Roman Polanski honors Poles who saved him from Holocaust
WARSAW, POLAND» Oscar-winning filmmaker Roman Polanski returned to Poland, the country of his youth, and paid tribute on Thursday to a Polish couple who took him in and protected him when he was a child, saving him from the Holocaust during World War II.
Stefania and Jan Buchala were posthumously declared as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor bestowed by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, in a ceremony attended by their grandson. The 87-yearold Polanski, who now lives in France, traveled to Poland for the occasion. That’s one of the very few countries Polanski can travel to safely given that he remains a fugitive from U.S. law after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in 1977 and fleeing the United States.
NEWYORK» One of Stephen King’s most creepy and tense stories was hiding in plain sight.
“Mr. Mercedes” started life in 2017 as a broadcast offering on the AT&Towned, DirecTV-exclusive Audience Network, only to be left marooned with an uncertain future after the obscure channel was shut down. The crime series gets another life this month after NBC’s Peacock streaming service acquired it.
“Nobody could find it, and that was enormously frustrating,” said director Jack Bender. “Hopefully it’s going to get the audience it’s always deserved.”
The pitch-dark series, adapted by David E. Kelley and starring Brendan Gleeson, is based on King’s bestselling Bill Hodges trilogy and follows a retired, ornery detective tormented by a seriously troubled serial killer who announces himself by mowing down dozens of people in line for a job fair in a stolen Mercedes.
“My intention was always to do a character driven, scary show about the monster inside these people instead of the monster outside the people,” Bender said. “Even though they’re monstrous people doing monstrous things, they are not, quote-unquote, bogeyman monsters.”
The first two seasons of “Mr. Mercedes” are now bingeable on Peacock. The show’s
most recent outing, 2019’s Season 3, will arrive on a date to be announced.
In addition to Gleeson, the cast includes Harry Treadaway, Kelly Lynch, Jharrel Jerome, Mary-Louise Parker, Holland Taylor, Breeda Wool and Nancy Travis. The series was filmed in Charleston, S.C., which stood in for Ohio.
English actor Treadway, who has played a genius psychopath in “Penny Dreadful,” takes on the serial killer in “Mr. Mercedes” and calls him “a unique, brilliantly drawn, complicated character.”