TV Guide

October 12, 2002 - October 18, 2002

by Joe Rhodes

Pages 30-33

http://www.tvguide.com/

BOB CRANE was, in many ways, exactly what he appeared to be-a churchgoing, Republican-voting, cardigan-wearing family man, warm and gregarious, with a quick wit and an easy, mischievous smile. Even before Hogan's Heroes made him famous in 1965, Crane flashed those qualities as a successful Los Angeles radio personality. But more than anything else, Bob Crane came across as a regular guy.

"If you were to line up all the people from television history to have double lives and be bludgeoned to death in a hotel room," Greg Kinnear says, "Bob doesn't seem like a guy that you'd put at the top of the list."

But on June 29, 1978, Crane's body, clad only in white boxer shorts, was found in a Scottsdale, Arizona, hotel. He'd been beaten to death with a blunt object, probably a camera tripod. The motel room-where Crane, 49, was staying while performing at a local dinner theater-was filled with video equipment and sexually explicit tapes of Crane and others, evidence of his obsession with swinging and pornography.

The often-contradictory story of Crane's life and gruesome death is the subject of the new feature film "Auto Focus," directed by Paul Schrader and starring Kinnear s the ill-fated sitcom star who never quite understood the perils of his addictions. The movie makes a convincing case against Crane's friend, a man named John Carpenter, who was tried but not convicted of the murder. He has since died.

"Auto Focus" producers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski ("The People vs. Larry Flynt," "Man on the Moon") chose Kinnear because they saw in him the same brash likability that Crane possessed.

"Greg's sweetness is the audience's entrée," Alexander says. "But where he really shines is when Crane has lost his mind, isn't sure who his friends are, and all he cares about is his addiction. When he's wallowing in chaos and dementia-that's when Greg is astonishing."

As the host of E!'s Talk Soup and NBC's Later, Kinnear coasted on charm, a raised eyebrow and a fratboy smirk. He was as surprised as anyone when director Sydney Pollack offered him a part in 1995's "Sabrina". In 1997, he earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in "As Good As It Gets," and he's worked steadily ("Nurse Betty," "The Gift") ever since.
But Kinnear, 39 and married since 1999 to writer Helen Labdon, has felt hamstrung by his trademark breezy demeanor-and said just that in a 2001 interview that Alexander and Karaszewski read.

"He was talking about how he'd been typecast in these light, romantic-comedy parts and he wished he could do some darker, more challenging material." Alexander says. "And there are scenes in the movie where Bob Crane says almost exactly the same thing. We took the bait and said, 'You want a challenge" Well here it is.'"

TV GUIDE spoke to Kinnear in Los Angeles a week before " Auto Focus" (which also stars Willem Dafoe and Rita Wilson) premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It opens in New York City and Los Angeles on October 18 and nationwide on November 1.

You had to know that this was going to be controversial-pretty explicit sexual scenes, showing the dark side of an actor a lot of people liked.
I knew there were some elements of the movie that were going to be risky. But if somebody is looking for a sensationalistic view of sexuality, they will be disappointed. This movie deals with more complicated issues than that.

There's not much titillation for a movie about a guy addicted to pornography.
As an audience member, you're a little detached from the sexuality. That was important. Bob was much more interested in documentation than fornication. That was the addictive element, the inability to stop a behavior that you know might be destructive to your job, your family, your finances. There wasn't any romance in any of this.

What kind of research did you do, other than watching a lot of Hogan's Heroes?
His oldest son, Robert Crane Jr. [a consultant on the film], provided me with some audiotapes of his dad around the house. He also gave me some strange documentation his dad used to keep about the family. Every Sunday the family would get in the pool and play water polo, and his dad kept kind of startling, detailed notes about the statistics of each game-how many shots on goal, who was defending whom, the scores of all the games. There were little pieces of his obsessive nature that were evident even in things like that. [Scotty Crane, Crane's son from his second marriage (to Hogan's Heroes actress Patti Olson), did not cooperate in the making of the film and has dismissed it as sensationalized and inaccurate.]

When you were re-creating some of the Hogan's Heroes episodes, were you worried about getting every detail exactly right?
I thought it was important to get as close as we could, because if we weren't in the ballpark, it would be distracting to the audience. So I incorporated as many impersonation elements as possible-the way he held his chin, how he crossed his arms.

In the end, will people be able to forget that it's Greg Kinnear on the screen and accept you as Bob Crane?
You research as much as you can, absorb as much as you can, and then when you're doing the work, you just let it go and hope that some glimpses of the character will come through. You try to make it as truthful as you can, and then after that, you've got to let it go. Because at the end of the day, I'm not Bob Crane. I can't be Bob Crane.

So what was it about Bob Crane that made you want to play him?
His contradictory nature. He's this guy who has a sort of self-morality. He doesn't like rock and roll or hearing dirty jokes on the radio, but at the same time he is living this wildly lascivious lifestyle and documenting it along the way. And showing that documentation to other people. Proudly. How do you reconcile those two people into one man? Whether all this happened to him because he was a celebrity-a guy who suddenly had a lot of women available to him just by the nature of who he was-I don't think can be truly answered.

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Front Cover

Page 30-31

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Last Modified : Fri 16 May 2008 7:12 AM