An article by Jamie Stuart

“Then a vision came
And it looked a lot like Bob Crane
And Bob sang:
Life is shit, life is shit
The world is shit, the world is shit
This is life as I know it, this is life as I know it...”
-from Life is Shit
The Dead Milkmen

Penile implant. Didn’t happen,” begins the only complaint from Robert Crane, Bob Crane’s oldest son, regarding the authenticity of Paul Schrader’s new feature Auto Focus. “We shared an apartment in Westwood. We’d see each other come out of the shower. Believe me, he was okay. He had nothing to worry about.”

Auto Focus recounts the rise and fall of actor Bob Crane. It traces his early days as a radio DJ to his professional peak starring on TV’s Hogan’s Heroes, then his subsequent decline into dinner theater -- as well as 2 failed marriages and an assortment of depraved sexual encounters. It’s also about, most importantly, his relationship with fellow swinger John Carpenter, and their love affair with modern technology. And finally, Crane’s unsolved murder.

Two of the film’s stars, Greg Kinnear and Maria Bello, as well as its director and uncredited writer Paul Schrader, made the rounds at Sony’s headquarters the day of its premiere at the New York Film Festival. Robert Crane accompanied them, enjoying the press coverage. They were all aware of the significance that Sony played in the plot of Auto Focus, and constantly reminded everybody -- John Carpenter worked for Sony in the 1960’s and introduced their products to Bob Crane.

Although the subject matter seemed a perfect fit for Paul Schrader, the creator of such films as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and most recently Affliction, he was extremely disinterested at first. A former angry young man, he’s in his mid-50’s now, with a round face and a relaxed manner. He speaks eloquently, though uses an occasional profanity for punctuation. Concerning his initial introduction to the project, he ironically notes, “I’ve gotten fed up with biopics.”

“Because of Raging Bull I was offered everything. Every difficult subject. Every historical figure with a problematic storyline, you know -- they asked me to write it. So, I just told my agent, ‘I’m out of that racket. Don’t send me biopics. Don’t send me the offers.’ Then he called up and said something about Bob Crane, and I said, ‘Steve, I don’t want to do a biopic -- I don’t even want to see a biopic.’ And he said, ‘Well, you should read this one.’ Then I read it, and at that time it was a more conventional biopic than it subsequently became -- once I rewrote it. But still there was something inside it. There was a very interesting movie inside it. So, it kind of won me over.”

Schrader’s greatest contribution to the screenplay was his strengthening of the relationship between Bob Crane and John Carpenter. In reality, while they’d known each other for years, it wasn’t until the last part of Crane’s life that they became partners in crime, so to speak. They initially met while Carpenter was a video salesman for Sony; he introduced Crane to the technology that would ultimately fuel his voyeuristic sex drive. Other clients included Richard Dawson, Dick Martin, Tommy Smothers -- and Jay Silverheels. “Tonto! Tonto himself! That’s the story! The masked man and his Indian sidekick,” enthuses Schrader, of his film’s subtext.

The arc that Schrader gave to their relationship has been one of the most controversial aspects of the film. Bob Crane’s youngest son Scotty has vocally disapproved. The filmmakers, though faced with a lawsuit, remain unfazed. Robert served as a technical advisor to the picture and has been one of its staunchest supporters. His advice to Scotty: “Three words: See the movie. Go see the movie and this fire will be put down immediately.”

“I like it. I like it a lot. It’s Paul Schrader’s vision. It’s a Paul Schrader film,” Robert continues. “That’s his interest. If you saw Affliction, the brothers. He likes it, cause he has a brother. Leonard. They wrote together. They wrote The Yakuza together. He’s interested in that. He’s interested in male relationships, brothers, friends... So, he admits that he pumped up Carpenter from a real support figure in my dad’s life to: We’re partners in crime now! But that made his movie.”

Portraying the 2 leads are Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane, and Willem Dafoe as John Carpenter. Dafoe hams up his cinematic image as the peculiar, dark anti-hero -- a role he’s played for Schrader before in Light Sleeper and Affliction. The big surprise is Kinnear, previously known as a TV talk show host and the star of lighter, more comedic fare like Sabrina and As Good as it Gets.

In Auto Focus Kinnear plays off his doe-eyed Indiana good looks. We get what we expect from him in the earlier, funnier scenes. His transformation to despair is subtle and devastating. “He trusted me in some of it, didn’t trust me in other parts of it,” Kinnear explains. “Clearly, going into this I didn’t have as much experience with the darker elements of where this movie evolves into.”

Schrader on the other hand didn’t have much experience with the lighter elements. “I knew he could handle the part that I found most difficult, which is the comedy. That’s the part I was most worried about. So, I had to have an actor who was comfortable in the shallow end. I’m pretty comfortable in the deep end. So, if the scenes are written right, and the actor is serious, and he has talent, I can get him in the deep end.”

That deep end is what we now refer to as sex addiction. At that time, the ‘60s and ‘70s, during the sexual revolution, it wasn’t thought of as a great oddity. Robert emphasizes, “Remember...this was not ominous while it was going on.”

Bob Crane’s life devolved into a series of one-night stands, progressing in frequency while his career was regressing. Auto Focus’s audience is left to wonder, was it the sex or the voyeurist aspect of filming his interludes that thrilled him?

Kinnear offers, “Clearly, if he was having any more sex -- and he wasn’t documenting it -- that would suggest that his conquests were almost inhuman. I think for the most part, he probably had a camera rolling when he was engaged. He seemed much more interested in documentation than he was in fornication. I don’t know what that speaks to -- obviously some type of narcissism.” (The title Auto Focus is a direct reference to being self-invloved.)

In conclusion, he admits, “I’m not sure the movie ever set out to answer that question -- which is which, or where he felt he was on that -- but I don’t think anybody could really answer that question.”

The addiction destroyed Crane’s first marriage. He met his second wife Pat Olson, while both were starring on Hogan’s Heroes. She offered a significant departure for him in terms of acceptance. Whereas Crane’s first marriage was in the mold of a traditional family, Olson was more liberal and accepting of his lifestyle.

Olson is played in the film by Maria Bello, from E.R. and Coyote Ugly. She was attracted to her role, because of the character’s openness. “I love the line in the movie when she says, ‘I never want you to have to lie about who you are, and I never want to have to lie about who I am.’ I think that’s kind of noble.”

Bello elaborates, “I’m not saying their relationship was noble, by any means. But that point of view, at least to say, ‘Whatever your faults and foibles I’m going to love you through it, and let’s just see what happens.’ I mean, here was a woman coming off the sexual repression of the ‘50s, where you were either a housewife or a whore, into the free-love generation of the ‘60s. Experimenting -- what do we do with this new found freedom? It seems to me that she was an experimenter and open-minded, but then it got to the point where he was an addict. He kept going down that road, and she was taking care of the kids and the mortgage.”

Schrader felt that it wasn’t Crane who changed, so much as the altering social landscape of the period, which allowed Crane to be more in the open. “I think he was always this guy. What there was -- and I think maybe this film exaggerates the arc, cause I think he was always more or less the same -- it was the level of hypocrisy. In the ‘60s, he was living that total photoplay life. The all-American father, church going... That was the role he was playing. He was a sex junkie even then. But he had it totally under control. It was totally locked down by the iron bars of hypocrisy. But then celebrity came. Times changed. The marriage fell apart. The show ended. The need for hypocrisy drifted away. He became who he really was.”

(Social hypocrisy is still very much in full swing. In order to achieve an R rating, which Schrader was contractually obligated by Sony to deliver, he had to pixelate parts of certain graphic images. The rest of the world will see the film without these alterations.)

As Auto Focus progresses, the bright colors of the 1960’s subtly desaturate, illustrating how vacant Crane’s life became. He was a man in denial of his reality. There were no dark nights of the soul in his household, Schrader suggests. He was even oblivious as to why he went from the star of a hit TV show to touring with a dinner theater troupe. His life became surrounded by technology, not people -- his sexual encounters were so void of emotion that they were mechanical.

The image that best represents this doesn’t even call great attention to itself. It’s not even important in the dramatic scheme of the narrative. It’s simple: John Carpenter pulls up outside Crane’s house in a classic Lamborghini. As he gets out the camera tracks with him down the body of the car. We’ve never seen it before, and we never see it again. But it speaks volumes about the emptiness of their existence as they’re getting older -- and their need to supplement their inferior sexuality with a newer, sleeker machine.

The movie is also a scathing commentary on humanity’s growing reliance on technology. Unable to emotionally experience events once as they’re actually occurring, we’ve resorted to recording them, so they can be repeatedly viewed -- hence television reruns, including Hogan’s Heroes.

Robert finds it sad that his father isn’t around now to see how technology has evolved. “My dad always loved cameras. He always loved stereo equipment. I think about all the stuff he missed, since he died in ‘78. CDs, DVDs, digital. He would’ve freaked out over all this stuff!”

It’s a great stroke of irony that the film portrays Crane’s murder weapon as that of his camera tripod. In reality a weapon was never recovered. However, since his tripod was missing it’s been suggested the likely object.

The film also suggests that Carpenter was the murderer. Willem Dafoe’s face is never seen, though by way of dramatic juxtaposition it’s clearly implied. The reason for this is that Carpenter was never convicted. He was the original prime suspect and was actually tried for the crime years later, but the case was largely circumstantial. Schrader chose Carpenter because he believed him to be the most likely culprit. Robert’s opinion has changed over the years. He no longer suspects Carpenter and thinks it could have been a jealous husband, for instance.

Bob Crane’s story became the stuff of legends, providing the perfect mix for tabloid fodder. Many film projects had been in the works over the years, but Auto Focus finally nailed it. Paul Schrader’s decision to reassess his initial instincts has made for a great movie.

Perhaps Schrader’s involvement was by way of providence. Robert fondly recalls of his father, “We had a Paul Schrader experience together. One night we went to the Plaza Theater in Westwood, California, and we saw Taxi Driver. We sat there stunned. We looked at each other, and my dad goes: ‘That’s a pretty important film. Those are the kind of people I would love to work with! The Scorseses of the world and the Schraders and all that.’”

It would seem his dream of being important has finally come true...

-Copyright 2002 by Jamie Stuart 


 

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