Into the Deep End

The clean-cut star of “Hogan’s Heroes” seemed pleasant, witty, outgoing. He appeared to enjoy a picture-book marriage living in Tarzana with his pretty wife and three attractive kids. And after his sitcom was canceled in 1971, he still seemed to charm dinner theater audiences throughout the hinterlands whenever he’d perform the romantic comedy “Beginner’s Luck.”

What Bob Crane did not seem to be was a compulsive pornographer.

But when “Auto Focus,” starring Greg Kinnear, comes out Oct. 18, “real-life sex addict” may turn out to be the role for which Crane is best remembered.

Crane’s womanizing destroyed two marriages and damaged his career. With John Carpenter, a video technician who became his best friend and orgy partner, Crane taped hundreds of sexual encounters right up until the summer night in 1978 when he was bludgeoned to death in a Scottsdale, Ariz., motel room. For director Paul Schrader, the Bob Crane story, devoid of redemption, proved irresistible.

“See, I disagree with this whole thing in Hollywood, that characters have to be likable,” says Schrader, sipping soup in a Los Angeles restaurant. “I don’t know that they have to be likable. They have to be fascinating. Does Travis Bickle really have to have a dog? I don’t think so.”

Schrader should know. In his screenplay for “Taxi Driver” he created the tormented Bickle for Robert De Niro. He also scripted the indelible portrait of wife-beating boxer Jake La Motta in “Raging Bull,” and as writer-director of “Affliction,” steered James Coburn to an Oscar-winning performance as a sadistic drunken father. Over the course of 20 pictures, the 56-year-old filmmaker has assembled a gallery of obsessive personalities capable of commanding an audience’s attention in a slow-motion-train-wreck kind of way.

“The trick,” Schrader says, “is to get the audience not to pass judgment too quickly and just sort of stick around for the ride and watch these events unfold and gradually, they get sucked in.”

Schrader himself got sucked into Crane’s orbit two years ago, despite his resolve to swear off biopics. “Because of ‘Raging Bull,’ I became one of those writers you’d go to if you have a difficult subject. You’re doing John Holmes, ask Schrader. You’re doing the Mitchell brothers, ask Schrader,” he says of the adult film star and San Francisco porn producers. “I wrote one on Bobby Darin, Doris Duke, Hank Williams--these were never made.” Schrader did direct films about Patty Hearst and the suicide of Japanese author Yukio Mishima. “So I was sick of making biopics, sick of watching them. Then my agent said, ‘You really ought to read this script.’ ”

Paul Gerbosi’s “Auto Focus” screenplay, based in part on Robert Graysmith’s book titled “The Murder of Bob Crane,” struck Schrader initially as “a straight-ahead biopic,” he says. “But underneath it was this very interesting relationship between Crane and Carpenter.”

Referring to Stephen Frears’ fact-based 1987 movie about British playwright Joe Orton, who was murdered by his boyfriend, Schrader says, “I saw this kind of a heterosexual, middle-age, TV-star version of ‘Prick Up Your Ears.’ I was interested in doing a story about the enabling power of certain friendships that allow you to do things you wouldn’t do on your own.”

Schrader signed on as director, re-worked the script to emphasize the co-dependent Crane-Carpenter dynamic and settled on Kinnear to play Crane. “Greg had the glib, ironic tone, the hip, in-the-know, DJ stuff that is actually kind of hard to do. I’m not very good at that. I am rather good at getting an actor out into the deep end of the pool. So Greg gave me the shallow end of the pool, and I gave him the deep end.”

Schrader then picked Willem Dafoe, whom he’d directed in “Affliction” and his 1991 film “Light Sleeper” to portray Carpenter. “If I was going to take Greg someplace where he might be uncomfortable, I needed an actor in those waters beside him. Will had no compunction about playing either the nudity or the oddity of it all. So Greg could look to Will, and Will would say, ‘This is fine, don’t worry!’ ”

In tracing the last 14 years of Crane’s life, Schrader manipulated film stock, production design and camera movement to mirror his protagonist’s dissolution. “The nature of addiction is that it sneaks up on you,” he says. “When we first meet him in 1964, the real Bob Crane was doing Photo Play articles with the beautiful house and family. So you take that hypocritical world of the ‘60s, you saturate it with bright color and then slowly, incrementally, you make this cluttered, washed-out world of the discos. You can’t pinpoint the moment when this world changes, just as an addict can’t pinpoint the moment he becomes an addict. It’s just a little detail here, a little detail there, until finally you’re saying, ‘Ooh, I don’t know when it started, but this is getting kind of creepy.’ ”

Similarly, Schrader says he needed the characters to be oblivious to their flaws. “They can’t know they’re being creepy because people who are inside a relationship don’t know how peculiar it is.”

Case in point: Midway through “Auto Focus,” Crane and Carpenter sit half-naked on a rec room sofa one afternoon, nonchalantly watching their self-produced pornography tapes on TV. “That was a repeat of a shot I did in ‘Affliction,’ where Nick Nolte pulls out his tooth,” Schrader recounts. “He and Coburn, who plays his father, are both watching wrestling on TV. Nick has a bottle, and Coburn has a glass, and he just puts out the glass, and Nick fills it up. It was like a Norman Rockwell tableau for alcoholism and parental abuse. I thought I’ll do the same thing here, but about sexaholics; they’re talking in this completely dislocated way: ‘What is it about women?’ Then you pull back into this tableau. ‘Here it is folks: America.’ ”

Crane’s wholesome public image--he starred in a 1974 Disney picture called “Superdad”--stood in harsh contrast with his private appetites. The affable celebrity’s predilection for strip clubs and one-night stands provided Schrader with just the kind of traction he needed as a storyteller.

“All his life, Bob Crane wanted to be the nice guy,” Schrader says. “He didn’t want to offend anyone. So Bob Crane was living this functional contradiction until it became dysfunctional. That’s always wonderful to watch because occasionally in life, more often in fiction, you run into characters who are living this contradiction, large and those two headlights of contradictions are coming down the tracks aiming right at you. If you can get your hands on one of these characters, then you’ve got something to work with! And that’s what we got with Mr. Crane.”

The other thing Schrader got with “Mr. Crane” was an ongoing dispute with Scotty Crane, the actor’s son by his second marriage to actress Patti Crane (portrayed by Maria Bello in “Auto Focus”). Under her stage name Sigrid Valdis, she played Hilda on “Hogan’s Heroes.”

Scotty Crane had been shopping his own script about Bob Crane, “Take Off Your Clothes and Smile,” around the time that “Auto Focus” was being developed. He currently runs a Web site that, among other things, sells access to X-rated photos and videotapes of Bob Crane. The younger Crane felt snubbed when he wasn’t consulted by the makers of “Auto Focus” and contends that the film short-changes his father’s virtues. “My father was a really happy, lighthearted guy,” says Crane, speaking by phone from Paris.

Scotty Crane eventually met with Schrader and Kinnear on the “Auto Focus” set and read the screenplay. “It shows none of the real humor of Bob Crane,” he says. “This isn’t a funny film, it’s a dark film, and Bob Crane was anything but dark. The reason he was able to attract so many thousands of women was because he was a charismatic, fun-loving guy. Maybe parts of America will find pornography dark, but let’s face it: Today, with the advent of home video recorders, it’s pretty commonplace.”

Robert Crane Jr., Crane’s son from his first marriage to Anne Crane (played by Rita Wilson), consulted the filmmakers and had a small role in the movie. Scotty Crane was offered a similar arrangement but turned it down. When he was not invited to the first press screening for “Auto Focus,” Scotty Crane showed up anyway and was escorted from the premises.

Dissension within the Crane clan comes as no great surprise to Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who produced “Auto Focus.” The pair wrote “Man on the Moon” about Andy Kaufman, “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Ed Wood.”

“Whenever you make these true stories, there’s always controversy,” Alexander says. “Usually it’s about omissions, because you’re taking somebody’s life and turning it into an hour [and] 40 minutes, so there’s bound to be something you left out.”

Adds Karaszewski: “Drama tends to focus around trouble and conflict. You could make a whole movie about Bob Crane, the radio DJ who raises three kids in Tarzana and goes to Little League games, but I don’t know if that’s a movie.”

Bela Lugosi Jr. was upset for years at the way his father was portrayed in “Ed Wood,” Alexander says, while Schrader remembers Jake La Motta’s son Joey filing a lawsuit after “Raging Bull” was released.

“I’m sure it must be very heart-wrenching to see your father’s life portrayed on the screen,” Alexander says. “We keep it as close to facts as possible, but at end of the day these things have to work as a structured motion picture, and Bob Crane certainly lent himself to a very simple three-act structure: Here’s a regular guy, he gives in to temptation, he loses his way.”

Schrader believes “Auto Focus” rests on solid legal ground. “Sony has vetted the script to within a millimeter of its life,” he says. “If there were a lawsuit, and they say there will be one, Sony feels very confident about it.” Scotty Crane’s lawyer has been in contact with the studio, but he says he has not taken any legal action. Representatives of legal affairs for Sony Pictures Classics declined to comment.

Legal considerations aside, surely Schrader feels a special responsibility when making a movie about a real person. “I do,” he says. “You can’t trespass history. I’m troubled by ‘Beautiful Mind,’ when schizophrenia can become a malady that can be cured by the love of a good woman. But portraying Bob Crane as a creep, I don’t think that’s going too far. I don’t think I’ve crossed a line there. From everything I know about his life, that’s a pretty accurate portrait. It’s like so many of my other protagonists, going all the way back to ‘Taxi Driver.’

“These people just don’t get it. Usually those kinds of characters at some point toward the end of the movie, for a moment, get it. Bob Crane never does. Robert Jr., who lived with him for a number of months in Westwood after the second marriage broke up, told me Bob Crane didn’t see where the problem was. He was upset with the consequences of his actions, not with his actions.”

Schrader admits, “I didn’t identify with Bob Crane as closely as I have with other characters, but I can take him into some very interesting places, and in so doing, learn, and teach. That may seem like a dirty word. But if audiences can learn, then why can’t I teach? And there’s something to be learned from watching this guy.”

Namely?

“I don’t know if this is a morality tale,” Schrader says, “but if it is, then the moral is not ‘Too much sex kills.’ Home porn is certainly not as scandalous or as unusual as it once was. But look, the reason Bob Crane didn’t have any friends is, if he had dinner with a couple, within five minutes, he’d be reaching over and stroking the arm of his friend’s wife. This story is really about the dangers of selfishness.”

Hugh Hart is a regular contributor to Calendar.