"Madame Emma Thompson is but passing through petitions," writes novelist and filmmaker Yann Moix on the website of Bernard-Henri Lévy's journal, La Règle du jeu, this morning. "She does not own, she is a tenant. Worse: she is there visiting, with the badge ‘guest.'"

He adds, "In life, we must choose between whims and ideas...We at La Règle du Jeu would like to now sign a petition that Madame Emma Thompson never again sign a petition, because it would not be her signature that would be ridiculed, but this time the cause."

(Translation courtesy of high school French and Google Translate, so let us know if we've missed something).

By the way, Thompson's name has already been removed from the petition. An associate of Lévy, Liliane Lazar, told us that it was Thompson's request to be removed by Wednesday.

Update: A native French speaker has weighed in and the translation has been tweaked accordingly, although the meaning remains the same.

Madame Emma Thompson "Se Retire" De La Pétition Pour Polanski Lancée Par La Règle Du Jeu!"

Earlier: Emma Thompson's Name to Be Removed from Polanski Petition This Week

Thompson, you see, disappointed many of her fans earlier this fall when she signed a petition — along with a host of other boldface names, including Salman Rushdie, Natalie Portman, and Diane Von Furstenburg — demanding that Polanski be freed on charges relating to his rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

Luckily, Caitlin Hayward-Tapp was nowhere near as abstemious as the View ladies: last week, the 19-year-old Exeter University student gutsily convinced Thompson to remove her name from the petition demanding Polanski's freeing. But as of this morning, Thompson's name was still on the petition, which is hosted on the website of French public intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy.

After we contacted her a few hours ago, Ms. Thompson's publicist told us that her client "...requested that her name be removed when she said she would. We have asked for confirmation from them but have not yet received it."

We also asked Mr. Henri-Levy's camp for an update, and Liliane Lazar, a former French professor who worked with him on the petition, responded, saying that Thompson's name will be removed Wednesday. As for why it would take several days to remove a line from a posting on a webpage, Ms. Lazar has yet to say.

Related: Thompson Talked Out of Support For Polanski by 19-year-old Student [Independent]
Polanski Business: In Which Emma Thompson Breaks My Heart [Shakesville]
Dear Emma... [Shakesville]

Earlier: Emma Thompson To Remove Name From Polanski Petition?
Letters From Hollywood: Roman Polanski's Rape Of Child No Big Thing

• The dream has ended for Shrek: The Musical. The stage adaptation of the cartoon which attempted to change the Great White Way forever with this revolutionary classy dramatic rendition of a farting contest (we're not kidding, watch the clip), finally accepted the call of gravity just under a year after its debut. [Variety]

• The immediate fate of Roman Polanski is unclear today. After reports earlier this week that he would not fight extradition to the US, today the picture is muddier, with his legal team apparently hotly debating the question. [Hollywood Reporter]

• This Is It, the documentary based on what would have been Michael Jackson's concert series, is headed for a big opening, with 1600 of its showings already sold out. [NY Times]

• David Fincher has signed on to produce a TV series based on the British political thriller House of Cards. The novels which were adopted into a classic trilogy of mini-series by the BBC a decade ago portray the rise and fall of a ruthless British Prime Minister. [Hollywood Reporter]

• Signaling to the world's geek community that it is time to hurry up and say their last goodbyes, Fox has announced it is pulling Joss Whedon's Dollhouse from its November sweeps schedule. [Hitfix]

• Technicolor has finally taken its place on the bandwagon to shove 3D - and its accompanying higher ticket prices - down the world's throat, announcing it has found a solution that will allow non-digital equipped movie houses a conventional means of projecting 3D. [Variety]

While locked away for the first time on the still pending child rape charge, the state Corrections department, we've learned today, gave the celebrated auteur a chance to play God in the manner to which he had grown accustomed, giving him the reins to direct a training film for prison guards.

In recent days, the world has been stunned and mildly amused to learn that celebrated autuer/accused child rapist Roman Polanski has been spending his time in jail while awaiting extradition hearings finishing his film.

When arrested in Zurich a few weeks back, Polanski was nearly done with production on The Ghost, a political thriller starring Pierce Brosnan, based on a novel by Robert Harris. Observers had speculated about the fate of the unfinished film until Harris revealed in an interview with The Guardian yesterday that the director has been hard at work on the film from behind bars (or behind chalet as the case may be.)

But we have learned that this is not the first time Polanski has put his hard time to good use for the cinema, according to the Daily Bulletin of California's Inland Empire — home of the Chino State Correctional Facility where Polanski was first incarcerated for the rape charges from December 1977 - January 1978.

The article discloses that while Polanski was serving his time he directed a training film about prison gangs for the Corrections Department. The Bulletin's writer describes the circumstances of the shoot:

Cameras rolled in the prison's East facility, the same one trashed in the recent riot. It was a lockup for high-security and protective-custody inmates. "Roman was a very diminutive and overwhelmed-by-prison inmate, but over in the East Facility cellblocks, with camera and lights rolling, he would `forget himself' and DIRECT, BABY, DIRECT!" cracks my source.

"He would shout out orders to some really heavy-duty gang characters - allowed out of cells only one at a time - to `stand this way' or `suck in that gut,' and all sorts of personal comments and commands. And the gang members, clearly starstruck by being on camera, meekly complied!

After spending a few hours a day working on the shoot, the Bulletin says "the film was suppressed and never used for departmental training."

It's good to know that even incarcerated for terrible crimes, auteurs never have to stop playing God. And exciting to imagine that somewhere out there, in a dark government archive, the Rosemary's Baby of prison guard training films sits waiting for its day in the sun.

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.

Well, that's not entirely true, over the past seven days, there have been some nice things said about the Hollywood director, but we certainly didn't find the tweets he was talking about. In the piece, he says the "other day" he flew to New York, and on the trip a limo driver tweeted about the tip he left. To do that, a lot of things would have to happen: the limo driver would have to recognize Brett Ratner, he'd have to risk his job and life to tweet while driving, and Brett Ratner would have to leave a good tip. At least two of any of those three things seem unlikely to occur.

Also, Ratner claims two "performance artists" tweeted that he would attend their strip show, and a kid tweeted that he was a thief. We couldn't find any of these. In BlackBook Ratner says that the constant surveillance of people recognizing him and writing about what he's doing and how awesome he is really harshing his mellow. That apparently seems to be a problem only in Bizarro Cyberspace where Ratner lives.

Mostly, what people were talking about was how he would produce a new Roman Polanski documentary.

Some excerpts of what people were really saying:

• @BrianLynch says: :Brett Ratner's Roman Polanski doc will have the kickiest soundtrack and most hilarious fish out of water misunderstandings a doc can HAVE."
• @hunterstep says: Polanski is like white peoples' oj, except he's guilty and he didn't murder anyone, and he's friends with brett ratner.
• @John_Hollahan says: Even if I felt drugging/raping were ok, Brett Ratner's support would give me pause. On any issue, really.
• @AdamTM24 says: Brett Ratner, McG, Roland Emmerich, Joel Schumacher, Friedberg/Seltzer, Tom Rothman. All clown shoes when it comes to movie making.
• @katerbee says: You know how to decide how you feel something? find out what Brett Ratner thinks, then think the opposite.
• @PAPPADEMAS says: Also: Brett Ratner got a "Special Thanks" for, like, just being a good dude. His heart is so big it has a poolhouse you could crash in.
• @Meli_Molina says: Oh yea, saw New York, I Love You. I still don't have a soft spot for NYC and I still hate Brett Ratner with a fiery passion

But Ratner still looks on the bright side, seeing past the drawbacks of living in a world where limo drivers and strippers constantly tweet about how excited they are to be near you:

Maybe I should look at the positive side of constant surveillance. Maybe it's a sign that when one of my films comes out, and it's really good, all of those secret spies will tell everyone about it, and get more people into the theater for opening weekend. But then again, they might not like what they've seen and tell everyone that the movie isn't worth their dollars.

From our not very scientific market research, we're going to have to go with the latter.

[Image via Getty]

The conversation around Roman Polanski has been a hard one to follow. Part of it is annoyance - it is unnerving to see how certain celebrities fall under scrutiny for consorting with minors and others can make it seem like an unfortunate lapse in judgment.

Jill at Feministe points out how many actors seem to feel that this is just peachy:

What I don't understand is why so many people are signing this petition. On the most basic level, it's especially disappointing when the signatories are people whose work I like and respect. Pedro Almodovar. Wes Anderson. Natalie Portman. Kristin Scott Thomas. Darren Aronofsky. Diane von Furstenberg. Julian Schnabel. Martin Scorsese. Tilda Swinton. Gael Garcia Bernal (there goes my biggest crush). Penelope Cruz.

But they are, after all, just entertainers. It's absolutely heartbreaking when the support comes from someone who should really know better - like the founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

"My personal thoughts are let the guy go," said Peg Yorkin, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation. "It's bad a person was raped. But that was so many years ago. The guy has been through so much in his life. It's crazy to arrest him now. Let it go. The government could spend its money on other things."

Lauren over at Feministe brings her experience into the narratives around Polanski, noting:

Rape is not the only assault. Around rape is a large segment of the population that questions the victim, a culture that looks down on victims for allowing themselves to be victimized, or keep them victimized, questions about the victim's credibility, questions about the legacy of rape and how bad it is, because how bad is rape really? Rape, because various levels and forms of sexual assault are systemic and pervasive across all societies, exists alongside one's experiences of unwanted touching, wanted touching, sexual objectification, sexual desire, sexual harassment, incest, love, leering eyes, cat calls, roaming hands, consent, confusion, tits, vagina, rectum, penis, mouth, rape and not-rape, all of it loaded, all of it veering at rape's ugly legacy, co-mingling, the legacy that tells us to be more careful, to dress more conservatively, to BE BETTER AT BEING VULNERABLE, or BE MORE POWERFUL, or BE MORE FEARFUL, or GET OVER IT ALREADY. Rape leaks into healthy, consensual experiences. It lingers. It pervades.

Roman Polanski initiated sexual contact with someone he knew to be underage, persisted after she said no, pled guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor, and fled the country when he feared he would go to prison anyway.

What's so disturbing about the articles isn't that people are claiming our legal system is flawed. It's that people - be they in Hollywood or your average citizen - are grasping for all kinds of ways to twist this back on the victim and to exonerate Polanski by denying this crime ever happened. So you want him to walk on a technicality? Fine. Admit that! But why are we denying that the rape ever happened?

It did happen.

Polanski admitted as such. So are people so invested in the idea that if we pretend it isn't "rape-rape" then the matter will be resolved?

As Rock says at the end of the clip: "The United States, we want to capture Osama Bin Laden, and murder him. We don't want to rape him - that would be barbaric!"

Rape is a barbaric act.

And I'm amazed it took a comedian to say it outright.

Heartbreakers [Feministe]
Getting Over It[Feministe]

Earlier:
Whoopi On Roman Polanski: It Wasn't 'Rape-Rape'
This Roman Polanski Thing? International Clusterfuck
Letters From Hollywood: Roman Polanski's Rape Of Child No Big Thing
Are Anti-Polanski Celebs Afraid To Speak Up?

The movie, a thriller that stars Pierce Brosnan as someone who isn't Tony Blair, was recently completed, but lacks a score and some final editing. But, never fear, cinephiles, because maybe pedophile Polanski's team vows to keep the dream alive:

Timothy Burrill, a co-producer, said: "The film will continue. I honestly don't want to say any more but we're very close to finishing it now." However, the final post-production steps are not a formality and Polanski is known for wanting to control every aspect of his films.

If Polanski is, in fact, extradited to the United States, he can always work remotely, says Variety's international editor, Ali Jaafar.

Regardless of what happens to Polanski, there's no doubt that the film will have no problem tackling another one of its problems: it has no distributor. This could be the director's final work, so someone, somewhere will definitely take the reins to release a film with massive amounts of pre-publicity, however bad.

Seriously, after Matt Lauer asks her what she can tell us about Polanski personally, as someone who's kept in touch with him over the years, the first words out of her mouth are, "Roman is a brilliant director." He's also a "philanthropist," a "humanitarian" and a "good guy," and wait, I don't know if I mentioned this yet, "He's brilliant as well."

You know, all of these things may very well true. Can I just point out that none of them rules out his also being a child rapist? As Bitch Ph.D.'s M. Leblanc said on Twitter yesterday, "I really am baffled by how hard people find it to accept that great artists can do terrible things. Where have you been for all of history?"

Lauer asks Tate what she'd say to those of us asking questions like that, and she tells us that back in the '70s, Polanski was in custody for 4 months — 4 months, 42 days, tomayto, tomahto — that the shrinks judged him not to be a pedophile*, and then, here it comes! "There's rape, and then there's rape." Actually, Debra, I think the legal term you're looking for is "rape-rape." (Ask Whoopi Goldberg about it.)

She continues, "It was determined that Roman did not forcibly have sex with this young woman." Really? Was that determined by someone other than Roman Polanski? 'Cause I sure haven't seen anything indicating it was. The charges involving issues of consent were dropped because he agreed to a plea bargain — you know, the one he skipped town before being sentenced for? But for all the talk about how the victim has forgiven him and doesn't want to see this drag out, I haven't heard anything about her saying, "He didn't put his penis in me while I said no. First in my vagina, then in my anus. After raping me orally. He actually did none of that! Sorry for the confusion!"

And yet, Tate assures us, "It was a consensual matter. I am a victim's advocate, and I know the difference." And that is where I lose any respect I might have had for Debra Tate (and also where my head explodes). First, as far as I know, she's an advocate for families like hers, who have lost loved ones to murder, not for rape victims. Second, even if she were an advocate for child rape survivors, her opinion would still be just that. As it is, I don't even have snark for someone who says, "I work with victims of violent crime, therefore I have special knowledge that allowed me to determine conclusively that this 13-year-old was lying when she said my ex-brother-in-law kept putting his penis in her, long after she said no." I just... yeah.

*No word on whether they would have called the forty-something man who went on to have a relationship with 15-year-old Nastassja Kinski an ephebophile, instead.

"Film-makers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision," says the petition which, according to the Guardian,

has now been signed by more than 70 film industry luminaries, including Polanski's fellow directors Michael Mann, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodóvar, Darren Aronofsky, Terry Gilliam, Julian Schnabel, the Dardenne brothers, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Wong Kar-Wai, Walter Salles and Jonathan Demme. Actors Tilda Swinton, Monica Bellucci and Asia Argento, as well as producer Harvey Weinstein have also put their names on the petition. Yesterday, Weinstein stated he was "calling on every film-maker we can to help fix this terrible situation".

Meanwhile, the media is abuzz with speculation as to why after all these years, Polanski was arrested now. Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff opined that the arrest is revenge by prosecutors for the humiliation they endured after last year's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired depicted the circus surrounding the original case.

The LA Times however, claims that Polanski provoked the arrest by taunting law enforcement with their inaction. They write:

Polanski's attorneys helped to provoke his arrest by complaining to an appellate court this summer that Los Angeles County prosecutors had made no real effort to capture the filmmaker in his three decades as a fugitive. The accusation that the Los Angeles County district attorney's office was not serious about extraditing Polanski was a minor point in two lengthy July court filings by the director's attorneys.

The piece goes on to describe how, despite the fact that Polanski had visited Switzerland before, the widely publicized nature of his appearances at the Zurich film festival goaded prosecutors to action.

And while Polanski's victim Samantha Geimer may be "over it" a significant lynch mob is still roaming the internet demanding justice for what they remind us, was not just some private between adults indiscretion.

At Salon, Kate Harding writes a hang 'em high piece succinctly entitled "Reminder: Roman Polanski Raped a Child."

And over at moviecitynews, David Poland rebuts seemingly the rest of Hollywood with a nice list of retorts to the "But he's a great director who's been through so much" arguments.

Turning back the clock, awards blogger Tom O'Neil wonders whether Polanski even deserved his best director Oscar for The Pianist, pointing out that the director of that year's Best Picture Chicago, was strangely denied the traditional accompanying statue and ponders whether the award might have been Hollywood's show of support to the exiled molester.

Q: Who is this old dude anyway?
A: Roman Polanski's is one of most colorful lives of the 20th Century. A young Jewish boy when the Nazis invaded Poland, he managed to survive the war, hiding out while his parents were deported to concentration camps. Becoming an internationally celebrated filmmaker in his 20's, Polanski defected from his native Poland to seek artistic freedom in the west. In France and later in the US, he became a noted international playboy and directed a run of still classics that included Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown. After settling down and marrying actress Sharon Tate however, his long-denied domestic bliss was interrupted when Charles Manson's apostles murdered his very pregnant young wife. Polanski's post-Tate period witnessed a return to his international playboy ways, an epoch ended by his arrest for rape in 1977.

Q: What was he accused of?
A: The LA District Attorney charged Polanski with luring a thirteen year old aspiring actress/model to Jack Nicholson's home, drugging and anally raping her.

Q: Was the girl Justine Bateman?
A: No! But this was an urban legend for many years. The victim's name is in fact Samantha Geimer who has since spoken to the press about her experience, including today expressing her wishes that Polanski be punished no further.

Q: What happened with his trial?
A: As detailed in a recent documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the trial was a circus that makes the OJ case look like a model of jurisprudence. A judge in love with the spotlight ran the case in circles while seemingly allowing every day's headlines to dictate his rulings. Ultimately, Polanski allowed himself to be jailed for 90 days to undergo psychiatric evaluation on the understanding that this time served would constitute the bulk of his punishment. When it appeared, however, that the judge was on the brink of reneging on this promise and Polanski was facing a much longer imprisonment, he fled the country.

Q: What has he done since fleeing the U.S.?
A: Since fleeing in 1978, Polanski has lived in France where he has continued to work as a director, making big budget films—such as Frantic, staring Harrison Ford—in cooperation with American film companies. His career went through a rough patch in the '80s and '90s after a series of tepid misfires (eg. Pirates). He recently, however, has had a bit of a comeback winning from afar the Academy Award for The Pianist, a film inspired by his own adventures hiding out from the Nazis.

Q: Why haven't we brought him back before?
A: Since defecting from Poland, Polanski has held French citizenship and France's extradition treaty with the US forbids sending us their own citizens. Since fleeing, he has been careful not to venture to countries which might send him back. According to the LA Times, U.S. Marshals have come close to nabbing Polanski half a dozen times when he traveled in recent years, but "for one reason or another, it just didn't work out."

Q: Why are the Europeans making such a fuss over this now?
A: In France in particular, Polanski symbolizes much of the cultural war between the U.S. and Europe, with the director cast in the role of urbane free-spirited intellectual, hunted down and persecuted by the bigoted, close-minded xenophobic Americans. There is certainly truth on both sides. Prejudice played a big role in how Polanski was viewed during his trial and even after the murder of his wife, he was shamefully portrayed in many press accounts as bizarre outsider figure who was somehow responsible for the slayings. However, be that as it may, drugging and raping a 13 year old girl ain't tiddlywinks.

Q: Isn't it kinda weird that this is happening the week after the first of his wife's murderers dies?
A: Yes, it is, but such is the roller-coaster ride of the life of Roman Polanski.

The Telegraph put together a great item report on the arrest. The 76 year-old Polanski, who's been living as a French citizen, was on his way to the Zurich Film Festival, where he was supposed to receive an honorary award and be the recipient of a tribute. The charges and arrest warrant—submitted in 2005 as an international alert by request of American authorities, meaning someone, somewhere still really wanted to bust him—stem from his 1978 guilty plea to supposedly drugging and definitely having sex with a then 13 year-old Samantha Geimer, an aspiring model, during a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson's place. Of course: it's always at Jack Nicholson's place.

Polanski plead guilty, but realized the judge might not honor the plea bargain in Polanski's sentencing, and left the country. The judge in the original case—the late Laurence Rittenband—has been accused of tampering with the verdict for political reasons. Polanski's tried to appeal the decision unsuccessfully. Just two months ago, he unsuccessfully tried to get an appeals court in California to overturn a refusal to even consider throwing out his 1977 case.

He's still been making films, and won an Oscar for The Pianist in 2003 (which Frantic star Harrison Ford accepted on his behalf), but hasn't returned to the US since. He had the quite the life pre-exile: his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family. He was a refugee of the Holocaust; his mother told him to run before Nazis could get to him, and she was killed in Auschwitz.

And now, Polanski's situation and life is only going to get worse for all parties involved, again. Even the adult Samantha Geimer has forgiven him, and wants the case overturned:

The victim at the centre of the case, Samantha Geimer, has previously asked for the charges to be dropped, saying the continued publication of details "causes harm to me, my husband and children.

Oh, and thanks Switzerland, for pissing off the French:

France's culture minister says he is "dumbfounded" by the arrest. of the director, who is a french citizen. Frederic Mitterrand said he "strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them".

Silly Swiss; with your sketchy, Nazi-assisting banks and "army" knives that could maybe fight a way on the canned soup aisle, you fucked up someone's weekend. And a nice film festival! His extradition and arrest are being processed there now (both of which he can fight in Swiss courts), but at this point, he looks to be headed home.

Roman Polanski's been a cause celebre of the film community since it happened. A documentary about the issue (Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired) ran on HBO last year. The trailer's below. Polanski's very much one of the most respected, working filmmakers alive. Expect there to be a huge outpouring of support for him in Hollywood. This is far from over.

While Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza declined to dismiss the case outright with Polanski absent, he did acknowledge sharing the Oscar-winner's sense that "substantial misconduct" occurred during the trial 30 years ago. That misconduct was brought into relief over the last year by the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired; Espinoza set a May 7 date for his next hearing, at which time Polanski's attendance — "submit[ting] to the jurisdiction of this court," in his words — could hasten the dismissal he wants.

When asked by Polanski's lawyer what would happen to his fugitive client upon surrender, Espinoza declined to advise. Developing, as they say, but feel free at this point to cross Polanski off your surprise Oscar presenters list. Sorry.

• Polanski loses court bid but gets another chance [AP]

The trailer above is just a sampling of the vaguely lesbionic tussling that can be found in Polanski's short film Greed, which is exclusively showing over at Dazed Digital. The project is the latest work from artist Francesco Vezzoli, who's known for creating trailers, premieres, and now a perfume ad for products that don't actually exist (you may remember his fake coming attraction for a Caligula remake starring Courtney Love, Benicio del Toro, and Helen Mirren). Finally, we've found a plausible explanation of the trailer for Crank 2: High Voltage!

• Francesco Vezzoli's Greed Online Premiere [Dazed Digital via E!]

· Influential visual effects house The Orphanage, who did some of the effects on Iron Man and Pirates of the Caribbean, is shutting down operations. *Sad face outfitted with dazzlingly complex heads-up display and shoulder-mounted rocket-launchers.* [Variety]
· Suave, debonair, dazzlingly gorgeous AMC star Peter Bart (suck it, Hamm) and Peter Guber will bring their act to primetime for a series of specials called StoryMakers, featuring "gatherings of top actors in roundtable discussions of current entertainment topics." [Variety]
· David E. Kelley repertory player Loretta Devine gets a series regular spot on Legally Mad. [THR]
· Timothy Hutton will co-star in The Ghost, a Roman Polanski film about a ghostwriter hired to write a former British PM's memoirs. Ewan McGregor plays the writer, Pierce Brosnan the PM, Tom Wilkinson, James Belushi (spittake) and Kim Cattrall (second spittake) fill out the rest of the cast. Shooting begins this week in Berlin. [THR]

To recap: Sure, Polanski pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old, and he did a month and a half of jail time awaiting his sentence before dashing off to France, where he's lived as a fugitive since 1978. But after a 2008 documentary revealed some skeevy, untoward influence on the case's presiding judge (now deceased), the director and his attorneys sought a dismissal of the case. And whoever dismissed it, they argued, it shouldn't go through the still-tainted Los Angeles Superior Court, which insists Polanski return to make his case in person — which would at least temporarily land him back in the can, where child rapists are reportedly unpopular no matter how many Oscars they and their films have have won.

It was worth a shot, we guess — even his victim wants the whole thing thrown out — but the change of venue was blocked yesterday when an appeals court lifted a stay on the Polanski proceedings. A new hearing will be scheduled shortly, for now still requiring Polanski's personal appearance in front of a sure-to-be-sympathetic local judge. We recommend the director make the most of it, perhaps lining up a Feb. 23 court date, preceded by one of those surprise presenter berths at the Academy Awards the night before. Get on it, Bill Condon.

• Polanski loses bid to bar L.A. judges [Variety]

From her residence in Hawaii, the 45-year-old Geimer filed a legal declaration asking the Los Angeles Supreme Court to throw out Polanski's case, lest the revival of hearings, more hearings and the director's imminent arrest upon returning to the States ensnare her a second time in the trauma of his persuasive appeals. It's not her first statement to this effect, and not even her most public — that likely occurred last summer on the red carpet for the crusading documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. But it is her most important, aiding Polanski in a way that his own fugitive logic cannot:

I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr. Polanski may have caused me as a child.

I am surprised and disappointed with the District Attorney, who (1) has refused to cause the dismissal of this case, and (2) has, yet one more time, given great publicity to the lurid details of those events, for all to read, again. True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children, and my mother. I have become a victim of the actions of the District Attorney. [...]

If Polanski cannot stand before the Court to make this Request, I, as the victim, can and I, as the victim do.

Hear that, Roman? You may get that change of venue after all. Bring your golf clubs!

• Polanski victim wants case dismissed [THR Esq.]

Polanski officially sought a dismissal of his 1978 statutory-rape case last month, when he cited the judicial trangressions laid out in the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired as the basis for his exoneration. Awaiting a ruling on that motion — which the LA district attorney declared useless until the fugitive director returned to the United States, likely obligating him to prison time — Polanski's lawyers have since determined that LA is the last place where their client would get a fair shake.

So Monday brought his latest motion to recuse the Los Angeles Superior Court from any involvement in reviewing the case; the publicity-whore judge who convicted Polanski may be dead, the reps say, but something about him sticking his dick in a 13-year-old may inflame the long memories of a legal system he defied by disappearing to France before his sentencing 30 years ago:

The prejudice became evident, the filing says, when a public information officer, Alan Parachini, told The Los Angeles Times in an e-mail message last month that the court’s standing position was that dismissal could not be considered unless Mr. Polanski returned to the United States.

The filing on Monday by Mr. Polanski’s lawyers said the court violated rules of judicial conduct by ruling publicly on a crucial issue that had never been addressed, as Mr. Polanski had never sought dismissal in the past.

The alternative? Who knows? We'd try Turks and Caicos first, where even vicious, vagina-kicking catfights have been scrubbed from the system as recently as last week. Las Vegas could work, too; they're kind of strict, but any court that serves sentencing-day smoothies can't be all bad. Suggestions?

• Polanski Requests New Setting for Hearing [NYT]