At Disneyland he remembered Kraków: He was a boy, salvaging mangled Snow White trims from ghetto trash cans. Fascinated by the very filmstrip, the sprockets, the emulsion, the literal medium and science of film, he remembered quite vividly the moment, before the war, when a grammar school teacher carried a tantalizing little gadget into class, “an epidiascope,” he recalled, “used for projecting illustrations onto a screen in the school hall. I wasn’t at all interested in the words or even the pictures it projected, only in the method of projection.” He wanted to understand. What was this contraption? How did it work? He carefully examined its lens, its mirror; he flicked fingers into the beam and grinned at the flickers on the wall. The physics; it made sense. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “my dream was to have a projector and you see, there was a boy in the ghetto who had a projector—it was a 35 mil projector, but a very little one with a handle and it looked like a—peddler grinding machine—and very primitive. It was for kids.” Polanski made his own.
There was another memory from before the war: the time Roman saw his first movie, the Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy musical Sweethearts, of which he understood nothing, but he didn’t have to; from that point on, the complete enterprise of moviegoing obsessed him, the light, the dark, the muffled click-click-whir of the projector, everything movie down to the dusty smell of the half-empty Kraków theaters and the squeaks of the folding seats. “I read whatever I could on filmmaking,” Polanski said. How were these things made? Who made them? Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out Polanski saw at age sixteen: “The whole atmosphere, strangely enough, resembles very much my childhood city of Kraków,” he said, “with the change of seasons that can happen in one day. That atmosphere seduced me, and then I thought of the acting, of the photography. And then I realized much later that there was something deeper in the story [that attracted me]; it was the story of a guy who is a fugitive.”
Entrapment: He understood that. “I always liked the movies that happen within some kind of cocoon rather than on the fields,” he said. “As an adolescent I preferred a film like Olivier’s Hamlet, which had tremendous influence on me, to The Charge of the Light Brigade. I like the lieu clos, as we say in French. I like to feel the wall behind me.” Futility, he learned, forced character out of hiding: “Let’s imagine that all of a sudden this house collapses and we find ourselves trapped here for two or three months,” he said. “Our true nature would be unleashed as we fight over who’s going to eat the flowers over there.”
At film school in Lodz after the war, he met a future master of Polish cinema, Andrzej Wajda. In 1954 Polanski appeared in Wajda’s seminal A Generation. “Roman was an insatiable presence on the set back then,” Wajda recalled. “Voraciously interested in everything technical—lighting, film stock, makeup, camera optics—with no interest whatever, on the other hand, in the sorts of thematic concerns that obsessed the rest of us, like politics, Poland’s place in the world, and, especially, our recent national past. He saw everything in front of him and nothing behind, his eyes firmly fixed on a future he already seemed to be hurtling toward, at maximum speed. And for him that future was out there, in the world, and particularly Hollywood, which he equated with the world standard in cinema. Even then. And that was absolutely unique among us.”
He was not ashamed, as many of his film-school contemporaries were, of swimming in the warm gush of thrillers, musicals, Westerns, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Maltese Falcon, Snow White (“It’s so naïvely beautiful. What is it, corny or something? But I just love this movie.…”), popular genres that were to Polanski “what cinema”—what Hollywood—“is all about.” These were not dreams; Roman didn’t understand his dreams. These were hopes, as real as the people who made them, sent to Poland from a magical but nonimaginary place on an actual map fantastically far from Soviet rule. “Go West,” Roman said “very quickly became a necessity for me.”
He had come to Hollywood, to Sharon’s Los Angeles, to show Ransohoff his rough cut of The Fearless Vampire Killers, a film Polanski made “to recreate, in a sense, the joy of childhood,” of his earliest genre-love. Ransohoff detested it.
“Listen, sweetie,” the producer told Sharon at La Scala restaurant in Beverly Hills, “I’m going to have to cut some stuff out of The Vampire Killers. Your spanking scene has got to go.”
“Oh, don’t do that. Why would you do that?”
“Because it doesn’t move the story. The story has got to move. Bang, bang, bang. No American audience is going to sit while Polanski indulges himself.”
“But Europeans make movies differently than Americans,” she protested. “Blow-Up moved slowly. But wasn’t it a great film!”
“I’ll tell you something, baby. I didn’t like it. If I’d have seen it before the reviews, I’d have said it’d never make it. It’s not my kind of picture. I want to be told a story without all that hocus-pocus symbolism going on.”
It had always been Ransohoff’s contention that while Polanski understood European audiences, Ransohoff understood his. “I know the American public better than you do,” he had warned Polanski, “and I’d like to reserve the right to change the American cut of the film.” Polanski had signed, concluding that Ransohoff, in his unpretentious baggy pants and sweatshirts, was trustworthy, a vagrant connoisseur and, based on Ransohoff’s investment in Polanski’s previous films, even artistically inclined. But he had misinterpreted the facts. “What’s funny is that I should have foreseen the problem,” Polanski complained to Variety. “When Ransohoff bought my previous film, Cul-de-sac, for the U.S., he cut 15 minutes from it and did some redubbing.” There was nothing Roman could do: Ransohoff took control. He slashed twenty minutes from Vampire Killers, redubbed actors to make them sound American, drastically curtailed the score, and added an inane cartoon prologue utterly out of tone with the rest of the picture. When Polanski saw what Ransohoff had destroyed—of his script, his film, his own performance and Sharon’s—he nearly vomited. The film, storywise, was now a shambles; it didn’t make any sense.
* * *
The end of Polanski’s relationship with Ransohoff’s Filmways left him, in 1967, professionally adrift. His problem, as ever, was one of timing: Had Polanski come to Hollywood two decades earlier, at the height of the studio era, when he had been foraging for scraps of Snow White in Kraków, he would have encountered a power structure more amenable to film production and exploration. “The studio pioneers might have been tyrannical,” Polanski said, “but at least they understood the business they’d built. They also took risks.”
Beginning in the fifties, the incremental dissolution of the Hollywood studio system—formerly the world’s wellspring of motion pictures—curtailed production of domestic film product. Antitrust legislation (United States vs. Paramount Pictures, 1948) had divested Hollywood of its monopolies, slashed its assets, decreased its profit margins, and the dominoes fell: Long-term contracts, in-house resources, and production efficiency declined drastically. The machine slowed. The number of motion pictures Hollywood produced each year fell steadily, and the rise of television made matters worse. There was suddenly less money to make fewer films for smaller audiences. “The movie business,” Richard Zanuck announced in 1966, “has become a weekend business.” Knuckles whitened. Poststudio Hollywood could no longer afford to risk as it once had; thus did Polanski, in the midsixties, sense correctly that a certain breadth and depth of creativity were dying.