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Also this issue: Nouvelle Vagueness Screen Picks |
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October 24-30, 2002
movies
 INSIDER SCHRADER: Paul Schrader, moralist and voyeur. |
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Paul Schrader on Bob Crane: star, sex addict and unwitting icon.
Paul Schrader sits neatly in his armchair. Sometimes, he leans forward to emphasize a point or to laugh, but mostly, he sits quietly, without a lot of wasted motion. Well-known for writing several of Martin Scorsese’s greatest films, including Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Raging Bull, Schrader is a director in his own right, with films ranging from Hardcore and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters to Patty Hearst, Light Sleeper and the superb Affliction.
In fact, Schrader laughs often when discussing his new film, Auto Focus, based on the life of Bob Crane (played by Greg Kinnear), the star of Hogan's Heroes (CBS, 1965-1971), found murdered in his Scottsdale, Arizona, condo in 1978, bludgeoned with one of the tripods he used to make home sex tapes. Schrader's film is less interested in the star's career (he says of Hogan's, "God, it was an awful show!") or domestic life -- he was married twice, first to high-school sweetheart Anne, then to Hogan's costar Patricia Olson -- than in his obsession with pornography and addiction to anonymous sex.
"In the later '70s, it really got to be an addiction for him, almost a full-time occupation," Schrader observes. "As he said, "The hard part was remembering their names." Schrader reflects on the folly and effort involved: "It never seemed to me like it was a lot of fun to go through fucking strange people every single day. You're really running from something at that time."
Crane's partner in many of these exploits was John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), a technology devotee who provided the photographic, home movie, and eventually, video recording equipment used to document their activities. Schrader laughs, "In just about every scene, Carpenter walks in with some new gadget: "Hey, look at this! The tape is in the cassette!'" Auto Focus is most interested in their bumpy relationship, equal parts homoerotic, homophobic, fraternal and, as Schrader says repeatedly, "enabling." Of "Carp," Schrader says, "I think that they are their best friends, their only friends, and I think that comes through. Certainly Carpenter cares about Bob; I don't know how much Bob cares about other people."
Schrader calls the story a "male folie à deux," and was drawn to its "similarity to Prick Up Your Ears"; he calls Auto Focus "the heterosexual, middle-aged American, TV-star version of the Joe Orton story." He laughs, "My friend Susanna Moore, the novelist, has said to me that whenever there's more than one penis in the room, it's a homosexual act. This film is full of complexities and connotations."
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The structure, which covers some 14 years of Crane's life, tracks "the accretion of clutter, as his life becomes more and more messy, through the camera work, developing process, sets and wardrobe. By the time you're at the end of the film, you're watching a rather different film than you were watching at the beginning. It's not the most brilliant idea, but the trick of it is to do it in an incremental fashion, so the viewer finally says, "This is different, not knowing exactly when the change occurs."
Crane's loss of control is gradually revealed, but one scene highlights it: On the Hogan's set, his efforts to maintain his "normal" surface devolve into an outlandish sexual hell. Schrader says, "I wanted to have a little fun and show Bob coming a little unhinged. But the thing is, because Bob's such a superficial guy, you have to do things in a kind of superficial way. There's no dark night of the soul for this cat. I didn't think it was right to have him anguishing alone in the farmhouse like Wade Whitehouse [the Nick Nolte character in Affliction]."
Schrader shows Crane's decline in part through his voice-over, though the character remains ignorant. Not only does this allow "you to jump expositionally, through periods of time" in the biography, it also "gives you an opportunity to hear Bob's voice, to identify with him as he sees himself, in his own mind." And in that mind, Schrader smiles, Crane remains "fucking clueless."
"In the last narration, when he's dead," Schrader recalls, "someone wanted me to put some perspective in there. And I said no: just because he's dead, he didn't get any more insight. He still doesn't get it. And surely, the audience can find it without me giving it to them. Audiences are given too much stuff in movies." He sighs. "You don't have to give Travis Bickle a dog. He's interesting enough. Audiences will form an empathy of sorts, an identification, and then at some point they'll have to back off."
For Schrader, Crane's inability to see himself is what eventually does him in. "At some point," Schrader says, "his lifestyle overtakes him, and he can't stop. But I don't think he changed that much, really. I think what happened was that the hypocrisy fell away, and the obsessions solidified. Hollywood didn't make Good Bob go bad, but it helped Bad Bob come out."
Auto Focus opens Friday at Ritz East. See Sam Adams’ review on p. 50.
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