Bob Crane was nothing if not a product of his environment. More specifically, Crane was a product of two separate and distinct environments, each instilling him with conflicting values and desires. The result was one of the more bizarre double lives of modern times.Crane was an All-American guy and a typical family man who just happened to be a celebrity. As the star of the popular '60s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes and, later, Disney family fare like Super Dad, Crane projected a solid, squeaky-clean image that endeared him to audiences. Female viewers found him impishly charming in a non-threatening sort of way, and male viewers liked him because he seemed like a stand-up guy, plus their wives liked him.
But behind the wholesome, innocuous public persona, Bob Crane was living a whole other life, a secret existence as sordid and excessive as anything ripped from the pages of Hollywood Babylon. Roughly coinciding with the first burst of fame that Hogan’s Heroes brought him, Crane began spending more and more time away from his family, hanging out in seedy strip clubs where he watched the girls and sat in with the band (he was an amateur drummer). From there, Crane quickly progressed to sleeping with the occasional stripper to having sex with lots and lots of strippers to having sex with pretty much anyone and everyone he could get his hands on.
The story gets weirder. Around this same time Crane met a libidinous tech-geek named John Carpenter, who became Crane’s constant companion in his increasingly obsessive quest to get laid. Carpenter, a lowlife who prided himself on being on the cutting edge of both technology and swingerhood, eventually introduced early prototypes of video equipment into their fun and games, and Crane soon became as obsessed with the recording of his sexual encounters as he was with the sex itself.
As portrayed by Greg Kinnear in Paul Schrader’s new film Auto Focus, Crane is as cheerfully clueless as he is lascivious, as pure a product of Eisenhower’s Father Knows Best America as he is of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Nation. (Actually, forget Father Knows Best; Leave It To Beaver would be a far more appropriate assessment, if you get my drift.) You couldn’t have fabricated a more perfect illustration of Hef’s swingin" philosophy than Crane and Carpenter diligently recording their nonstop fornication marathons with the latest high-tech toys.
Auto Focus is an odd and lurid little movie, but not nearly as odd or as lurid as it probably should have been. A writer/director whose films are almost always more concerned with the subtleties of character than with style or sensationalism, Schrader here assumes a purposefully flat, almost detached tone that doesn’t do much to bring the story to life. Nearly everybody in the film, from Crane on down, comes off as overly wooden, insipid and just sort of out of it, almost as if the entire cast of characters in Auto Focus were channeling Ed Wood. It’s a curious approach for a filmmaker to take with this subject matter, and not a particularly effective one — it’s neither funny nor especially poignant.
Carpenter is a plum role for Willem Dafoe, who rises above the stilted veneer of his character to become the sad, dark heart of this movie. The most fascinating thing about Auto Focus is the relationship between Carpenter and Crane, a complicated dynamic that gets into some strange power games as well as an undercurrent of homoerotic tension that eventually leads to the most bitter of ends for the film and for Crane.
Crane’s life went from bad to worse, and the film faithfully documents that process. After Hogan’s Heroes was canceled, Crane’s career nosedived and he wound up on the dinner theater circuit, playing crappy shows in crappy little towns and using his faded celebrity as a lure to attract still more increasingly joyless sex. The downward spiral intensifies during the film’s final 40 minutes, when Auto Focus undergoes such a radical shift that it very nearly feels like a different movie. What little humor there was almost completely evaporates, the soundtrack rumbles ominously, and the film becomes diffused with a hard blue metallic light that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those existential French thrillers from the middle of the last century Schrader so admires.
As Crane’s world crumbles and he becomes an ever more pathetic figure, the movie becomes increasingly disturbing, but it’s never entirely moving. Schrader maintains that distanced, slightly bloodless approach to the very end, creating a constant barrier for those of us disposed toward getting inside his characters’ heads. On the other hand, Schrader’s whole point may very well be that there’s simply nothing to get inside of here, no depth, no motivation, no answers, nothing.
Auto Focus leaves us feeling vaguely empty and dissatisfied, and maybe that’s the whole point. It’s not a pretty picture but maybe it’s an unavoidable one, as illustrated by the 11th hour exchange between an aging Crane and his agent, who pleads with his client to wise up and finally understand that sex is not the answer.
"I know," says the fallen star, doing his best to completely avoid the point. "It’s the question."
"And "Yes,"" he adds, smiling from ear to ear at his own punchline, "is the answer."
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg @weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2002.