A great movie that is very difficult movie to recommend because of its subject matter, Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus (2002), the story of TV-star Bob Crane, is another of Schrader’s portraits of a man whose self-destruction we watch with admiration for the writing and unease at what we’re seeing. It’s a combination of The Lost Weekend, Reefer Madness, and Sunset Blvd. with Willem Defoe at his creepiest. But it’s much more than perfect recreations of Hogan’s Heroes or Greg Kinnear’s incredible performance: it’s a movie about the power of movies and images and of how nothing seems real until it is filmed—an idea we see all the time as people hold up their phones to record their vacations, kids’ sporting events, or office birthday parties. It’s a shocking film, but Schrader seems to have been as shocked to make it as we are to see it.
Auto Focus is based on Robert Graysmith’s The Murder of Bob Crane. If you are interested in the details of Crane’s murder—which remains a cold case—you may want to read John Hook’s Who Killed Bob Crane? The Final Close-Up. A more traditional biography of Crane that seeks to tell more than what Schrader does in Auto Focus was published in 2015.
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