This movie is about porn and murder

When Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane was found in 1978, bludgeoned to death by a camera a tripod in a Scottsdale, Arizona hotel, I was one stunned 10-year-old. When news reports began to reveal that Crane’s death could have been connected to his penchant for videotaping women during sexual encounters, I was dismayed.

Being that I was a prepubescent Sunday School dweller and relatively ignorant, that was pretty much the first time I had heard about people videotaping themselves naked, and it struck me as totally outrageous. The clean cut TV guy in the leather jacket that outwitted fat Nazis on a weekly basis couldn’t be capable of something so “wrong.”

With his chilling Auto Focus, director Paul Schrader shows us Crane’s little hobby. On the surface, Crane was the picture of decency, his face popping up on many family favorite shows such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Love Boat, and Password. He even played SuperDad in a Disney movie. Behind the scenes, Crane was a tragic pioneer of home produced video pornography, his fame and money enabling him to obtain Sony prototype video cameras.

When the film starts, we see Crane (a pitch-perfect Greg Kinnear) doing his radio show, decked out in nerdy sweaters and tossing out corny, G-rated humor with just the slightest hint of sexual innuendo. Happily married to his wife Anne (Rita Wilson), he’s searching for his next big break after being fired from The Donna Reed Show.

That break came with TV’s Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971), the Nazi POW camp comedy that brought Crane instant fame, a new weapon in his arsenal for attracting women to sex orgies.

Kinnear’s Crane is seemingly lifted straight out of a goofy sitcom. Always smiling, never drinking or smoking, and attending morning mass with his family, he seems to have his life together. As the film progresses, Schrader shifts to grainy film stock and handheld cameras, but Kinnear’s performance remains upbeat. The juxtaposition of Kinnear’s sitcom-like Crane and sex orgies is shocking and, dare I say, funny.

Based on the book The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith, the film takes some poetic license with Crane’s goody two shoes image. The movie suggests that Crane’s obsession with filming pornography started upon meeting video tech John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) sometime in the ‘60s, but it is known that Crane was filming women in the late ‘50s.

At the core of the film is Crane’s relationship with Carpenter (not the Halloween guy), a friendship that possibly ended in homicide. The film definitely suggests that Carpenter was responsible for Crane’s murder (he was indicted for the crime, but never convicted), implying that Crane was looking to clean up his image, restart his career and leave Carpenter behind.

Kinnear plays Crane as someone unaware that his intense preoccupation with sex can be a career and lifestyle killer. As his marriage falls apart, and his career hits the skids due to behavior deemed scandalous, he remains sunny and optimistic. Dafoe, on the other hand, depicts Carpenter as a desperate, sleazy leech, his insecurities overwhelming him to the point of possible violence.

In a closing narration delivered by Crane from the grave, Kinnear’s voice has a forgiving tone in reference to Carpenter’s suspected murdering ways. He declares that “Men gotta have fun!” and nowadays, with video cameras in many households, men and women are indeed doing just that.

In a strange way, Auto Focus depicts Crane as a sacrificial lamb, his death being a mere speed bump on the road to a more acceptable time for happy, healthy, home-produced video porn. For many, he was a pioneer of Magellan and Elvis magnitude … only much, much dirtier.