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Der Spiegel
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Victim or Perpetrator?: The Tragic Case of Roman Polanski

Era of Excess

The case -- the People vs. Roman Polanski -- is filed under case No. A-334,139 at the Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles. The file, which was created in March 1977 and has now grown to 10,000 pages, represents one of the oldest unresolved cases at the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.

Los Angeles was a wild place at the time. A few young directors and actors had stirred up a revolution in Hollywood. For the first time, it was not just producers and accountants who were determining which films were to be made. Hollywood's new stars were people like Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Warren Beatty, and the films the studios produced told stories of male prostitutes, brutal cops and psychopathic taxi drivers. Hollywood was arguably never as good as it was in that era.

But it was also a time of unbridled rebellion. In an interview with Playboy, Nicholson described how he would dust cocaine on his penis before having sex, while Beatty told a TV interviewer about his bad habits and his penchant for excess. They stylized Hollywood as a place where morality was suspended, posing with the most beautiful women and living in a world of hubris and megalomania.

Shadowy Realm

Polanski was considered one of the most dazzling figures of the new Hollywood. His films seemed to emerge from some shadowy realm. In "Rosemary's Baby," he had Mia Farrow tied to a bed and raped by the devil. In "Chinatown," a film about corruption in Los Angeles, Polanski played a gangster who slits open Nicholson's nose. In the film, evil prevails in the end, and when Polanski was later asked what would have happened to the gangster he played, he said: "He would probably be in Mexico, screwing virgins."

There were no limits. The sexual revolution had changed everything. Playboy featured pictures of an 11-year-old girl, 12-year-old Brooke Shields played a whore in Louis Malle's film "Pretty Baby," and the soft-focus films of David Hamilton, in which he portrayed young girls as nymphs, reached a mainstream audience. Somehow it all seemed relatively normal at the time.(...)