Who Are These Polanski Backers Anyway?
You know the tide has turned on Roman Polanski's campaign for child rape forgiveness when even the French have defected from the director's camp. But just who the hell were these friends of child rape to begin with?
Ah Fortuna's bitter harvest! Just yesterday the giants of entertainment stood arm in arm demanding the world come to its senses, and righteous intelligensia stared down the American rabble, asking of those who would dare judge a Roman Polanski, have you no decency sirs?
That was yesterday. Today the rabble is taking names.
Reading great political significance into the Polanski defense, Politico has done an accounting and reports that "Movie industry types calling for the release of director Roman Polanski last year gave $34,000 to Obama's presidential campaign and the Democratic Party, FEC records show."
Leading the list of supporters of both child rape and Democrats is mogul Harvey Weinstein, whose prominent role in the Polanski defense is paired with his $28,500 donation to the DNC. Politico doesn't say what the relationship of those two actions is, but they of course, do nothing to stand in the way of you drawing your own sinister conclusions.
Meanwhile in the LA Times, blogger Patrick Goldstein has a fascinating point that should pause the mob in their tracks before they storm the Paramount gates. After weeks of accusations that Hollywood was using the Polanski case as an opportunityto shove their pro-child rape agenda down the American throats, Goldstein points out that the Polanski defense has not been particularly Hollywood-based at all. He writes of the signatories to the Polanski defense petition:
All of those filmmakers, along with Harvey Weinstein, live far, far away from Hollywood and, with occasional exceptions, make their movies outside of Hollywood as well. If you look up the rest of the names on the best-known petition in circulation, it is filled with the names of foreign filmmakers, writers and actors — including the likes of Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar Wai, Alfonso Cuaron, Isabelle Adjani and Salman Rushdie — who also rarely set foot in Hollywood. If critics like Teachout want to claim that high-brow artists and writers have rushed to Polanski's defense, fair enough. But to say that Hollywood is in his corner, as part of a political argument that Hollywood is a liberal elite woefully ignorant of mainstream values, is just hogwash.
There's no petition going around with the names of the real Hollywood elite — A-list filmmakers and studio chiefs like Steven Spielberg, Alan Horn, James Cameron, Amy Pascal, Jerry Bruckheimer, Brian Grazer, Tom Rothman, J.J. Abrams, John Lasseter or Michael Bay — because the real Hollywood elite isn't supporting Polanski. In fact, they haven't offered the slightest hint of backing for Polanski. It's only European and New York-based artists, who clearly see the world in a very different light than the real Hollywood elite.
We did our own geographic accounting of the Polanski defenders, adding up all the home cities of all the public American supporters we could find whose hometowns we could determine. Here is what we came up with:
• New York: 18 Supporters
Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, Kent Jones,Harmony Korine, Richard Pena, Jerry Schatzberg, Julian Schnabel, Barbet Schroeder, Paul Auster, Mike Nichols,Diane von Furstenberg, Harvey Weinstein, Adrien Brody, Jonathan Klein, Natalie Portman
• LA: 8 supporters
Scott Foundas, John Landis, Alexander Payne, Taylor Hackford, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann J. Neil Schulman, Harrison Ford
• Elsewhere USA: 2 supporters
David Lynch, Terry Zwigoff
Like Politico, I'm not saying this necessarily means that all New Yorkers practice moral relativism when it comes to high crimes by filmmakers, but as a native Los Angeleno, I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
And while the backlash against the defense does not yet have a body count, it may have a lost-commercial-shoot count. Mediabistro's Agency Spy blog reports on a rather obscure tip that Martin Scorsese was cut out of a group of directors hired to shoot ads for the 2010 census because of his Polanski support. The blog has a hard time nailing down the truth of this rumor but state pretty decisively that Scorsese's name is now m-u-d at the agency handling the census account.
And while America points fingers, the accused himself sits in his alpine chalet/cell, awaiting our justice.