LOS ANGELES — Those who remember “Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out” from the Toronto International Film Festival last year may wonder if memory is playing tricks, should they happen to see the documentary on Showtime, where it is scheduled for a television debut on Sept. 23.

In the festival film, Mr. Polanski’s open letter 2010 plea against his extradition to the United States to face a sexual assault charge was read aloud by Paul Rachman, a friend of the movie’s director, Marina Zenovich.

Now, the voice sounds distinctly like that of Mr. Polanski. Because it is.

“There was one thing I didn’t like,” Ms. Zenovich recalled Mr. Polanski telling her after he watched the documentary after it was shown at the festival.

“Really, what’s that?” Ms. Zenovich said.

“That person reading the letter,” Mr. Polanski said.

Ms. Zenovich suggested he could fix the matter by reading it himself, which he did, in an audio file that arrived in her e-mail shortly afterward.

The change, said Ms. Zenovich, was quietly slipped into a version of the film for video-on-demand this year. With the movie’s arrival on Showtime, however, Ms. Zenovich decided she should explain Mr. Polanski’s sudden voice appearance in a film for which he had otherwise declined to be interviewed.

“It brought a creative closure to the whole project,” said Ms. Zenovich, who spoke by telephone last week. “It meant a lot to me; it meant I could move on.”

But not everyone has moved on, despite the decision by the authorities in Switzerland not to extradite Mr. Polanski to the United States. In Los Angeles, the Polanski sex case remains open.

And Atria Books is prepared to publish, on Sept. 17, “The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski,” by Samantha Geimer, whom Mr. Polanski was accused of having raped in 1977, when Ms. Geimer was 13.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/business/media/roman-polanski-lends-voice-to-documentary-about-him.html?partner=rss&emc=rss