The United States has asked Switzerland to hand over Roman Polanski to authorities in California, where he could serve up to two years in prison for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl, Swiss and U.S. authorities said Friday.

The Justice Ministry said in a statement that Washington filed its formal extradition request late Thursday. The 76-year-old filmmaker has been in Swiss custody since his arrest Sept. 26 as he arrived in Zurich to attend a film festival.

The request has been forwarded to Zurich authorities, who will hold a hearing on an unspecified date to decide whether Polanski should be sent back to Los Angeles. If extradition is approved, Polanski may appeal the decision to Switzerland’s top criminal court and, theoretically, to the Federal Supreme Court.

That means the director of such film classics as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” could remain in a Swiss jail for months more of legal wrangling, even though legal experts say he has little chance of avoiding a return to the United States after 31 years as a fugitive.

The maximum sentence Polanski can receive in California is likely two years, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. She said the sentence would come under laws that existed at the time of the crime, but she did not know if he could receive credit for time served in Swiss detention.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined comment.

Folco Galli, a spokesman for Switzerland’s Justice Ministry, said the sentence couldn’t be longer because Polanski could only be punished for the crime that is the basis of his extradition.

In Paris, Polanski’s lawyer said the director would fight extradition.

“He will oppose this request and continue to ask to be released until the request is examined,” Herve Temime said.

The U.S. had until late November to file for extradition, but the Swiss were already asking on Oct. 5 that the Americans expedite the process, according to documents obtained by the AP.

In an e-mail exchange obtained by the AP under U.S. public records request, Los Angeles prosecutors noted that the “Swiss were very eager to receive an advance English copy of our papers” and “the sooner that the Swiss knew we had filed formal papers the better.”

There was no mention in correspondence of the intense public scrutiny over Polanski’s arrest in the Alpine country, which tipped off U.S. authorities that he was expected five days before his apprehension at Zurich’s airport.

Swiss officials have defended the move as routine procedure. But several politicians and commentators have argued that Switzerland may have cooperated too energetically, and that recent U.S.-Swiss troubles over wealthy American tax cheats and Swiss banks may have provided motivation for the arrest.

Polanski, who won a 2003 directing Oscar in absentia for “The Pianist,” was accused of raping the 13-year-old girl after plying her with champagne and a Quaalude pill during a modeling shoot in 1977. He was initially indicted on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs, child molesting and sodomy.

Polanski pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse. In exchange, the judge agreed to drop the remaining charges and sentence him to prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation. Polanski was released after 42 days by an evaluator but the judge said he was going to send him back to serve the remainder of the 90 days. Polanski then fled the country on Feb. 1, 1978, the day he was to be sentenced.

Polanski claims the judge and prosecutors acted improperly, and his lawyers in California are urging a state court to quickly hear his appeal. In court filings Friday, the lawyers said key witnesses in the case are now elderly and have yet to testify under oath.

A French native who moved to Poland as a child, Polanski has lived in France since fleeing the United States. France does not extradite its citizens.

Polanski has been fighting since his arrest to be released from jail. He suffered a serious setback earlier this week when the Swiss Criminal Court rejected his appeal because of the high risk he would flee justice again. It turned down a bail payment of his Alpine chalet in Gstaad, house arrest and electronic monitoring as conditions for his release.

The loss appeared to prompt some rethinking of his defense, when one of Polanski’s lawyers said Wednesday that it was possible that the director might voluntarily return to face justice in the United States.

But that suggestion was quickly rejected by another attorney representing Polanski.

Associated Press Writers Thomas Watkins and Anthony McCartney in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Many of the issues surrounding the ever-beleaguered state of the Australian film industry are encapsulated in Into the Shadows, a dense, compelling and cheaply produced documentary from debut writer/ director Anthony Scarano. Essentially a compilation of talking heads, Scarano collaborates an impressive cross-section of viewpoints from exhibitors, distributors, actors, writers, directors and other industry folk keen to chip in their two bob. The film canvasses a broad array of issues but narrows the debate by focusing particularly on the decline of independent cinemas in Australia, discussing the closure of venues such as the Lumiere in Melbourne, the Valhalla in Sydney and Electric Shadows in Canberra, in the context of the rise of multiplex giants such as Village and Hoyts.

Film aficionados will be alternating between nodding their heads in approval and shaking them in dismay at some of the anecdotes and analyses on offer. Memorable moments include one wag’s description of the session time screens at multiplex cinemas – “the airline indicator board,” as he sardonically puts it – and the weary words of Kenny director Clayton Jacobson, who explains that even though his film was cheaply made and was a huge player at the box office (generating more than $5 million) the experience nonetheless left him $250,000 in debt. That’s as good a summary as any of the perilous playing field local filmmakers inhabit.

Into the Shadows offers no clear-cut solutions, of course, but Scarano provides a good whack of optimism, seeing hope for the future partly by reflecting on stalwarts of the past who fought tooth and nail for venues to screen their films. Crucially, Scarano keeps a brisk pace and if in doubt simply moves on to the next interviewee. Into the Shadows is probably only for film appreciators, but for those interested in the business side of cinema-going in Australia it deserves to be considered required viewing.

So you think you’ve had a rough couple of years? Try comparing your recession story to the one belonging to Willie Aames, the once-flush ‘Charles in Charge’ actor who squandered his money, couldn’t find a job, went bankrupt, lost his house and witnessed the total collapse of his family. But Aames, 49, blames only himself for his downward spiral from curly-haired hearthrob on ‘Eight Is Enough’ to the short-fused grump on ‘Celebrity Fit Club’ a few years back. “It’s me,” he tells PopEater. “I did it to myself.”

Aames resides in Olathe, Kansas, outside Kansas City. By March, years of living beyond his means had led the former TV star into poverty. “No heat, no food, no car, no water, no phone, no nothing,” he says. “There’s no question that was the lowest point of my life.” When you’re broke and famous, what better way to help lift yourself up than a TV special? ‘Broke and Famous: Willie Aames’ (airing Thursday night on VH1) was that opportunity. Life coach Sarano Kelley spent seven days giving Aames a wake-up call to get him back on track financially. In the show, Kelley succeeds in getting Aames cash flow (yard sale), a job (woodworking) and a renewed relationship with his estranged daughter. Full interview after the jump.

On the heels of last week’s shocking round 2 results (yep, we’re still bitter about ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ losing), AOL TV users pulled another fast one on us in round 3, ousting front runner ‘M*A*S*H’ in favor of ‘Happy Days.’ So much for suicide being painless.

‘Happy Days’ now joins ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and ‘Mission: Impossible’ in the next stage of our 5-round best TV theme songs tournament.

Only two can make it to next week’s final round of voting. Which will it be? Vote now and then come back on Nov. 11 to see the results.

Robin Layton is that rare combination of photojournalist and artist who can render a writer’s words superfluous. Her eye is not only unerring, it’s uncanny.

Those of us who worked with her at the Seattle P-I in the 1990s knew it the first time we worked on assignments with her. Where most of us saw reality, she saw possibility. Where some might see cliche, she sees clues to thoughtful expression, greater exposition.

Layton now spends most of her time in Los Angeles, where she has become an in-demand photographer to the glitterati. Her client list includes Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Jessica Parkers, Kenny G, Sidney Poitier, Tobey Maguire. She has traveled the world doing expensive shoots in exotic places.

he exhibit incorporates Layton’s photographs into and onto found objects such as old farm equipment. The image of the Space Needle shown here is 6 feet tall, framed in what Layton describes as “fantastic blue iron scaffolding.”

Layton’s affinity for focal distortion reminds me at times of Emily Carr. It’s not quite photographic abstractionism. More like post-Impressionism, in that she subtly alters real-life forms for expressive effect.

Thursday’s exhibit is open to the public from 6 to 9 p.m., with free comestibles courtesy of Seattle chef Tom Douglas.

Music photography is about conveying the feeling of being at a live show, and when a band is energetic and moving around on stage, that can require more than just freezing the moment with a bright flash and fast shutter. This shot of the band Goes Cube was taken at Magnetic Fields in Brooklyn. I used a Canon Rebel XTi, a Canon 450 EX flash, and an EF-S 10-22 mm lens. The ISO was set to 400, the aperture was at f/3.5, and I had a 1/2 second exposure time.

The streaking light effect was caused by a combination of four elements: the camera-mounted flash, the movement of the camera, the subject’s movement, and the lighting in the background. I set my flash to second curtain sync flash (also called slow sync, or on a point-and-shoot it’s sometimes called the “night portrait” mode) and started the exposure as the musician began to move closer to the camera. The first flash fired and the initial light streaks were created, with the second flash firing just at the point where his guitar was closest to the camera.

[Bryan Bruchman is a Portland, Maine based photographer (bryanbruchman.com) and music blogger (hillytown.com)]

Want to submit your own photo to our Snapshot series? Send the photo (or a link to the photo) and a description of how you got the shot to digitalphoto@macworld.com. Include the text “Snapshot” in the subject line. We’ll pick our favorites and feature them on our Website. Chosen photographers will receive a free printed copy of our Digital Photography Superguide.

A tiny village of 50 residents straddling the former border dividing East and West Germany and nicknamed “Little Berlin” has preserved its own 100-meter section of the Iron Curtain — for tourists.

For more than 38 years Moedlareuth belonged to two different countries and ideological systems. The 2.5 meter (eight foot) high Wall, similar to the famous Berlin Wall, remains a fixture in the village center even 20 years after Communism collapsed.

Nowadays the farming hamlet that lies some 300 km (186 miles) south of Berlin has become a prime destination for tourists searching for the remnants of the Communist era when East and West Germany were divided.

“Visitors can come here to get a real glimpse of what it was like to live here with the Wall running through the middle of the village,” said Robert Lebegern, director of the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum in the heart of Moedlareuth.

For four decades the villagers of Moedlareuth were divided by the Iron Curtain. Half of the village was in the old German kingdom of Bavaria, the other part lay in the eastern state of Thuringia. It was one bizarre aspect of the country’s division.

A neighborly cup of tea is now a mere matter of a few steps, but traces of the old division still persist: there are two different post codes, two dialing codes and two different school systems.

Those living in the former East greet each other with “Guten Tag” (good day) while their neighbors from the heavily Roman Catholic state of Bavaria tend to use the traditional greeting “Gruess Gott!,” literally translated as “Greet God!.”

In addition to the original segment of Wall — which looks like a compact version of its big brother in Berlin — the old border posts, watch towers and barbed-wire fencing still stand in their original positions.

The occasional barking dog — an eerie echo of the past border control — interrupts the droning of a tractor in the nearby fields. But gone are the armed guards who once surveyed residents. Instead snap-happy tourists arrive by the busload.

The inhabitants of sleepy Moedlareuth have grown used to the constant influx of visitors who shuffle to the museum to watch a 20-minute film documenting the peculiar split reality that became normality for nearly four decades.

NO WAVING

More than 60,000 visitors came to Moedlareuth in 2008 and the museum expects a similar number to make the trek to the isolated village this year as the 20th anniversary of the Wall falling approaches.

“It feels very frozen in time,” said Huw Diprose, 20, a student of International Politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales, who was on a walk along the former Iron Curtain.

“I was barely a year old when the wall fell. I wanted to come here to get into the mindset of what it was like back then.”

East Germany started to fence itself off from the West in 1952 — a border that for centuries had been administrative then divided families, friends and neighbors. East Germany built the Berlin Wall in 1961 and at the same time in Moedlareuth.

Even neighborly greetings were outlawed.

“We could wave to our friends on the other side of the wall, but they weren’t allowed to acknowledge us back,” said Karin Mergner, a 62-year-old farmer living in western Moedlareuth.

When the Wall finally cracked open in 1989, eastern Moedlareuth was overwhelmed by the sudden media attention. Residents quickly became resentful of visitor stereotypes of backwardness and reports of bitter East-West division.

It took a while for the small town to reunite. Four weeks after the Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989, a direct border opening was finally made in Moedlareuth on December 9 1989 but everyone was still required to present their passports.

It wasn’t until six months later, on June 17, that people were allowed to cross the border in “Little Berlin” freely, after the mayor on the Bavarian side, Arnold Friedrich, knocked down larger chunks of the Wall with a digger.

“It was a great moment of celebration,” said Lebegern, director of the museum. “But afterwards some East Germans complained that he had damaged East German property.”