John Steiner on Sharon Tate, New Sharon Tate Art, A New Blog on Sharon and More

A little while ago a Sharon fan asked about John Steiner and what he thought of Sharon.  I tried to email him but never got a response so I emailed one of his fans and here is what he had to say:

Actor John Steiner.

Sorry I've been so long in replying. I've been rooting through some old magazines and files to see if I can find anything for you. Sadly, there is very little on the film, which has always struck me as strange. It was pretty much overshadowed at the time by Mel Brook's inferior The Twelve Chairs, and the film has stayed stubbornly unfashionable.

Steiner only mentioned the film in passing in an interview in the early 70's, and quoted that Tate was a "lovely lady."


All the very best, Cranston


For his website go here:

http://www.moviemags.com/main.php?title=JOHN%20STEINER%20ZINE&etos=%

Another artistic blogger has created a nice sketch of Sharon here:

http://celebritysketches.blogspot.com/2010/04/this-drawing-was-inspired-one.html

And another person has began a Sharon Tate blog.  She wrote and complimented me on mine.  Thank you!  Here is the link for her blog:

http://cielostar1969.blogspot.com/

Good luck with your blog!  The more the merrier for fans of Sharon!

Have you ever wondered what happened to Polanski directing Robert Harris' other best seller Pompeii?

http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/04/12/ridley-scott-producing-pompeii-mini-series-formerly-developed-as-a-feature-by-roman-polanski/

Here is a video of Author Robert Harris talking about "The Ghost Writer" and comparing Polanski to Hitchcock:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8615081.stm

Photo Comparison of the Week, More Fantastic Videos of Sharon from Artist Kerstien Matondang, Style Icon Sharon and More on Polanski

Here is the photo comparison of the week:

The eyeglasses, hair and even the clothes remind me of something Sharon would wear. ;)

From Vogue Magazine: A Dolce and Gabbana Ad.

The great artist Kerstien Matondang has uploaded two great mini movies here:

http://kerstien.se/_bluerayforsharon_.htm

http://kerstien.se/star_for_sharon.htm

Please be sure to check out her site for more...

http://www.kerstien.se/sharoninart.htm

And be sure to leave your comments on her guestbook here:

http://99419.netguestbook.com/

Here is another blogger showing photos of Sharon as a style icon:

http://www.iadorestyle.com/2010/04/style-icon-sharon-tate/

And here is a new article on Polanski and his talent:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/263c350c-435b-11df-833f-00144feab49a.html

Roman Polanski has 'the gift of the nose'

By Tobias Grey

The gift of the nose” is how Jerzy Mierzejiewski, one of Roman Polanski’s teachers from the Lodz Film School in Poland, summed up his young protégé’s uncanny ability to make films that reverberate with audiences on several levels.

Robert Harris, who adapted the film’s screenplay from his book ‘The Ghost’, at the Berlin Film Festival in February.

Even now, at the age of 76, Polanski knows how to sniff his way to a good film. His 18th feature, The Ghost Writer, which won the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, is the latest in a long line of Polanski pictures where art and reality have become inexorably entwined.

Yet that was never his original intention. Polanski first contacted the novelist Robert Harris to see if he could make a film out of Harris’s novel Fatherland, an alternative history of the second world war with Nazi Germany as the winners. Told that the rights for Fatherland were gone, Polanski read his way through the rest of Harris’s oeuvre until he got to Pompeii, the English author’s novel about ancient Rome.

Harris agreed to write Polanski a screenplay. But in 2007, just as Polanski was about to start principal photography on the $100m budgeted film, the project became derailed by a looming Hollywood strike. A dogged Harris then sent Polanski his just-finished novel The Ghost, a roman à clef about a professional ghostwriter employed to write the memoirs of a former British prime minister who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tony Blair.

Ten days later Harris received a phone call from Polanski saying he would like to make a film out of The Ghost and asking Harris again to write the script.

“Providence!” exclaims Harris, who altogether spent two-and-a-half years working with Polanski on the two scripts. “It was far more suitable as a Polanski film than Pompeii was.”

Harris points to The Ghost’s isolated setting, its sexual tension and the master/servant relationship between the former prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) and his ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) as typical Polanski territory. But what neither Polanski nor Harris could have predicted was that The Ghost Writer’s plot – ex-PM Adam Lang, accused of war crimes, becomes a prisoner in his publisher’s compound – would end up echoing Polanski’s own house arrest in Switzerland for a crime he had committed more than 30 years earlier.

Polanski, who fled the US for Europe in 1978 before being formally sentenced for having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old, was arrested in Switzerland last September after travelling to the Zurich film festival to receive a lifetime award. After spending two months in jail, Polanski was granted house arrest at his residence in Gstaad, where he is still awaiting a decision over his appeals to fight extradition to the US.

“Some American critics said, look how he [Polanski] made this film to parallel his own situation under house arrest,” says Harris. “But that was a long way from our thoughts at the time we wrote the film. He’s funny, Roman: things just happen around him. He’s like a kind of whirlpool where fantasy and reality seem to collide.”

Polanski would likely agree. The opening of his (ghostwritten) autobiography Roman by Polanski (1984), is a confession of a kind: “As far back as I can remember the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred. I have taken most of my lifetime to grasp that this is the key to my very existence.”

Harris suggests that it was during the second world war, after his parents were deported from Poland by the Germans (his father survived, his mother didn’t), that Polanski, who was on the run, began to fuse reality and fantasy “by hanging around in movie theatres as a kind of alternative reality”.

Filmmaking has allowed the director to evacuate his demons. His extraordinarily bloodthirsty Macbeth was the film he made after his wife Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson’s gang, while the tag line of Tess, which Polanski made in France after fleeing the charges in the US, reads like reverse propaganda: “She was Tess, a victim of her own provocative beauty.”

Polanski finally felt ready to make a film about the Holocaust – The Pianist – after reading the Polish pianist Wladisaw Szpilman’s memoir of the Warsaw ghetto. For Polanski, who had turned down an offer to direct Schindler’s List because it was set in the Krakow ghetto “just too close to home”, The Pianist was far enough away from his own story to make a film possible.

Harris finds Polanski’s current predicament ironic because the director had felt that during the making of The Ghost Writer his legal situation was improving and that he might soon be able to return to the US. Marina Zenovich’s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired came out in Paris, where Polanski lives, during their collaboration in 2008.

“He heard about it when I was sitting with him,” Harris says. “The film makes clear that a deal was done; he pleaded guilty to one charge (unlawful sex with a minor) and the rest was never tested in court. The understanding was that he [Polanski] would not get a custodial sentence and the judge ratted on that.”

With redemption seemingly just around the corner, Polanski and Harris busied themselves writing a film designed to be a pure entertainment in the Hitchcock mould, for once not driven by any personal trauma. Harris’s models for his original novel were North by Northwest and “the entertainments” of Graham Greene. Polanski also discussed Carol Reed’s The Odd Man Out, which according to Harris is “his all-time favourite film”.

As was his wont Polanski made sure that Harris remained as faithful to the source material of his novel as possible. “Whenever I tried to leave something out in the screenplay he’d say, ‘You’ve left out these lines,’” remembers Harris. “‘Don’t f*** with success!’ he’d say. ‘Leave it in.’”

Although Harris wrote all the new film’s dialogue, Polanski would egg him on to put more dark humour into the script. “His default position is that the world is so terrible you have to laugh,” says Harris. “It was like working with a kind of super-editor. Sometimes I had to rewrite each scene 20 or 30 times until they chimed with what he had in his head.”

The other film of Polanski’s that The Ghost Writer most resembles is Chinatown. There is the same idea of a slightly cynical but inherently naive, young man snooping around in matters that shouldn’t concern him as much as they do. How do you end a story like that? In his autobiography Polanski delivers the rare insight that ending films effectively is always the most difficult.

“The film was going to end on an ambiguous note, with Ewan McGregor’s character just disappearing into a crowd,” says Harris. “But just before he started shooting the final scene Polanski said, ‘We can’t have this, it’s got to end on a darker note.’”

‘The Ghost Writer’ is released on April 16

Photo of the Week, Sharon Fashion News, Sharon Tate "Wrecking Crew" Photos and Polanski Gets to see his own Finished Film

Photo of the Week. . . .

 Nice photo of a happy and smiling Sharon!

Polanski sees a preview of his latest film:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/roman-polanski/7169286/Roman-Polanski-has-premiere-for-one-of-The-Ghost.html

Roman Polanski has 'premiere for one' of The Ghost

Roman Polanski, the director under house arrest in Switzerland, has been treated to a special showing of his latest film, The Ghost.

By Tim Walker

Polanski will be unable to attend the premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday but has, however, seen the finished version and pronounced himself delighted with the political thriller.

Mandrake hears that Polanski, who is fighting extradition to America after his arrest last year on a charge of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, watched the film in a DVD version at his chalet in Gstaad with Robert Harris, who wrote the screenplay.

“He was very happy with it, which was wonderful, but of course I am hugely biased,” the affable Harris tells me.

“I don’t know if he is disappointed not to be able to attend the premiere. I imagine he has been to quite a few premieres in his time.”

Harris, together with Ronald Harwood, who wrote the screenplay to Polanski’s film The Pianist, has been among the director’s doughtiest supporters.

Sharon in Fashion News, someone told me this reminded them of Sharon Tate's hair and makeup from Valley of the Dolls:

http://gossipgirlvideos.com/zac-posen-spring-2009-runway-show-mercedes-benz-fashion-week/

Here are a great set of photos of Sharon on the set of "The Wrecking Crew".  I do not know what the signifigance of the poster behind her is though, do you?

http://community.livejournal.com/adski_kafeteri/1746550.html

Rare Sharon and Philippe Forquet Photo, Polanski's Ghost to be released February 19th, and Sharon Tate the Most Beautiful Woman--Yes, Yes!

Here is a rare photo of Sharon and Philippe Froquet from Cronaca September 12, 1964:

The caption for the photo reads: "Sharon Tate, the new Marilyn of American cinema, offers the symbolic 'apple of sin' to a young partner. How many problems arouse in youth from 'flowers' and 'fruits' harvested before the wedding?

For more on Forquet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Forquet

Here is short article on the release of Polanski's latest film:

http://www.fearnet.com/news/b17889_polanskis_ghost_writer_in_theaters_feb.html?utm_source=fearnet&utm_medium=rssfeeds&utm_campaign=rss_imdb

And this link lists Sharon as one of the most beautiful women of all time along with Helen of Troy, Nefertiti, and Greta Garbo:

http://worldrec.info/2010/01/11/most-beautiful-woman-who-ever-lived

Jailed Polanski finishes film for Berlin Competition

Jailed Polanski finishes film for Berlin Competition

Gautuman Bhaskaran, Hindustan Times
 
January 2010
 
Roman Polanski, the Polish director, is no stranger to me. Certainly his work, no. My first brush with it was at one of the editions of the International Film Festival of India in Kolkata during the early 1990s. The film was Bitter Moon. Starring stars such as Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner and Peter Coyote, it was an extremely provocative work that had the classic Polanski’s psychological touch, thrilling to the core and disturbing to its depth. Set on the high seas, the movie traces the lives of two couples as they sail towards Istanbul on their way to India. Polanski explores bondage, sadomasochism and voyeurism to narrate the bitter story of death and destruction, passion and possessiveness.
 
I still remember that the film was introduced by the dashing Bengali actor, Victor Banerjee, whose parting line was, “Yes, there is a lot of masala in it”. But there has been even more masala in Polanski’s life, often tragic I would think.

Now under house arrest in Switzerland, waiting for his deportation to the USA, where he could be tried for having sex with a 13-year-old girl (who incidentally has long pardoned him), Polanski has completed his latest movie, The Ghost Writer. It will compete at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival to roll on February 11.

Based on the International Thriller Writers’ Award-winning novel, The Ghost by Robert Harris (who also penned the screenplay), Polanski’s movie was shot at Studio Babelsberg, outside Berlin, and was finished by him while he was in Swiss prison.

The film stars Ewan McGregor as a professional ghostwriter hired to pen the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister, essayed by Pierce Brosnan (the man we knew best as James Bond). The writer finds himself in political and sexual intrigues (without which, I guess, no Polanski work will be complete) that involve the ex-Prime Minister’s wife and his aide. It soon transpires that the Brosnan character has a terrible secret that may well upset international ties. Tony Blair is reportedly the inspiration for this character.

Often considered a master of crime and conspiracy, Polanski himself fell a victim to these when his beautiful, young and pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was savagely murdered by a cult in LA in 1969. A shattered Polanski, who was then in Britain, returned to Europe saying that there was nothing to hold him back in Hollywood. He later wrote in his autobiography that his “absence on the night of the murder is the greatest regret of my life…Sharon's death is the only watershed in my life that really matters… her murder changed my personality from a boundless, untroubled sea of expectations and optimism to one of ingrained pessimism ... eternal dissatisfaction with life".

And his work since then has reflected these.

He came out of his self-imposed seclusion in 1971 with The Tragedy of Macbeth. His later movies continued to have this tinge of the dark and the forbidding. Tess, Chinatown and Death and the Maiden, for example, have all had their share of the mysterious. Dedicating Tess (based on Thomas Hardy’s famed 1891 novel), to Sharon, Polanski said that his wife had given him a copy of the book on the last occasion he saw her alive. She had said that it would make a great film. It did.

Polanski continued to make movies such as The Pianist (2002, Palm d’Or for Best Picture at Cannes and Academy Award for Best Director) that in some ways were an echo of his own life. The Pianist is set during the dark days of World War II and was adapted from Jewish-Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman’s autobiography. Like Szpilman, Jewish Polanski escaped death in Nazi hands, while his mother was killed at Auschwitz. Polanski and his father survived German tyranny. The father lived through the horrors of a concentration camp, while Polanski escaped from the Krakow ghetto. He changed his name, behaved like a Catholic and saw the end of the war.

This was the fighter I met at Marrakech a couple of years ago, and his agility and verve amazed me. As the head of the jury at the film festival there, he was a 75-year-old bundle of unimaginable energy. In a way, he epitomises all that one sees in his cinema: sensitivity, intelligence and a lot more.

As he now bides his time incarcerated in a Swiss chalet, there is a wave of sympathy for him. Letters pleading for the dismissal of the American legal case against him have been coming in. Probably justice must prevail, but if his imprisonment, if that happens, can well be a sad loss for cinema. For at 77, Polanski may not have many more years of helming.

(Gautaman Bhaskaran has been writing on international cinema for over two decades, covering major film festivals at home and abroad, including Cannes, Venice and Berlin.)

A few more articles today on Polanski:

Swiss Preparing Decision on Polanski



Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF-New York Times



Published: January 7, 2010



The justice ministry of Switzerland said Thursday that it may decide soon whether to grant a request by the United States to extradite Roman Polanski, Agence France-Presse reported. The ministry’s spokesman, Folco Galli, told Agence France-Presse: “We are preparing our decision. It could be January, it could also be in February. I am not going to be more precise.” Mr. Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl, was apprehended in Switzerland in September. He spent several months in a jail near Zurich before posting $4.5 million bail in December and is now under house arrest in his chalet in Gstaad. On Wednesday a written request from Mr. Polanski to be sentenced in absentia was presented to a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. The judge, Peter P. Espinoza, has scheduled a hearing on Jan. 22 to consider it.


And one more link of interest:

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b160804_roman_polanski_seeks_long-distance.html