[More on that HBO-Schlock film on the 2000 Lipstadt Trial (with some minor errors)]

[extract only]

How to dramatize the evils of the Holocaust without diminishing them challenged British playwright Ronald Harwood (“The Dresser”) in adapting “The Pianist” from the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish piano virtuoso who escaped deportation to Nazi labor camps.

“I take a huge breath,” says Harwood, who is currently developing a script for Ridley Scott about the 1992 trial of David Irving (right), who was convicted in a German court for demeaning human suffering in his writings denying the Holocaust.

“I hold my breath and [hope] I don’t corrupt or distort. Also, [director] Roman Polanski and I didn’t want to try and encompass the whole Holocaust. You can’t do that. By concentrating on this one man, it embraces all the elements of terror that one can imagine.

Image: Mr Irving researching at the UK
National Archives on his 65th birthday, March 2003

  Items on the Ridley Scott film project