Potboiler du Jour

Now Jude is hunky, and the nanny is just a girl, and Sienna is smokin', and the confession is mawdlin, and the disgusted ex-wife and broken engagement is all very very excellent--but still Jude ain't got nothing on Roman.

Because there's another salacious scandal in the headlines and even though this one is nearly forty years old, it's so perfectly crafted and so flawlessly cast it's hard to believe it's actually happening. It unfolded this week in a courtroom in London--barristers, wigs, the whole deal--where the director Roman Polanski is suing Vanity Fair magazine for libel.

First of all it stars Polanski, a notorious womanizer with 40 years of seniority on Jude in the philandering depoartment. In 2002 Vanity Fair ran a story about Polanski, claiming that in August of 1969 just a few days before the funeral of his movie star wife Sharon Tate, who was brutally murdered while 8 months pregant by Charles Manson, he was spotted in Elaine's hitting on a model. A witness quoted in the article says he ran his hands up her thigh, told her he could put her in the movies, make her into the next Sharon Tate. The witness in question? The same one who solemnly took the stand in London this week, recounting the exact gestures up the thigh, the precise smarmy words that he overheard, the cliche movie mogul moves he say Roman pull to get into the model's pants? Lewis Lapham! The patrician doyen of literary New York, the most powerful literary gentleman in all of New York and probably London too! The macabre twist (aside from the dead wife)? The model herself--no one knows if she's even alive, she wasn't called as a witness. The techno-twist? Polanski had to testify via video from Paris because he's wanted for statutory rape in the U.S. and is afraid England will extradite him. Now that is serious womanizing cred.

The real kicker? Polanski just won! So cheer up, Jude. Your type usually does land on his feet.