WI: The Manson Family kills Roman Polanski

The legal outcome would be roughly the same, even if it's a double murder(as opposed to the single one in OTL). Those killers were gonna end up doing hard time, no matter what the body count.

If Polanski dies, he's probably remembered mostly for Rosemary's Baby, which has an even more sinister rep than what it garnered OTL. Yes, logically speaking, there is no more reason to draw a "satanic" connection from one body than from two, but the death of the director himself is going to have a psychological impact on how the film is viewed(at least among conspiracy and occult buffs).

And occultic conspiracies aside, Polanski will be regarded as more of a "legend", as opposed to the current view of him as a one-time auteur, pummeled with self-inflicted scandal, then sloughing it through a steady artistic decline in exile from Hollywood.
 
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Just so I'm not misunderstood, I've enjoyed a lot of the post-exile Polanski I've seen, but I think there is a critical consensus that stuff like Bitter Moon and The Ninth Gate isn't quite up to the standards of Rosemary's Baby or Chinatown.
 
Oh, and Jack Nicholson and Natassja Kinski don't have Chinatown and Tess on their respective resumes. I think the impact might be greater on Kinski's career rather than Nicholson's, but really can't say for sure.
 

CECBC

Banned
He'd be remembered as a legendary filmmaker rather than a child molester on the run from justice.

As he exists now he's more a lesson in separating the art from the artist.
 
No "Macbeth", which was released after the Manson murders, and clearly that impacted the film in how violent it was. No "Chinatown", which is a major impact on Nicholson's career, the neo-noir genre, and 1970s and following film making.
 
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