Scene Selection — Geoff Carter: ‘Focus’ a vivid portrayal of addiction

Friday, April 4, 2003 | 8:31 a.m.

Geoff Carter is a Seattle based free-lance film critic and entertainment writer. Reach him at carter@pre2k.com.

Iremember driving through Los Angeles a few years ago and seeing a billboard that declared, "Real Men Don't Use Porn." Five such men -- a doctor, a policeman, a fireman and the like -- smiled down from the billboard, chaste and pure as driven snow.

If I'd had a Playboy in my car, I'm certain lasers would have shot from their eyes and cooked it.

At first I thought it was a joke -- I was in Los Angeles, after all, the town that smut built -- but I quickly dismissed that, remembering the adult film industry skates on thin ice as it is, and that Los Angeles had to suffer the humiliation of Bob Crane.

Crane, the "Hogan's Heroes" star who sank deep into sex addiction and amateur pornography before his still-unsolved murder in 1978, is the subject of Paul Schrader's "Auto Focus" (Columbia/Tristar Home Video, $26.95), and his story does the job the billboard couldn't: It shows pornography as an addiction. In Crane's case, apparently it was a lethal addiction.

Greg Kinnear plays Crane as he was, a basically straight arrow with his moral compass sitting next to a magnet. He starts out slow, with a promising role on a certain World War II comedy ("Oh, with the funny Nazis?" he asks his agent, incredulous) and a stack of "photo magazines" hidden in the garage.

When he meets John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), an electronics specialist with a Pandora's box -- the videotape recorder -- Crane pulls onto an expressway that ends with him dead in an Arizona motel. The two men develop a codependency as old as time itself: Carpenter has the means but not the talent, and Crane can buy his way into anything with a smile.

Crane and Carpenter bed women compulsively, filming the acts and watching them over and over. They don't feel passion, much less love for what they're doing; sex is only something they do to get sex acts on video. Eventually, Crane can't work without leering at his audience, picking out likely "stars."

The executive producers of "Auto Focus," Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, seem to be creating an encyclopedia of lost characters -- they wrote "Ed Wood," "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and "Man on the Moon" -- and Schrader seems to know this. At no point does Crane ever lose our sympathy, no matter how low he sinks. Even his wives seem sympathetic to him.

Schrader doesn't document the man; he documents his condition with the patience of a priest. The loudest cautionary voice in "Auto Focus" is Crane's own, and when he tells Carpenter what it's saying, he seals his fate. No one can save him, not even his agent (Ron Leibman), who tells him plainly that he can't get him any more work unless "you're a new man."

"Sex is not the answer," his agent cautions him, amazingly enough on the set of a Disney film. "I know," says Crane, oblivious. "It's the question. Yes is the answer."

For the most part, the collateral materials on the DVD look at what happened after the events in the film. Schrader, Kinnear, Dafoe and writer Michael Gerbosi all offer relevant commentary tracks, but the most compelling extra on the disc is an hourlong documentary that focuses on the mishandling of Crane's murder investigation.

Crane himself would have appreciated that. He didn't think the compulsive sex was all that big a deal -- it was just a natural thing people did. "Men gotta have fun," he says at the end of "Auto Focus." Just you try changing that kind of mind with a billboard.