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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Bob Crane's son Scotty is proud of his dad's reputation as a video horndog -- in fact, he retails Pop's home porn on the Web. But Paul Schrader's "Auto Focus," he insists, gets it all wrong.
Oct 21, 2002 | On June 29, 1978, "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane went from the dinner-theater circuit to front-page headlines in the worst possible way. He was found dead in a pool of his own blood and brain tissue in the Scottsdale, Ariz., apartment that was his temporary domicile during his run in the romantic comedy "Beginner's Luck." Crane's head was completely bashed in by a camera tripod, and a severed power cord from one of his many VCRs was tied around his throat for good measure. The murder became infamous by the discovery at the crime of several videocassettes featuring the actor starring in his very own porno movies as well as some equally explicit photo albums.
The speculation into Crane's life, obsessions and death were once the sole province of tabloid television and true-crime novels. But with the release of Paul Schrader's Bob Crane biopic "Auto Focus" -- which stars Greg Kinnear as Crane and Willem Dafoe as John Carpenter, the video technician accused (and acquitted) of his slaying -- this unsolved murder mixed with sexual addiction is now part of a major media war. Crane's son Scotty, armed with his father's candid snapshots, blue home movies, a sensationalistic Web site and plain old audacity, has taken on Schrader and Sony Pictures.
Scotty Crane's site may be the first to offer celebrity skin as a protest vehicle. Viewing its pages is like being confronted with irrefutable proof of an urban legend. There is the affable Col. Hogan on top, on the bottom, giving and receiving and generally romping with party gals who seem happy just to bathe in the sitcom star's charisma and take off their clothes for his camera. In the site's free sample area there are pictures of Crane tapping out a beat on a snare drum while entertaining a topless stripper and another shot of him in his 1950s dad sweater with a buxom nude woman bending over in front of him while he clicks his ever-present camera into a mirror.
"My dad always had a big libido," says the younger Crane from his hotel room in Cannes, France. "I do too. I love beautiful women but I'm just monogamous because I learned a heavy moral lesson from my father's murder: that you can't go spreading it around. That you can't sleep with other men's wives."
Robert Scott Crane is the son of Bob Crane and his second wife Patricia, who played Col. Klink's blond bombshell secretary Hilda on "Hogan's Heroes" under the stage name of Sigrid Valdis. Scotty was only 7 at the time of his father's murder and was even fingerprinted during the investigation of the crime.
Like his father before him, Scotty has a successful career in radio (Bob Crane was L.A.'s "King of the Airwaves" before turning to television). His show "Shaken Not Stirred" is nationally syndicated and has been nominated for a Peabody Award. After Scotty's attempts to contact Schrader and the makers of "Auto Focus" were ignored or rebuffed, he launched Bobcrane.com in May 2001, going on the Howard Stern show soon thereafter to take his case to the public.
"I haven't thought of a better way to be believed or noticed," Crane says, and he may have a point. Since he went live with his dad's homemade porn and Sony ejected him from a packed press screening of the film last July, Scotty Crane has seized the press from the usually infomercial-like Hollywood hype machine. Almost all coverage of "Auto Focus" is combined with some mention of Scotty's site and his complaints against the film.
Schrader (the writer of Martin Scorsese's classics "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull," as well as the director of such films as "Affliction," "Patty Hearst" and "American Gigolo") has at times allowed the Crane controversy to degenerate into unpleasant mudslinging. In a recent interview with Lynn Hirschberg of the New York Times Magazine, Schrader went on the offensive against Scotty Crane and his mother. "Patty Crane says I am killing her," he says. "I don't think I, or a movie, can be responsible for the health of a woman who is a lifelong smoker and drinker."
The 56-year-old filmmaker goes on to state that he has a copy of Scotty Crane's unpublished coffee table book "The Faces of Bob Crane" and it contains nude pictures of Patricia Crane as well as, in Schrader's words, "a picture of Patty with a woman."
Scotty and Patricia Crane's lawyer, Lee Blackman, vigorously dispute this. "Firstly, there are no nude pictures of Patricia Crane in the book and there are certainly no lesbian pictures of her," he says. "There are numerous photographs of Patricia Crane in the book and she is fully clothed in all of them. Since there are numerous photos of her in the book, anyone could look at them and tell that none of the other photos that he's alluding to are her."
Blackman also denies that Patricia Crane drinks alcohol. "She has an almost allergic reaction to hard liquor," he says. "I am shocked that the New York Times would publish this type of journalism."
Scotty also disagrees with the film's portrayal of his mother. "There is a scene where she attacks my dad and he has to perform a play in Scottsdale that night with stitches. There are no medical records of this and no police records. The people that performed with my dad in the play don't remember this and a whole audience full of people didn't see this. It is completely made up."
