c. 2003 Religion News Service

HOLLYWOOD _ Troubled filmmaker Roman Polanski, the “Chinatown” director and fugitive who fled the United States 25 years ago after having sex with a 13-year-old girl, is being noticed again in Hollywood with “The Pianist,” a Holocaust drama with Oscar potential.

But talk of the 69-year-old Polanski remains uncomfortable, his directing brilliance never far from his still-active arrest warrant on the seemingly ancient sex charge.

“People have forgotten all of this and would just as soon not talk about it,” said one retired television director, who like others asked to remain anonymous when discussing Polanski. “It’s behind us, it’s behind him. Forgiveness is part of our culture. (In Hollywood) we don’t consider ourselves personal judges.”

Sources said that several filmmakers, notably “Mulholland Drive” director David Lynch, have met with law enforcement officials to try to get the arrest warrant quashed. More than two decades after one of Hollywood’s biggest sex scandals, some Hollywood veterans admit they have forgotten it, while younger filmmakers and film critics forget or ignore it entirely.

In 1977, Polanski asked a 13-year-old girl to pose for him for Vogue’s French edition but instead had sex with her after giving her a Quaalude and champagne at the home of “Chinatown” star Jack Nicholson. (The actor was not home.) Polanski pled guilty to one felony count of sex with a minor _ commonly called “statutory rape.” His attorneys believed the guilty plea would support a sentence of probation, but the judge on the case in 1978 planned to send Polanski to prison.

He already was a child Holocaust survivor and in 1969 his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, became the Manson Family’s most famous victim. Feeling betrayed that the guilty plea would not grant him probation, Polanski fled to his native France, which has no U.S. extradition treaty.

“He’s a fugitive; he pleaded to a felony count of sex with a minor,” said Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. “He has come to back. We have always held the position that Mr. Polanski surrender to the court.”

The district attorney has no say in the Los Angeles Superior Court’s still-open Polanski case. “This has always been a matter between him and the court; he is a fugitive from the court,” Gibbons said. “He has pleaded and he is awaiting sentencing. People always think that we can wave some magic wand and make it better for him, and we can’t.”

Polanski’s work on “The Pianist” won an Oscar nomination for directing. He was one of five director nominees announced last month (Jan. 21) by the Directors Guild of America, second-tier “peer” awards that are often bellwethers for Academy Award nominees.

Janine Alexander, a spokeswoman for the guild, would not say how the group nominated a fugitive. “The guild has no comment,” she said. “We’re going to go nowhere with this.” Guild President Martha Coolidge, however, was photographed calling Polanski with news of his nomination.

The guild’s awards are March 1, and the Academy Awards will be held on March 23. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe for best drama but was edged out by “The Hours.”

The Polanski case highlights a quirk about the Hollywood award season’s general lack of rules about nominees’ personal conduct; the Directors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences usually have guild or academy members vote for the performance or the performer regardless of private, even criminal, behavior.

“You don’t vote for the person, you don’t vote for the director,” said Oscar spokesman John Pavlik. “The (Best Director) award is for `achievement in directing.’ You don’t write down anybody’s name; you write down the name of the picture. There’s no name involved with it. The name comes about as to who picks up the award for achievement.”

“There really isn’t anything in the rules that would prevent him from being nominated,” said Pavlik, adding that Polanski’s 1979 film “Tess” received an Oscar nomination. “The legal status of any person nominated has really never come up. It’s not something we have to make a decision on; it’s something for the courts to make a decision. It certainly will come up more often if in fact he is nominated.”

At the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, philosophy professor Rabbi Elliott Dorff compares Polanski’s quagmire to President Bill Clinton’s indiscretions.

“Do you judge somebody simply on the basis of his professional performance, whether that be as a president or as a film director?” Dorff said. “Or does the moral character of the person have an effect on your judgment, even of his professional expertise? It’s not unheard of that you make a moral evaluation of an artist as an artist.”

Polanski’s once-13-year-old victim now is married with three children and lives in Hawaii. She was given a settlement by Polanski, whom she has forgiven and has described repeatedly to reporters as having not raped her, but instead making her have sex with him.

Dorff noted that along with his victim’s forgiveness, Polanski apparently has lived a blemish-free life in Paris with a wife and two children. The 1977 scandal gutted his career, his work in exile far removed from the pre-scandal hits that garnered Oscar nominations for directing “Chinatown” and another for writing the “Rosemary’s Baby” screenplay. After a quarter-century, only now with “The Pianist” and its Hollywood support has Polanski found himself not making another unprofitable, second-rate European film.

“We really don’t make moral requirements by and large, especially when the person has been forgiven _ and he has effectively lived out his punishment,” said the rabbi.

KRE END FINNIGAN