Scotty Crane's conflict with Schrader may have become deeply personal following their one face-to-face meeting. After millions of Web hits, Crane says he met with the director and executive producer Trevor Macy nine days before shooting wrapped on the film. "They offered me $20,000 so I wouldn't sue the film studio," Scotty exclaims. "This whole meeting was so they could say that they tried to reach out to Scotty, when really all they were doing was offering me hush money. I wasn't interested in their money. I just wanted the truth about my dad."

While Scotty Crane refused the offer, Crane's other son, Bob Jr., served as a consultant on Schrader's film. Crane's son from his first marriage, Bob Jr. has a longstanding ax to grind with Patricia Crane that could explain the dim view of her presented in "Auto Focus." In the Times article, Bob Jr. repeated his frequent suggestions that Patricia may have been involved in her husband's death.

"I think the cops in Scottsdale didn't investigate her enough for my dad's murder," Bob Crane Jr. told the Times. "Who gained from his death? Nobody except Patty, who inherited everything."

San Francisco true-crime author Robert Graysmith, who wrote the book "The Murder of Bob Crane," on which "Auto Focus" is based, disagrees.

"Even though she has the best motive of anybody, with the considerable sum of money that would have been coming to Bob the year following his death," Graysmith says, "Patty actually had the most perfect alibi in the world. She was on a remote island off the coast of Washington at the time of the murder." The Scottsdale police, he says, actually flew from Washington to Arizona on regular airlines to determine whether she could have gotten to Arizona to commit the murder. "Those blows that killed Bob Crane were delivered by a very strong man," he adds.

(Bob Crane Jr. has stopped discussing the film and declined to comment for this article.)

"Auto Focus" chronicles Bob Crane's rise to the top with "Hogan's Heroes" and his post-TV descent into a world in which he used his syndicated celebrity to pick up women and videotape himself having sex with them. The movie depicts Crane as a devoted family man in its first act and a lecherous has-been in its last. Scotty Crane questions not just the film's chronology and general conception, but also the filmmakers' right to use his father's life as a metaphor.

"They portray him as being this 'Father Knows Best,' Pat Boone suburban family man who was led by my mother into this slow decline into pornography," Scotty says. "I have thousands of pictures of my dad with nude women. There is a picture from 1956 of my dad with a naked woman who isn't his first wife. I have the evidence. I have the pictures, police reports and autopsy reports. If you want to see it, I can get it to you. That's what the Web site is about."

"I don't think so," says Graysmith in response. "I think the Bob Crane story is: Here is a very good man who became a not so very good man. Werner Klemperer and Robert Clary [Col. Klink and Corporal Louis LeBeau from "Hogan's Heroes"] said that Bob was the squarest guy that they ever met. He was a conservative Reagan Republican kind of fellow who couldn't even understand the scripts very often. He was a very straight arrow. He was the average American guy, which is probably why he was chosen to be Hogan.

"He said himself that he was 100 percent faithful to his first wife, and I believe him," Graysmith continues. He believes that "fame and new friends" changed Crane, pushing him into serial infidelities and his homemade porn collection. "After that it just accelerated, almost as if he's attempting to find himself on other pieces of film. I think that with the downward slide of his career, maybe it just increased: the less career, the more extracurricular activities."

Michael Gerbosi wrote the screenplay to "Auto Focus," with some help from postmodern biopic specialists Scott Alexander and Larry Karazewski (the writers of "Ed Wood" and "The People vs. Larry Flynt"). For Gerbosi, the issues here go beyond Crane himself, a family schism and an unsolved murder.

"With almost every Hollywood movie about a real-life historical figure, there's always somebody out there who feels something was left out, or that something was not depicted as completely accurate," Gerbosi explains in a carefully worded phone interview. "What's dangerous about these complaints is: Their aim is to limit artistic freedoms and control a movie's content. Not every fact about Bob Crane could fit into this movie -- not every single facet of his life was interesting to explore.

"We had to limit ourselves to an hour and 40 minutes," he continues. "In this relatively small time frame, my goal was to present a story that had broader implications than just one person. I feel this story is a look at the universal problem of sex addiction, and a look at some of the universal concerns that come along with attaining a measure of celebrity. And in my opinion, Scotty Crane's complaints are nothing more than his attempt to censor this movie.

"It's understandable to me why he would feel he has a proprietary interest in the story of Bob Crane, because it's his father," Gerbosi muses. "It's his life. He's lived through this. This is very much a personal matter for him and that's understandable. I hope that Scotty understands that this story is also bigger than just the family and has become a story discussed on the Internet, a story that is out in paperback, a story that is in tabloids and on television. This has become very much a public-domain story."

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