I missed my Houston to Shreveport flight through no fault of my own, so I’m chilling until the next flight leaves at 5:30 pm. My Newark-to-Houston flight landed at 3 pm (i.e., 20 minutes late), and it was utterly impossible to make the 3:30 pm flight to Shreveport for three good reasons. Actually, make it four.

Houston Airport Terminal A — Thursday, 10.1, 4:35 pm

One, The Shreveport departure terminal was almost a mile away from the one I arrived at from Newark. Two, to get there I had to wait for and then ride on the slowest and dinkiest airport shuttle system in North America. Three, with my flight leaving in five or six minutes and the gate about 500 yards away, I was forced to go through security scanning a second time — thank you, Houston George Bush airport! And four, the people who booked my flight cut it too close — never book a connecting flight without at least 90 minutes between flights, and two hours if you want to up your odds even more.

The same thing happened to me in Munich on my way to Cannes a couple of years ago, and that was my fault for not being more careful about the connecting times. And no, I don’t hate Houston because of this. I hated Houston for other reasons long before.

Here, at long last, is a response by Marina Zenovich, director of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, regarding David Wells‘ claim, contained in a recent Daily Beast article by Marcia Clark, that he lied to Zenovich on-camera about having goaded Judge Laurence J. Rittenband into throwing out the 1978 Roman Polanski plea deal:

“Dear Editors:

“I am perplexed by the timing of David Wells’ statement to the press that he lied in his interview with me for my Polanski documentary. Since June of 2008, the film has been quite visible on U.S. television via HBO, in theaters and on DVD, so it is odd that Wells has not brought this issue to my attention before.

“For the record, on the day I filmed Mr. Wells at the Malibu Courthouse, February 11, 2005, he gave me a one-hour interview. He signed a release like all my other interviewees, giving me permission to use his interview in the documentary worldwide. At no time did I tell him that the film would not air in the United States.

“Mr. Wells was always friendly and open with me. At no point in the four years since our interview has he ever raised any issues about its content. In fact, in a July 2008 story in The New York Times, Mr. Wells corroborated the account of events that he gave in my film.

“I am astonished that he has now changed his story. It is a sad day for documentary filmmakers when something like this happens.”

If anyone has a PDF of The Ghost, the Roman Polanski thriller written by Robert Harris, please forward. Thanks.

I haven’t time to review Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland (opening tomorrow), but it’s better than Dennis Harvey‘s Variety review indicated. I was basically pleased, amused and never bored for the first 45 or 50 minutes, and then came the Bill Murray Beverly Hills mansion sequence and I was flat-out blown away. For this sequence alone the movie must be seen, although generally speaking it’s an engaging zombie comedy with dabs of a marginal Wes Anderson attitude-personality. All to the good. I’ll amplify later today.

I heard from Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired director Marina Zenovich at 2:30 am this morning. She was ringing from Zurich, where she’s working on a followup doc about the Polanski brouhaha. She’s actually been working on it since last February, she said. I had urged her in an e-mail yesterday to respond to yesterday’s Marcia Clark-authored Daily Beast piece in which former prosecutor David Wells claimed that he lied to Zenovich on-camera about having goaded Judge Laurence J. Rittenband into throwing out the 1978 Roman Polanski plea deal, etc.

Zenovich said she’d send a carefully worded response, but the long and the short is that she’s flabbergasted. Suffice that I’m not alone in detecting certain suspicious currents and motives contained in yesterday’s reaction piece. And we’re both agog, we agreed, at Clark’s new blonde hair.

I’m leaving soon for Newark airport, where I’ll catch a jet to Houston and then a connection to Shreveport, Louisiana. A degree of revelry and exploration this evening followed by a day of Straw Dogs inquiry with director-writer Rod Lurie and the cast — Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgard, James Woods and Dominic Purcell. A Shreveport Hilton staffer says their wifi is fast and steady, and if it isn’t they also offer ethernet cable connections in the room plus an in-house Starbucks with wifi of its own. So I can’t lose.

Shreveport, Lousiana — distinguishable, I presume, from Akron, Ohio, or Mobile, Alabama? Other than a few sound stages being there, I mean?

A 9.27 posting by The Atlantic‘s James Fallows presents two specially highlighted U.S. maps that reveal a very precise alignment. The areas with the highest levels of poverty and obesity voted the most heavily for McCain-Palin in last November’s election. “A minor point at such a moment,” as Rhett Butler once said.

Paramount has shifted the opening of Jason Reitman‘s Up In The Air back to December — 12.4, to be exact — to avoid any overlap with Overture’s The Men Who Stare At Goats. Both films star George Clooney. Air is expected to be a bigger commercial hit, but it can’t hurt to get out of the way of Goats just to be safe.

I should have run the news yesterday that screenwriter-director Roger Avary has been sentenced to a year in jail for causing a car crash on 1.13.08 that resulted in the death of a friend, Andreas Zini. Avary, the director of Rules of Attraction and Killing Zoe and co-author of Pulp Fiction and Beowulf, pleaded guilty last August to gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and other charges in the collision. He also got five years’ probation.

Avary’s attorney, Mark Werksman, told the L.A. Times that his client is heartbroken over the Zini family’s loss. “Roger Avary is a decent man and a good man who has always strived to do the right thing in his life,” Werksman said. “He never meant any harm to anyone, and this was just a terrible accident.”

I posted the following about Roger and his situation on 8.22.09, to wit: “My basic feeling is that after a certain interval of mourning and atonement, you have to move on and make the best of your life in the aftermath of such an event. A writer like Avary should use this tragedy as material. Sometime down the road he needs to write or create something from this.

“I only know that no single event defines a life and that the only way to deal with monumental tragedy is to say, ‘Yes, that happened and I’ll deal with it for the rest of my life, but we all need to turn the page and try to strike a match.'”

Former prosecutor David Wells is claiming that he lied to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired director Marina Zenovich about having goaded Judge Laurence J. Rittenband into throwing out the 1978 Roman Polanski plea deal.

Why, I’m asking myself, is the 9.30 Daily Beast article in which Wells recants, and which has suspiciously been written by former O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark, appearing at this moment? It’s obviously a mortar shell intended to make the pro-Polanski (or forgive-Polanski) side look bad. It looks to me as if somebody friendly with the Los Angeles D.A.’s office wanted to compromise the integrity of Zenovich’s doc (which the D.A.’s team has reportedly been irked by) and made some calls and pulled some strings. Well, doesn’t it?

I wrote Zenovich for a comment and she didn’t reply. She really needs to put her notes and recollections on the line and set things straight.