Watch a Sundance Q&A with the director of Wanted and Desired

Audiences at the Sundance film festival this year expected few surprises from a new documentary about the 1977 trial of the film director Roman Polanski. Aged 43, Polanski pleaded guilty to having “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor”, and fled the United States to live in France rather than face jail. However, the documentary – Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, directed by Marina Zenovich – was so surprising and controversial in its conclusions, and contained so much fabulously evocative archival footage, that there was a frenzied multimillion-dollar bidding war for the rights. HBO quickly bought the film for America, and the Weinstein Company bought international distribution rights. The documentary will be screened in the BBC’s Storyville strand later this year.

The title comes from something said about Polanski by the producer Andrew Braunsberg, one of his close friends: “In France he’s desired, and in America he’s wanted.” Based on interviews with more than 100 people, many speaking for the first time, Wanted and Desired upends conventional wisdom about the case. Zenovich persuasively argues that Polanski didn’t flee American justice, he fled injustice. As The New York Times put it in a review: “Mr Polanski survived the Holocaust and the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. It was the American legal system that almost did him in.”

Even Samantha Geimer – the 13-year-old with whom Polanski had unlawful sex – her lawyer and the prosecuting attorney agree that the director was justified in fleeing rather than face an indeterminate jail term, possibly as long as 50 years. The sentence was about to be meted out by a judge who – all the lawyers involved acknowledge – had corrupted the legal process and was more concerned with his own image than with the law or justice.

“I clearly hold no brief for Mr Polanski,” says Larry Silver, Geimer’s attorney then and now, “and obviously what he did to Samantha, my client, was wrong and outrageous, but clearly he was supposed to be treated fairly in court, and clearly he was not.”

The documentary is sure to renew calls for the director’s arrest warrant to be quashed so that he can return to America. As a citizen of France, where he was born, Polanski is not subject to extradition. He cannot travel to a number of other countries, including Britain, for fear of being extradited to the United States. At the same time, the film is unlikely to convince those who believe Polanski has escaped justice because of his wealth and celebrity.

Zenovich says she became intrigued by the Polanski case in 2003 – the year his film The Pianist won an Oscar – when she saw an interview Geimer and her lawyer gave to Larry King on CNN. “Her lawyer said that the day Polanski fled was a sad day for American justice,” she recalls. “I thought, what? That makes no sense.” As she began to look into it, Zenovich realised she and most people had little understanding of what really happened. She initially faced strong opposition from some people close to Polanski, but a number of them eventually agreed to speak to her, including Mia Farrow, who had starred in Rosemary’s Baby. Polanski did not make himself available, although the film does contain fascinating footage of him being interviewed by Clive James and the late Russell Harty.

One of the first people Zenovich approached was Jeff Berg, Polanski’s powerful Hollywood agent. He was not encouraging. “He said, ‘Everybody knows this story,’” she recalls. “I said, ‘No, people don’t know the story. Nobody knows what really happened.’” In fact, as David Dalton, Polanski’s attorney, speaking for the first time, says: “Only three people know the story, and one of them is dead” – himself; Roger Gunson, the district attorney who prosecuted the case; and the judge, Laurence J Rittenband, who died in 1993, aged 88.

Rittenband was a fascinating and deeply contradictory character. No strait-laced moralist, he was almost as much of a ladies’ man as Polanski. A lifelong bachelor, he loved champagne and spent most nights hobnobbing with his movie-business friends at the swanky Hillcrest Country Club. He had two girlfriends on the go at the same time, starting a relationship with one of them when he was 54 and she was just 20. “I’ve got one that cooks and one that does the other thing,” he told friends. The judge had presided over a number of other high-profile cases, including the divorce of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, and the custody battle over Marlon Brando’s late son Christian. He loved the limelight and had his bailiff keep a scrapbook of his press cuttings. The Polanski case seemed tailor-made for him.

By the time of his arrest, Polanski, having just made Chinatown (1974), was one of Hollywood’s most successful directors. He was also under a cloud, however, because of the hideous murder of his wife, the beautiful actress Sharon Tate, by the so-called “family” of the psychopath Charles Manson, in 1969. Tate and four friends were murdered in the couple’s rented Hollywood Hills home when she was 8½ months pregnant with Polanski’s child. She was stabbed 16 times. “He was devastated, devastated to a point that I have never seen any other human being,” says Braunsberg, who was with Polanski in London when he heard the news. (The film uses footage of Polanski returning to LA that makes this claim clearly and movingly true.) The ritualistic killings were not solved for some months. In the meantime, there was much insidious speculation in the press that Polanski, director of the satanic-themed Rosemary’s Baby, might have been involved. The media harped on the dark themes of his films: paranoia, alienation, loneliness and death. Even after Manson and his followers were convicted, some kind of psychic blame seemed to hover around Polanski. It didn’t help that shortly after the murders, he posed for a photograph at the house. The word “PIG”, smeared in Tate’s blood by one of the killers, could be clearly seen on a door behind him. “I am widely regarded, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf,” Polanski later wrote.

In the years that followed, he was often photographed consoling himself with the company of very young women. He began a relationship with Nastassja Kinski when she was just 15. So it was hardly surprising that a media firestorm erupted when Polanski was arrested, nearly eight years after the murders, for having sex with a 13-year-old. It became the first celebrity media circus of the television era, since repeated at the trials of Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson.

Although the US media could not disclose Geimer’s identity, her name and photographs of her were widely exposed in European newspapers and magazines. “It was awful,” says Geimer, who is now 45. “Everybody knew at school. People came to school with cameras, and things were being said and printed. The worst part was, nobody believed me. I would just as soon have walked away from it the next day, but you can’t stop it once it starts.”

Anxious to save Geimer and her family from further media intrusion and from the trauma of having to testify at a trial, her lawyer suggested a plea bargain. Polanski, who was being vilified in the press and facing antisemitic taunts, agreed to plead guilty to one count of having “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor”, and the five other, more serious, charges were dropped. “I thought it was a very good disposition for the reason that it vindicated the family and the girl, and it exposed Mr Polanski to significant time in custody based upon a probation report,” says Gunson.

When the probation report recommended that Polanski serve no time in jail, however, Judge Rittenband, under intense media pressure, balked. Behind closed doors, he did something unheard of: he told Gunson and Dalton what they were to argue in court. He said he would send Polanski to Chino state prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation. Dalton agreed to go along with this legal sham because the judge promised that would be the end of the matter.

Because Polanski was in preproduction on a new film, the judge agreed to postpone the evaluation for 90 days. Polanski flew to Europe to work on the film but had the astonishing bad judgment to be photographed at the Oktober-fest in Munich sitting between two beautiful young women. The judge, who felt he had been made a fool of, was furious. He ordered Polanski to return immediately and quickly sent him to Chino.

“It was grim, a frightening place,” says Braunsberg, who visited Polanski there. “This is hard-core... murderers. Roman was not safe. People get killed there.” Partly because the prison authorities feared for his safety, Polanski was released after 42 days. That infuriated Rittenband more.

“My father was at Hillcrest Country Club, washing his hands in the locker room, and standing next to him was Judge Rittenband,” says Hawk Koch, son of the producer Howard W Koch. “And one of the gentlemen at Hillcrest came up to Rittenband and said, ‘Are you really going to let that little Polish blah-blah-blah off?’ And Rittenband says, ‘Well, he thinks so, but no way. We’re going to put that blank-blank away for the rest of his life.’”

Rittenband then called Dalton and Gunson to his office and said that because of all the pressure he was getting, he was not going to honour the plea agreement. That meant Polanski could face a sentence as long as 50 years, although the judge really seemed to want to deport him. “He wanted Roman to say that he would voluntarily agree to waive any right he may have regarding deportation,” Dalton recalls. “Rittenband had no jurisdiction over such matters, and it is illegal to impose an unlawful condition on someone serving time in custody, and so now we were in the category of actual illegal conduct.”

Polanski came to Dalton’s office the night before he was due to be sentenced by Rittenband. “Roman said to me, ‘Can we trust him?’” Dalton recalls. “And I said, ‘No, we can’t trust him. We have no idea what he may do. We’ve all agreed he can no longer be trusted and what he represents to us is worthless.’”

Polanski walked out of the office and the following day, February 1, 1978, took a plane to London. From there, he went to Paris. Geimer now says: “Who wouldn’t think about running when facing a 50-year sentence from a judge who was clearly more interested in his own reputation than a fair judgment or even the wellbeing of the victim?” After Dalton and Gunson threatened to go public about Rittenband’s shenanigans, the judge was forced to withdraw from the case.

Despite the documentary’s persuasive argument that Polanski was steamrollered, some people still defend Rittenband, feeling, like him, that 42 days was far too light a sentence. “That’s not a punishment,” says Phillip Vannatter, the Los Angeles detective who arrested Polanski. “He got off with nothing.”

“She was a 13-year-old girl,” one district attorney reiterates. “He had sexual intercourse with her, sodomised her, gave her drugs, gave her alcohol.” And what Polanski did that day obviously remains problematic. Geimer’s grand-jury testimony makes it clear that as Polanski was forcing her to have sex with him, she was pleading with him to stop. She didn’t struggle because she was afraid of him and thought they were alone in the house. So it’s hard to know what Zenovich means when she says: “If it was a violent rape, I wouldn’t have made this film.” In a few brutal, unforgivable moments, Polanski apparently took away a young girl’s innocence.

Some have blamed Geimer’s mother for allowing her to go off with him that fateful day. Geimer, who lives in Hawaii with her second husband and her three children, doesn’t blame her mother. “We trusted him,” she says. “We had no reason not to. He was a celebrity.”

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