Oscar Horrors: Roman Polanski's Chalky Undertaste
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 11:30PM 
In the Oscar Horrors series we're celebrating Oscar nominated or Oscar winning achievements of or related to the Horror genre. Daily through Halloween!
HERE LIES… Roman Polanski’s screenplay for Rosemary’s Baby, which he adapted from Ira Levin’s bestseller. It lost the statue for Best Adapted Screenplay to a tale of a very different plot – “There are plots against people, aren’t there?” in The Lion in Winter.
JA from MNPP here. When people ask me what my favorite movie is I tell them it’s a tie between Rosemary’s Baby and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. (I’ve always wished I could fall madly in love with another movie that starts with “R” just so I could make some lame comment about how I bide by “The 3 R’s” but it hasn’t happened yet. Yes I am a nerd.) Point being, since seeing Rosemary for the first time twenty years ago or so, I’ve managed to watch it at least once a year, sometimes more, so it’s one of those movies I know by heart.
One of my first activities upon signing up with a Twitter account was, much to my Twitter follower’s understandable exhaustion, a live tweeting of the film – I find exuberance in pretty much every line of dialogue, whether it be something small like the way Minnie (Ruth Gordon) gags out the words “THE CCCCAAARRRPPPETTT” as Roman (Sidney Blackmer) spills the vodka blush, or something big like Guy (John Cassavetes) telling Rosemary (Mia Farrow) that “ it was kinda fun, in a necrophile sorta way.” I consider the script a perfect thing, and a week (hell, a day) doesn’t go by where I don’t quote something from it.
“The name is an anagram.”
“Pain be gone, I will have no more of thee.”
“He has his father’s eyes.”
“It has a chalky undertaste.”
More on the brilliant screenplay and one of cinema's most iconic shots after the jump...
