Here, we see Bob Crane reading the Hogan's Heroes comic book (drawn, as I recall, by Sal Trapani and an array of ghost-pencilers, including Steve Ditko) and eating lunch from his Hogan's Heroes lunchbox. What kind of man was Bob Crane when he wasn't playing Colonel Robert Hogan? I don't know…and I find it hard to believe that the makers of a new movie about his life have any more idea than I do. Certainly, the folks who worked closely with the man thought he was a heckuva nice guy and a good actor, and they weren't at all sure about his "other" life. I guess that's what bugs me a bit about the film, Auto-Focus, and why I probably won't see it until it hits cable, if then.
I never knew Crane but I've known a lot of people who did…who spent 12-hour shooting days with him for years. And not a one of them professes to the kind of insight claimed by the makers of the movie, most of whom never inhabited the same zip code as Robert "Bob" Crane. I see Greg Kinnear (who plays Crane) and director Paul Schrader all over the media dissecting the man's character and discussing the childhood events that obviously motivated him to spend so much of his adult life making dirty movies with waitresses from Barney's Beanery. The cause-and-effect connections involved in such simplified psychology always seem tenuous to me at best…but even if I buy them, I have to wonder how a bunch of total strangers could know "the real Bob Crane" when those who knew the real Bob Crane didn't know "the real Bob Crane."
Is it possible that a certain sham is being perpetrated here? That the filmmakers have taken the broad strokes of the man's life and used them to construct a largely-fictional character whom they have named Bob Crane? That it would have been more honest but less commercial to fictionalize further and not pass this off as the true story of Bob Crane, star of the beloved situation comedy, Hogan's Heroes? Or have they really, from afar, homed in on the essence of a man who was an enigma to those who actually spent much of their lives with him?
I dunno. 22 years after you die, do you think people you never knew could make a film of your life and know all the things about you that your friends and family don't?