by MATTHEW HAYS

The tale is so sordid, so perfectly surreal, it seems the perfect fit for Paul Schrader. This is the man who wrote the sceenplay of Jake La Motta’s life in Scorsese’s incomparable masterpiece Raging Bull. This is also the man who delicately retold Patty Hearst’s wrenching story in the film that bore her name.

Now, screenwriter-cum-director Schrader has made Auto Focus, the lurid story of sitcom star Bob Crane’s descent into sexual decadence, his fall from Tinseltown success and his untimely murder. Gen-Xers and Boomers will recall Crane’s star turn on Hogan’s Heroes, arguably one of the strangest sitcoms ever thought up. The setup was that Crane, playing Hogan, led a ragtag group of prisoners in a German POW camp during World War II. And the Nazis were played as a gang of dimwits, Keystone Cops style. And there was a laugh track. The show was as weird as it was controversial, long before Roberto Benigni created what was incorrectly billed as the first WWII comedy, Life Is Beautiful.

Then there’s all the behind the scenes stuff. For most of us, Crane faded into obscurity after the show was cancelled. What came as a shock later was his murder in the late ’70s. Crane was found in a sleazy motel room, bludgeoned to death by a tripod. The murder weapon was somehow poetic; Crane had had a longstanding obsession with sex and porn and had been making home-made porn for years.

“You’re right,” Schrader says to me, through thick glasses. “I tend to choose marginal figures, ones who aren’t known so well by the public. Truth be told, I don’t know what I’d do with a Nixon or Muhammad Ali or the Rat Pack. It’s nice to have a sort of marginal figure like Crane who wasn’t that intimately known by the public. Crane sort of seems like someone we all knew but didn’t really.”

Paternal porn

We certainly didn’t, but Crane’s antics were the stuff of Tinseltown lore, Hollywood Babylonesque tales of sex orgies and smut parties. One of his sons, now a shock-jock DJ in Seattle, sells peeks of his father’s porn movies and photos of his dad getting blow jobs at bobcrane.com. (It’s an odd ode to dad.)

Schrader contends that though he chose a marginal figure, getting the facts as straight as possible was paramount to the director. “You have an obligation to history, but you also have an obligation to drama. You have to serve both masters. If you’re going to cheat one at the expense of the other, you really shouldn’t do it.”

With Auto Focus, Schrader also maps out the huge shift in attitudes towards sex and porn in the past half century. “Porn used to be on the bad, seedy side of town. Now it’s on main street. Everyone has it on their computer whether they like it or not. I think things have really changed. I’m 56 years old and I remember when oral sex was considered a perversion.”

What Auto Focus does not do is paint Crane as some sort of groundbreaking hero. The man is shown as a deeply flawed addict who pursued sex to the point of it destroying much of his own personal and professional life. It’s a tribute to Schrader that the film manages to do this without careening into a cheap morality lesson. “The things he was doing then certainly wouldn’t be as career destroying now as they were then. But they would be seen as tacky and tasteless, rather than outrageous.”

Casting coup

The choice of Greg Kinnear for the Crane role seems so perfect it’s impossible to think of who else might have pulled it off. “I thought about it for five seconds, and realized it was a great idea,” confirms Schrader. “He had all that Crane stuff down, the glib, the ironic, and I think he’s getting better and better as an actor. I’m very good at taking an actor into the deep end, but not as good at the shallow end. So I thought, wow, Greg will get the shallow end and I’ll protect him in the deep end.”

“I would say that I had to trust Paul in going into these dark areas,” says Kinnear, full of gee-whiz enthusiasm about the project. “He has a history of that. And he had to trust me, in terms of the comedic areas. I think of a lot of things when I think of Paul Schrader, but comedy isn’t one of them. There’s a lot of subversive humour in this movie. And where there were places that I felt needed to be enhanced, Paul was very open to that.

“Paul and I are sort of two opposite extremes. But Crane’s persona was extreme. This family man, this one-woman guy, who didn’t like rock ’n’ roll and attacks on the president, who was also living this lascivious lifestyle, taking pictures and showing them to strangers. Bringing the two together was the job; the two extremes of our work helped us do it.”

Crane’s elder son, who was 25 when the TV star died, served as a consultant on the film, helping Kinnear to get to know the late Crane. “He was genuinely useful in terms of filling in some blanks. There was a family journal that Bob used to keep, about the family’s weekend water polo matches. It was creepy, Shining-style writing. Who won, who lost, all meticulously recorded. His obsessive nature, his compulsive nature, extended beyond his sexuality. He really only had one friend, John Carpenter, which pointed to some of his social problems.” (Played by Willem Dafoe, the film points to the theory that Carpenter murdered Crane in an emotional fit.)

The sitcom recreations will please Nick at Nite junkies. But the sexual recreations had to be toned down, perhaps not surprisingly, due to the ratings system. “It’s ironic,” says Schrader. “He was doing it then, but we can’t show it now. Some of the shots had to be pixillated. In Europe that won’t be there and, of course, on the DVD.”

Crane’s groundbreaking home-porn fetish prompts the question: did Schrader ever consider making an all-out porn movie in ode to the man? “Absolutely not. I think people who consume porn know exactly what they want to see and how they want to see it. They don’t want to go to the multiplex to see it. I think they’d be offended it they went to the multiplex and saw it. They go to the multiplex to see an engaging drama over two hours.

“I think we would have lost the audience if I’d tried to jam porn down their throats in the multiplex.” :

Auto Focus opens Friday, Jan. 17

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