Roman Polanski. You can start a heated conversation just uttering his name. He has led a life so large that often it's chopped down to a few phrases: Oscar-winning director of film classics such as "Chinatown," "Tess" and "The Pianist." Survivor of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Married to actress Sharon Tate, who was eight-months pregnant when she was stabbed to death by members of the Manson family. Had sex with a 13-year-old and, after being convicted of unlawful intercourse with a minor, fled the United States for Paris, where he has been for the last three decades.

Through extraordinary interviews with friends, colleagues, journalists, as well as both the prosecuting and defense attorneys, Zenovich contends that it was nowhere near as simple as that. Plagued by a rabid American media and put in the hands of a judge known for his love of the spotlight, Polanski came to feel that his chance for equal treatment under the law was slim to none.

Neither Polanski nor Judge Laurence J. Rittenband was interviewed (Rittenband died in 1993), but Zenovich has made good use of archival interviews of the director and spoken to virtually everyone else connected with the case and/or Polanski, including Rittenbrand's former girlfriends, producer Daniel Melnick and Mia Farrow.

Not everyone is sympathetic; former Los Angeles Police Department Detective Philip Vannatter (who was also involved in the O.J. Simpson murder trial) and retired Assistant District Attorney David Wells believe Polanski was not dealt with harshly enough.

Far from a tedious legal deconstruction, "Wanted and Desired" captures Hollywood and California in the midst of the first of many celebrity-driven international media swarms. Still reeling from the 1969 Manson murders, at once envious and judgmental of the swinging Hollywood scene, many people saw in Polanski a nexus of unsettling forces.

"The European reporters looked on Polanski as this tragic, brilliant, historic figure," says Richard Brenneman, who covered the trial for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, noting that Polanski had survived the gassing of his mother and maintained his integrity against the Hollywood machine. "And the American press tended to look at him as this malignant, twisted dwarf with this dark vision."

Polanski certainly ran with the fast crowd -- the crime occurred famously at Jack Nicholson's house (Nicholson was out of town), and far from engendering sympathy, the brutal murder of Tate had cast an air of horror around him. Polanski initially was accused in some media outlets of committing or orchestrating Tate's death.

"My real problems started with the murder of Sharon Tate," Polanski says in an interview. "I was all right with the press before them. They wouldn't let it go. It was just the story that wouldn't go."

But Zenovich is not making an apologia for Polanski, who always has admitted to having sex with a minor, although only recently has he conceded that this act was wrong. Instead, she examines how the hysteria surrounding Polanski and the case affected the way it was handled, particularly by Judge Rittenband, who seemed more concerned with the needs of the media than of justice.

It is not a film with easy answers; even if one concedes that the proceedings were compromised, the crime did occur; the girl was traumatized and sullied, along with her mother, as a gold-digger and a con artist, and although Polanski did "serve" 45 days of psychiatric evaluation, that now seems slight for a clear case of statutory rape.

But the tension between fact and perception, between the various mores and standards of behavior -- Europe vs. the U.S., Hollywood vs. Middle America -- is exactly what makes the case, and the man, still fascinating after 30 years.