Fellow Dopers, I did a search on “Auto Focus” in Cafe Society prior to starting this thread and I got zero results - hence this thread.
I must say I’m quite surprised that no one has created a thread on this film yet. It truly is quite compelling.
I specifially won’t give away any spoilers - just that wow, the two performances by Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane, and Wille Dafoe as his sleazy sidekick John Carpenter - well, they’re really something. Very powerful stuff.
And the film is wonderfully directed - as it shows Hogan’s ascent into stardom, and the times he lived in - and then his inexorable descent into the depths of permanent sleazoid persuit.
I saw it a few months ago, and was totally blown away by it. Who would have thunk that Greg Kinnear was such a good actor?
My one beef, and it’s a minor one – the guy who played Richard Dawson looked nothing like him. Given how brief a part he had, this was just distracting – my suspension of disbelief snapped totally during that segment.
Very head-twisting, bizaare, disturbing story. I started off feeling sorry for Crane, but by the end I felt dirty just watching the movie. Truly a man bent on self-destruction.
I just watched it last night. It certainly was an interesting film but it broke my heart. I was most disturbed and saddened to see that Bob Crane felt he was “normal” in light of his addiction to sex. He went through two marriages and one promising career just to videotape his one night stands (for years!) with his sleazy “friend”.
You should see the documentary on the DVD. It stated that had Bob lived, he would have gotten a piece of the back end to “Hogan’s Heros”. He would have benefited somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of the 90 million dollar profits.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed the movie. It’s been a while since I watched it, so I won’t make any specific comments. But I do recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.
But bear in mind that Bob Crane’s son, who runs bobcrane.com, hates the movie and calls it wildly inaccurate.
I saw it a few weeks ago and thought it was very good, especially the two leads. I imagine it would really be an eye-opener for people who don’t know anything about or aren’t aware that it is possible to have an addiction to sex.
That scene where they both starting masturbating while watching their movies was really creepy too.
It was also interesting that the movie took such an unambiguous position about the identity of the killer.
I can’t speak to the accuracy of the movie, although if what Scott Crane says is true, it makes it even more trashy. But to me, he’s definitely right about one thing: Schrader is so intent on being shocked at the depravity of their actions that it makes the movie ridiculous.
I thought Willem Dafoe was remarkable but Kinnear not so much- he tends to play Kinnear far more than any other character.
Among the more major inaccuracies the Crane family complains about:
-Bob and his wife had reconciled by the time of his death (according to Scott)
-Scott’s (adopted) full sister isn’t mentioned
-Kinnear’s hair is parted on the wrong side
-Crane wasn’t as innocent pre John Carpenter as the movie depicted but had been videotaping his one-nighters since the 1950s
I was surprised that they deleted the commentary twixt Klemperer and Clary. In case you didn’t watch it, (the actor playing) Robert Clary is commenting on how strange it makes him feel to have his concentration camp tattoo cosmetically concealed in order to play a POW. This leads to a comment about the oddity of so many Jews (Klemperer/Klink, Clary/LeBeau, Banner/Schulz and Askin/Burkhalter were all, in real life, Jews who fled Germany to escape the Nazis) in the series, to which (the actor playing) Klemperer comments “Who better to play Nazis than us Jews?”
The main thing I learned from the movie was how sleazy and kinky Richard Dawson was/is. Not surprising, but still odd.
Yeah, but we already knew Willem Dafoe was a good actor – the role may not have been a huge stretch for Kinnear (good-looking guy, kind of sleazily personable), but I thought he did a really good job of showing the arc of the personality changes, the descent into… whatever.
