Paul Schrader, chronicler of America's sordid margins, has found the perfect cloak for his obsessions: a bio-pic of Bob Crane, a wholesome 1960s TV star-turned-sex addict, writes Michael Dwyer.
Prefaced by apt retro credits, Auto Focus, the factually based new Paul Schrader movie, opens in the nascent Swinging Sixties, when Bob Crane (played by Greg Kinnear) graduates from radio talk show presenter to TV star as the Bilko-esque conniver of the wartime sitcom, Hogan's Heroes. The year is 1965, and Crane participates in the new sexual liberalism of the era with unbridled enthusiasm, preserving his exploits on the new-fangled video equipment provided by a sleazy Sony technical wizard (Willem Dafoe) who becomes his co-conspirator in swinging.
A married Catholic with three children, Crane remains blithely indifferent to the problems his sex addiction creates in his family life, and the damage it does to his image as a mainstream popular star. This makes him an ideal - and fascinating - subject for dissection in the tradition of Schrader's trademark flawed and conflicted anti-heroes in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, American Gigolo, Mishima and Affliction.
"I love people who do the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons," Schrader says. "The interesting thing about Bob Crane is that all his life he wanted to be the nice guy, he didn't want to offend anyone, and all the whole there's this tail growing behind him that he's trying to ignore."
Men with tails growing behind them have been recurring characters in Paul Schrader's work as a screenwriter and a director. Unlike most directors who discovered movies in their childhood, Schrader did not see his first film until he was in his late teens.
Born in 1946, he was raised in a rigidly puritan environment by Calvinist parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was not allowed to drink, smoke or go to dances or movies until he left home at 17 to study theology at Calvin College in Michigan. Even Disney movies were prohibited in his childhood.
It's not that an individual movie is bad, his mother would tell him. It's the industry that's corrupt. To pay to see a single film was to support that industry.
Paul Schrader started to support that industry at the first possible opportunity, spending most of his weekends off from Calvin College by going to New York and watching movies. While taking a summer film study course at Columbia University in New York, he met the influential film critic, Pauline Kael, who helped him to secure a place in the film school at UCLA, where many of his contemporaries studied, including his subsequent regular collaborator, Martin Scorsese, who shared Schrader's preoccupation with the themes of guilt and redemption.
Bob Crane's hit sitcom, Hogan's Heroes, was making its mark on the TV ratings while Schrader was at college. "At the time I was more involved in the counter-culture and in demonstrations against the Vietnam War," Schrader says, "so that show was way off my ken. It floated out there somewhere between being unfunny and offensive."
However, over three decades later, when he was presented with the opportunity to make a film about Crane's life and death, Schrader was irresistibly drawn to the subject. "I was interested that it chronicles the evolving notion of American male sexual identity in the critical years from 1965 to 1978," he says, "and that it dealt with a male folie a deux, in which two men get involved in conduct they probably would not have considered doing on their own.
"There was also the theme of corrosive effect of celebrity, even minor celebrity, on both the fan and the celebrity himself. Bob Crane was enabled and allowed to pursue this kind of destructive behaviour because he was a minor TV star. It's part of how we feed celebrities and what we expect of them. The other thing that interested me was the desensitising effect of an addiction, in this case sexual addiction. Crane becomes progressively clueless about how he hurts people and about how selfish he is."
For all the social and attitudinal changes over the intervening decades, not much has changed when it comes to the crucial matter of image for public figures, as has been vividly demonstrated by the destructive impact of Robert Downey Jr's off-screen behaviour on his once hugely promising career as an actor.
"What Crane was doing would not be nearly as scandalous today," Schrader responds. "However, it would still have cost him his job, because it would have been regarded as tasteless and tacky and not something a TV network would want to be associated with." Schrader accepts that he has to surrender a substantial degree of artistic freedom when he chooses to explore the experiences of real-life people such as Bob Crane, or in his earlier films, Patty Hearst and Yukio Mishima.
"I find I have to serve two masters," he says. "One, I have an obligation to history, to do the best I can to find out what happened and say that, even though you never entirely can find that out. On the other hand you have an obligation to drama - to an hour and 45 minutes that has a theme, a narrative arc and a progression of events.
"If you come to the point where you have to sacrifice one for the other - where, in order to be factual, you have to tell a boring story, or if you want to tell a good story you have to distort history - then you don't make that film. You should just walk away from it. But if you can find a peaceful place where a drama and history can meet, then you're okay because both are working."
One of the most complicated aspects of the film was in dealing with Bob Crane's murder in a Scottsdale, Arizona, motel room in 1978. Although the crime has never been solved, Schrader's film - on which Bob Crane Jr served as a consultant and technical adviser - offers a clear point of view on who killed Crane. That view ought not be revealed here.
"The character I suggest did it is the right fit, I believe," Schrader says. "The Scottsdale police had the same theory, but unfortunately, they didn't bring much evidence to the murder trial, and the jury was out in 20 minutes. If I had been on that jury, I would have acquitted, too, on the basis of that trial. But I couldn't show someone smashing Bob's head in, because, who knows?
"Maybe some time next year, some guy, maybe some mobster, will be dying and will admit that he did it. The problem is that Crane was involved with so many women. At the time Scottsdale was a Mob town and there is a theory that Crane could easily have become involved with the wrong woman and someone wanted to pay him back. The character I suggest as the murderer is not just the best fit historically, but also the best fit dramatically."
One of the key elements that makes Auto Focus so compelling is the imaginative casting of Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane. Kinnear, like Crane, had been a chat show host before he made his mark as in actor in movies, among them Sabrina, Nurse Betty, and As Good As It Gets, which earned Kinnear an Oscar nomination.
"Greg had been approached to play Bob Crane before I became involved with the film," Schrader says. "When I heard that Greg had expressed an interest in the part, I thought about it for about five seconds and I realised it was a great idea. I never looked elsewhere. I never had second thoughts. Greg had all those Bob Crane things - the hip thing, the ironic aspect, the likeable guy - and that's not easy. You either have it or you don't. You cannot teach an actor that, and I'm not very good at that stuff, and I never have been.
"Now I am pretty good at taking an actor out into the deep end and working him out there. So I realised that this could actually work - Greg could protect me at the shallow end and I would protect him at the deep end, and we could give this whole stretch to the character. And even though I had trepidations and anxieties, that's pretty much how it turned out."
Schrader was contractually obliged to deliver a film that would receive an R (Restricted) rating from the US ratings board, the MPAA, but this proved easier said than done. "It took a while," he says with a sigh of weary resignation. "We had to go back to the ratings board five times. It's a mysterious process because they never really quite tell you what to do. You have to guess their intentions, which is what drags it out. Then certain words start to come up over and over, like thrust - 'They began thrusting' - and I figured that anything over two-and-a-half thrusts becomes a problem.
"I was sort of a fool because while I was working on the film, I was basing a lot of what I could do on what I had seen on cable. But you can't play that kind of cable material in the cinema and get an R rating - series such as Sex and the City and Six Feet Under would qualify for an NC17 rating, which is much more restrictive. So now cinema films are more conservative than cable."
Schrader's next film will be the prequel, Exorcist: The Beginning, which he took over when the original director, John Frankenheimer, died before filming began. "Bit by bit I'm beginning to make it my own," Schrader says. He has been shooting the film in Morocco and at the Cinecitta studios in Italy.
"It's a precursor to the original, going back to the Father Merrin character when he was a young man in the 1940s, during the war and afterwards. I was originally going to do it with Liam Neeson as Father Merrin, but then Liam started to get weak knees about it, so I've replaced him with Stellan Skarsgaard. It deals with Lankester Merrin's first meeting with the devil and when he realises that God has called him to be an exorcist."
Clearly, this is the movie that offers Paul Schrader his definitive opportunity to deal with a character who has a tail growing behind him.
Auto Focus opens at selected cinemas on Friday.