The sordid, bifurcated life of Bob Crane comes to the big screen. I loved Hogan's Heroes as a kid: I didn't much care that a comedy about prisoners of war in WWll was in preposterous bad taste. The fantasy that the prisoners were actually empowered by their situation was the hook, and the characters were compelling and iconic. Crane was equally suave and silly.
I have preferred to keep Crane's appalling private life and lurid death separate from Crane-as-Hogan, at least until now:
- Bob Crane, star of Hogan's Heroes, avid amateur pornographer and bludgeoned victim of an unsolved 1978 murder, is now the subject of a fact-based film that makes most E! True Hollywood Story episodes look like Sunday-school picnics.
Auto Focus, directed by Paul Schrader (Affliction, scripts for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) and starring Greg Kinnear as the affable sitcom actor with a secret sordid hobby, doesn't open in New York and Los Angeles until Friday. But it already has intensified the animosity between Crane's two sons.
On one side is Robert, 51, one of three children Crane had with his first wife, Anne. A journalist, he was paid $20,000 to be an adviser on the movie and has a small (if ironic) part as an interviewer for a Christian publication who quizzes the TV celebrity on his tips for a happy marriage.
On the other side is Scotty, 31, Crane's son with second wife, Patricia, who was Hilda on Hogan's Heroes. His mother, who was separated from but never divorced from his dad, is executor of the estate and inherited proceeds from reruns. She also owns thousands of photos and tapes that document more than two decades of Crane's sexual encounters, a selection of which forms the centerpiece of Scotty's infamous Web site shrine, bobcrane.com..
- In 1997, Scotty, a radio host who operates a Seattle recording studio, his mother and Scotty's former on-air partner wrote a Crane script, Take Off Your Clothes and Smile, and shopped it around. But plans for Auto Focus, based on the 1993 book The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith, shut them out.
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