintage Polanski, but
there is also a lighter, knockabout side: this is the man who gave
us The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me but Your Teeth Are in
My Neck. Fascinating, flawed, wildly creative, the 'world's most
notorious artist' is seen here in full.
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