"It’s the people who aren’t artists who sacrifice. Artists somehow stumble onto the best life in the world, and I have no complaints."

Said Gena Rowlands, asked about any "regrets about having sacrificed her life to her art."

Quoted in "Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Brought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94/Known for playing on-the-verge characters, she twice earned Oscar nominations for her work in films directed by John Cassavetes, her husband" (NYT).

She sometimes said that if she had not married Mr. Cassavetes, her career might have taken a very different turn: She could have been the blonde in romantic comedies. But, she contended, physical beauty was so common in Hollywood that it was irrelevant. When People magazine named her one of the most beautiful people in the world (she was 69) and asked for beauty tips, she suggested: “Sunglasses are the secret. Sunglasses and a little lipstick will take you to the market.”

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wis....

ADDED: Here's the clip from "A Woman Under the Influence" that I blogged when Peter Falk died in 2011: 

And here's something Mia Farrow wrote that I blogged about in 2009:

One workday, while we were waiting to shoot, Roman [Polanski] was discoursing about the impossibility of long-term monogamy given the brevity of a man's sexual attraction to any woman. An impassioned John Cassavetes responded that Roman knew nothing about women, or relationships, and that he, John, was more attracted than ever to his wife, Gena Rowlands. Roman stared at him and blinked a few times, and for once had no reply.

"You were arrested because you happened to be in Jack’s house when Roman Polanski raped 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. How did you feel about that?"

"Well, see, it’s a story that could’ve happened ten years before in England or France or Italy or Spain or Portugal, and no one would’ve heard anything about it. And that’s how these guys enjoy their time. It was a whole playboy movement in France when I was a young girl, 15, 16 years old, doing my first collections. You would go to Régine or Castel in Paris, and the older guys would all hit on you. Any club you cared to mention in Europe. It was de rigueur for most of those guys like Roman who had grown up with the European sensibility.... I think they’re still doing it.... And frankly, I think there’s a whole element of guys who will get up to what they want to get up to. I didn’t think Brett Kavanaugh was all that believable. And yet this whole thing continues to be whitewashed and whitewashed and whitewashed. On the other hand, there is a thing called a male imperative, and it is maybe stronger than any #MeToo movement, because it happens at birth. I have a great 3-year-old nephew who made his way over to my umbrella rack the other day and pulled an Irish walking stick out and said, 'I am the leader of the universe.' Girls don’t do that."

From "In Conversation: Anjelica Huston On growing up in Hollywood, the cost of beating Oprah at the Oscars, and why Jack Nicholson doesn’t act anymore" (The Vulture).

"Roman Polanski's wife has rejected an invitation to become a member of the awards body behind the Oscars, extended weeks after it expelled her husband."

"French actress Emmanuelle Seigner accused the Academy of "insufferable hypocrisy" over the incident.... Seigner, who was one of 928 artists invited to join the Academy as part of a bid to boost diversity last month... said: 'I have always been a feminist. But how can I ignore the fact that a few weeks ago the Academy expelled my husband, Roman Polanski, in an attempt to appease the zeitgeist - the very same Academy which in 2002 awarded him an Oscar for The Pianist! A curious case of amnesia! The Academy probably thinks I am enough of a spineless, social climbing actress that I would forget that I have been married to one of the world's greatest directors for the past 29 years.'"

BBC reports.

I am very glad to see that MSNBC reversed its decision to fire Sam Seder.

 2 days ago, I wrote about the Sam Seder firing, in "At MSNBC, in the time of The Reckoning, there's zero tolerance for sarcasm aimed at the rich and powerful" ("I'd never even heard of Sam Seder, but apparently he had a show on MSNBC and now he's lost it, all because of a joke he made in a.. tweet back in 2009... retaliating against him for that tweet is... willfully stupid").

And I was going to blog about him again this morning, as I was reading something that Vox put up yesterday, "How the alt-right duped MSNBC into firing one of its contributors/An online community weaponized the political commentator Sam Seder’s satirical 2009 tweet."

But now I'm seeing (at The Intercept): "MSNBC REVERSES DECISION TO FIRE CONTRIBUTOR SAM SEDER."

Seder and MSNBC were set to part ways when his contributor contract expired next year, with reports indicating the departure had to do with a 2009 tweet from Seder surfaced by the far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich. After initially caving in to right-wing internet outrage over the tweet, MSNBC reversed its decision to not renew Seder’s contract....

“Sometimes you just get one wrong,” said MSNBC president Phil Griffin in a statement to The Intercept, “and that’s what happened here. We made our initial decision for the right reasons — because we don’t consider rape to be a funny topic to be joked about. But we’ve heard the feedback, and we understand the point Sam was trying to make in that tweet was actually in line with our values, even though the language was not. Sam will be welcome on our air going forward.”

Good. Maybe this is a sign that people are going to use their brains as they proceed through The Reckoning. Maybe a sense of humor and a commitment to treating people fairly will survive.

Here's Seder defending himself (before MSNBC reversed its decision):

At MSNBC, in the time of The Reckoning, there's zero tolerance for sarcasm aimed at the rich and powerful.

I'd never even heard of Sam Seder, but apparently he had a show on MSNBC and now he's lost it, all because of a joke he made in a (now-deleted) tweet back in 2009:

Don’t care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene.

I understand why the risk-averse, uncreative management at MSNBC doesn't want any of that anywhere near them. But I understand that joke as a criticism of everyone who cut Roman Polanski some slack because he's a great artist.

Seder was being sarcastic. We may cringe to see him put his own daughter in the middle of that joke, but I think that was the way to give it edge. He was speaking in the voice of a character he disapproves of, someone who wants to restore Roman Polanski to a place of honor in the elite world of film.

Let's remember what was going on in 2009 when Seder indulged in that sarcasm. The French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was collecting the signatures of "writers and artists" to spare Roman Polanski from the consequences of the rape he committed. He wrote:

We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.

I don't know if Seder is an ingenious news-show host, but retaliating against him for that tweet is the opposite of ingenious. It's willfully stupid.

"Hollywood’s de facto governing body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to 'immediately expel' Harvey Weinstein..."

"... breaking with 90 years of precedent and turning one of the biggest Oscar players in history into a hall-of-fame pariah. The academy’s 54-member board of governors made the decision at an emergency session after investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker that revealed sexual harassment and rape allegations against him going back decades...."

The NYT reports.

The Board sought distance from the monster:

“We do so not simply to separate ourselves from someone who does not merit the respect of his colleagues but also to send a message that the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over. What’s at issue here is a deeply troubling problem that has no place in our society.”

But that doesn't mean there are not other monsters. Getting rid of the one who's been outed doesn't send a message that you'll do anything about sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in your industry that hasn't been the subject of a big exposé. You'll have to do a lot more to convince me that the "era... is over." Message not yet received.

As the NYT points out, Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby are still members of the Academy.

One member of the Academy's board, Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy "told fellow board members that she was outraged by the allegations... [but] was also said to be aware that pushing him out could put the academy on a slippery slope."

If the slope is slippery, the era is not over.

"You’ve shot so many of your films here in Europe and yet in the U.S. you haven’t even been convicted of rape."

Rape joke cracked at the expense of Woody Allen (and Roman Polanski) at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

"In 1943, Polanski escaped the Krakow Ghetto and assumed the name Romek Wilk and lived in the countryside..."

"... aided by a family that had known his father, pretending to be a Christian boy."

“I survived because I did not look very much like a Jew,” says Polanski. “Particularly when I was a kid, I definitely looked like a lot of kids in Poland.” Even though at this point he lived no more than 30 miles from Auschwitz, Polanski says this rural area was quiet and free from violence; he knew “nothing about what was happening on the other side of the wires. … I only learned about all the atrocities right after the war.”...

Days before the war ended, Polanski recalls picking berries in the forest near Krakow when he heard a sound like the thrum of insects, only louder. “And then I realized it was coming from the sky,” he recalls. “I looked up, and these were the American bombers coming, hundreds of them. It was one of the most joyful moments of my young life. I laid down on the ground, and I was watching those planes.”

"I’m sure he’s a nice man and I know he has a family and I think he deserves closure and to be allowed to put this behind him.”

Said Samantha Geimer after a Polish judge declined to extradite Roman Polanski.

Geimer was 13 in 1977 was she was the victim of Polanski's admitted sexual predation.

“He said he did it; he pled guilty; he went to jail. I don’t know what people want from him,” she said....

Polanski apologized to Geimer in a 2011 documentary — and Geimer says she thinks he is sincere. She even sees herself as one of his supporters.

“We somehow ended up on the same side,” she explained. “Things have to go pretty wrong for them to end up this way.”

"How I’ve wished, over the years, I’d never told anyone about that poke in the butt."

A sentence in "The Girl," the authorship of which is credited to Samantha Geimer, whom Roman Polanski raped in 1977, and Lawrence Silver, who is Geimer's lawyer, and someone named Judith Newman, to whom the NYT book reviewer Lisa Schwarzbaum attributes the book's "lively, pugnacious narrative voice."

Schwarzbaum says the book is "a feisty, almost jaunty you’re-not-the-boss-of-me account" and "autobiography as a feminist tactic for Geimer to own her sexuality," because — I guess — that's what the lawyer and the pugnacious-narrative-voice provider figured would be the best approach to selling a graphic tale of the poke in the butt anal rape of a child.

Unfathomably, Schwarzbaum goes for a comic tone: "And wasn’t that what second-wave feminists fought for: our butts, ourselves?"

As they say on "Project Runway"...

... too much tootie.

Roman Polanski, free at last.

Switzerland has rejected extradition.

The 76-year-old French-Polish film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the USA. The freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked. This announcement was made by Mrs Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, head of the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police (FDJP), in Berne on Monday. The reason for the decision lies in the fact that it was not possible to exclude with the necessary certainty a fault in the US extradition request, although the issue was thoroughly examined. Moreover, also the principles of State action deriving from international public order were taken into account.

What fault in the extradition request? What "principles of State action deriving from international public order"?

UPDATE: NYT reports:

[Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf] said the American authorities had rejected a request by her ministry for records of a hearing by the prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson, in January 2010 which should have established whether the judge who tried the case in 1977 had assured Mr. Polanski that time he spent in a psychiatric unit would constitute the whole of the period of imprisonment he would serve.

“If this were the case, Roman Polanski would actually have already served his sentence and therefore both the proceedings on which the U.S. extradition request is founded and the request itself would have no foundation,” the Swiss Justice Ministry said in a statement.

"Mrs. Ann, do you have (or could you produce) a list of 'DVD's you deem essential?'"

C Black sees a phrase I used and makes a request. I'm here to answer your questions, so, based on a quick scan of the shelf and probably leaving a few things out, here's my list (in alphabetical order) of 40 DVDs I'd try to get you to watch if you lived with me:

32 Short Films About Glenn Gould
American Movie
Aguirre the Wrath of God
Clockwork Orange
Coffee and Cigarettes
Crumb
Divorce Italian Style
Don't Look Back
Dr. Strangelove
Election
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control
Fight Club
Grave of the Fireflies
Grey Gardens
Grizzy Man
Heathers
It's a Gift
Lolita
Memento
Modern Times
My Dinner With Andre
Nights of Cabiria
Pecker
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
Room with a View
Rosemary's Baby
Royal Tenenbaums
Salesman
Serial Mom
Slacker
Spirited Away
Streetcar Named Desire
Stroszek
The Blood of a Poet
The Shining
The War Room
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl
Wisconsin Death Trip
Wuthering Heights

Now, you may wonder which of these movies Meade had already seen and which ones have I succeeded in getting him to watch. You may wonder which ones, once watched, produced a negative reaction and about which ones did we see eye to eye. I'll leave that for Meade to say in the comments if he wants. The rest of you are welcome to guess, to produce your own lists, or to opine about mine.

Roman Polanski can remain silent no longer.

Read his statement. I don't see that it adds anything new. His lawyers have already said all this. But he'd like you to think he's been holding something back all this time and now has simply got to say it.

Roman Polanski is heartened by your murmurs.

"I have been overwhelmed by the number of messages of support and sympathy I have received in Winterthur prison... I would like every one of them to know how heartening it is, when one is locked up in a cell, to hear this murmur of human voices and of solidarity in the morning mail. In the darkest moments, each of their notes has been a source of comfort and hope, and they continue to be so in my current situation."

***

If you need to refresh your memory, here's what Roman Polanski is accused of doing.

It is not wrong, is it, to lift the heart of a prisoner who deserves his punishment? But Polanski has been evading punishment, and even now, he is likely to work out his legal problems in such a way that he will not be sentenced to further time in prison.

"Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to."

"Nothing will take away the hysteria of those ones who have never stopped pouring contempt upon him, hounding him through hatred and asking for his punishment as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthysm era all over again. At least, the nightmare is about to end. At least the end of the hell is looming. And this, for the time being, is what does matter."

And can anything erase the immense, unbelievable fatuity of Bernard-Henry Lévy?  Can anything take away the hysteria of this man who has never stopped pouring contempt upon Americans, hounding us through hatred as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthyism — McCarthysm? — era all over again?

The sexual power of Carrie Prejean.

I've been checking my Site Meter quite a few times in the last day. I've been pleased and then a little ashamed of myself as I see the phenomenal power of one particular post title to attract search engine traffic. This post was originally titled "Things the Site Meter dragged in." I've tweaked it a little to make my point. I'm not traffic-greedy — not too much. Just trying to make my point.

While I was hanging out on Site Meter, a couple other things got my attention. It's my general policy not to respond to bloggers who attack me — otherwise it would be a traffic-building strategy to attack me — but I do make exceptions as the whim strikes me. So, let's look at what Roy Edroso — of Alicublog and the Village Voice is saying about me.

He takes my Carrie Prejean post and intersperses it with comments in fisking fashion, and I'm going to fisk it back at him. Ready?

THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Hadn't been over to see the Ann Althouse site for a long, long while, but I retain a soft spot for her, so when tipped today by the Perfesser (with the irresistible tease, "Teenager? Is TMZ threatening to post child pornography?") I took a chance. Professor Althouse was talking about the Carrie Prejean sex tape:

But TMZ — I don't read it much, but, again, I'll guess — does not itself parade as Christian. Prejean does, and so she will be held to the high standards of Christianity, while TMZ can say and do whatever it wants. ("When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. ")

TMZ is following Rule 4 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals":

Scripture and Saul Alinsky? This explains so much: Althouse is The Anchoress!

Despite his inclusion of that St. Paul quote, Edroso cuts my quote of Alinsky's Rule 4, which happens to use Christianity as the example of the effectiveness of demanding that your enemies live up to their own rules. Alinsky wrote: "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity." It's hardly some odd quirk of mine to combine scripture and Alinsky. Edroso, in his usual fashion, looks for ways to make me look flaky — along with the other bloggers he's made it his business to mock. (The link to The Anchoress hints at Edroso's approach. Check out his latest Village Voice column for a more comprehensive example of how he works.)

Back to Edroso:

This argument that hypocrisy doesn't exist for the Elect...

What argument? Where did I argue that Christians aren't responsible for hypocrisy? I simply don't.

.... is by now an old rightwing favorite....

So just pull it out of you frumpy bag of liberal complaints about right-wingers. I thought you were trying to fisk my post, Roy. But, no, I'm either this distinct writer that you love to make fun of or I'm indistinguishable in the blurry mass of rightish bloggers that you've looked at before and have grown weary of squinting at.

... and the quality of Althouse's reasoning hasn't changed much from the old days.

Well, you haven't come close to nailing anything I've said in this post, so why bother to be specific about anything I've said in the past? You can't even read the post currently in front of your face, yet you think everyone already knows what it is I've said in "the old days." Maybe Roy is tired and on autopilot. But maybe, as he worked his way through what I'd written, confident in his ability to spew snark, he saw that my post actually cohered and that it was pretty damned sharp and funny, and he consciously decided to blur his observations so he could still get his post up. The poor wilted man. The option of actually liking what I'd written is inconceivable within the little framework he's built for himself. What would happen to that Village Voice gig?

But the Jesus stuff was a shock. I went down into her comments...

He couldn't figure out anything to say about what I wrote — "the Jesus stuff" — and, desperate, he dove into the comments looking for something repulsive. What he came up was from Florida, a specific, familiar commenter here:

... a quick scan suggests that the old let's-pretend liberals (what were their names, again? Rainbow? Sunshine?) seem to have fled or outed themselves, and the remnant are leaving stuff like this:

What's difficult as hell to do is to live up to the standards that would be set up for Christians by the butt-buggering sodomites. The rapists of 13-year-old children.

Christians could never live up to the sodomites' expectations.

Thankfully, though, Jesus doesn't require that. And we know they'll spend eternity burning in hell.

So at least there's that comfort.

"Jesus stuff"... "stuff like this"... Roy is not editing and dealing with sloppy word repetitions, and, worse, he's not bothering to figure anything out. It's just stuff. He found the most unsightly quote and then — without reason — counted on his readers to believe that it exemplifies what is generally in the comments at my blog. How utterly flabby and lame.

Now, as for the comment he cherry-picked, Edroso has no idea what it means and makes no attempt to figure it out. He has not, like the regular comment readers here, been exposed to the way Florida writes and the things he writes about. He doesn't know about Florida's longstanding Roman Polanski theme — which began here and which involves a fair amount of antagonism toward me. It's likely that Edroso thinks he's come across some rabid homophobia, but, in context, I know that "butt-buggering sodomites... rapists of 13-year-old children" refers to Polanski and the Hollywood-type liberals who've defended him. Florida's comment is not part of a mass of "stuff like this" in the comments. It's something particular, incisive, and satirical, and, if you are going to focus on it, you'd better take some time to figure out what it means. But Edroso is happy to see something that looked like shit and to splatter it onto his post and then, childishly, to demand that onlookers see how ugly things are over at Althouse.

Amazingly, Althouse is still removing comments...

Huh? Where did that come from? What comments does he think I've removed? He's trying to pin that one comment on me by asserting that I moderate the comments, so that anything that is left, I've approved of. That is either a lazy mistake or a nasty lie. My approach to the comments is well known: I have a strong free speech policy, and I leave vile things in. To imply that whatever is left has my stamp of approval is cheap and unethical.

... perhaps because they don't come up to the standards of this gem, or because they're actually messages from her employers trying to reach her because her phone has gone dead and her windows are boarded up.

He ends with a comic image, intended as a play on my name, the "old house" that he's used in his post title. Unfortunately, he hasn't built the foundation for what could have been a well-written joke. The material he thought he had just wasn't there.

Den Beste isn't still blogging, is he?

Roy makes a second attempt at humor, and, while I'm familiar with Den Beste, I have no idea why this is supposed to be funny. Althouse is The Anchoress... Althouse is Den Beste? Everything is melting in the mind of Roy Edroso.

"Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half century."

"While enriching the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land."

Bilge from the probation report for Roman Polanski, written in 1977, when, the NYT writes, the cultural climate was much warmer toward moviemen and their interest in young girls.

You might not want to be the one out in front, championing Polanski, if this is what you wrote in your memoir.

"I got into the habit of paying for boys... All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excited me enormously... the abundance of very attractive and immediately available young boys put me in a state of desire."

Is it really so terrible that David Letterman has a bachelor pad in the building where he tapes his show?

Why should we mind if the TV star has an apartment in the building to retreat to before and after the show? He has to commute into town. He has to be fresh and energetic to do the show, which depends largely on his performance. He should be able to easily get away from the workplace to nap, watch TV, eat, and, yes, have sex.

An ex-"Late Show" intern unmasked herself Saturday as one of David Letterman's former flings - and sources revealed the randy funnyman keeps a bachelor pad atop the Ed Sullivan Theater.

"I was madly in love with him at the time," said Holly Hester. "I would have married him. He was hilarious."...

[There was a] year-long, secret romance... she said, until the funnyman called it off because of their age difference.

Outside what is believed to be Hester's country home in Sebastopol, Calif. - in ritzy Sonoma County - a middle-aged man lashed out at a Daily News reporter last night. "Get the f--- out of here. We're being offered a lot of money for this s---," he said.

Ha ha. I love that quote. Get the fuck out of here. We're being offered a lot of money for this shit. Reporters! Trying to get the story for free!

An ex-"Late Show" staffer said Letterman kept a room insiders dubbed "the bunker" that was open only to his favorite young female underlings....

A woman identified as a former paramour, Stephanie Birkitt, 34, remained in hiding Saturday. She was, until recently, dating Joe Halderman, who was arrested Thursday for allegedly threatening to go public with Letterman's dalliances unless he was paid $2 million.

A "Late Show" office worker in 1997, Birkitt quickly developed a role as Letterman's Girl Friday. She went on to appear in several skits as his comic foil. Behind the scenes, their relationship became intimate, sources said.

"The creepy relationship that Letterman maintained with Stephanie was obvious and not normal," an insider said. "She was able to do anything and everything ... It was pretty well known that Stephanie was the one that Letterman was having fun with."

And there you see why we speak of "sexual harassment" even when the employee getting the sex is eager to receive it. It hurts the rest of the employees. It skews the work assignments in a way that feels unfair.

But perhaps an exception should be made for a great late night talk show host. The funnyman's mood and ego need boosting. Just as he must have an office full of people who can write jokes and comic routines — who must share a lot of not-that-businesslike camaraderie — he needs pretty ladies to keep his senses well-honed. It's part of the structure of a business that revolves around a performer. The funnyman needs his supply of sex, and the paying career positions on the staff can be used to create a pool of potential sexual partners who will keep the old man bolstered up.

Perhaps, I said. Perhaps. Please discuss. And take into account the other examples we've seen lately of great men to whom the rules arguably do not apply: Roman Polanski (movie director might be allowed to rape), Harvard students (elite collegians might be allowed to stalk), Richard Prince (important artist might be allowed to display child pornography), Brian David Mitchell (man of God might be allowed to rape). And not so recently: Bill Clinton (Presidents of the United States might be allowed to have sex with subordinate employees).