Bob Crane - Biographical Film Auto Focus (2002)

Biographical Film Auto Focus (2002)

Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 film Auto Focus, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Greg Kinnear as Crane. The film, based on Robert Graysmith's book The Murder of Bob Crane: Who Killed the Star of Hogan's Heroes?, portrays Crane as a happily married, church-going family man and popular Los Angeles disc jockey who suddenly becomes a Hollywood celebrity, and subsequently declines into sex addiction.

Crane's son, Scotty, bitterly attacked the film as being inaccurate. In an October 2002 piece he wrote on the movie, Scotty said that his father was not a regular church-goer and had only been to church three times in the last dozen years of his life, which included his own funeral. There is no evidence that Crane engaged in BDSM and director Paul Schrader told Scotty that the BDSM scene was based on his own personal experience (while writing Hardcore), not Crane's. Scotty also claims that his father and John Carpenter did not become close friends who socialized together until 1975. Also, Crane was a sex addict long before he became a star, who started recording his sexual encounters at least as early as 1956.

Scotty and his mother had shopped a rival script for a Bob Crane movie biography. The script, alternately entitled F-Stop and Take Off Your Clothes and Smile. The spec script was written up in Variety by columnist Army Archerd, but interest in Scotty's script ceased after Auto Focus was announced.

At the time of the article denouncing Auto Focus, Scotty Crane was operating the Web site www.bobcrane.com, which included a paid section that featured outtakes from his father's pornographic films and videos. It also included the autopsy report, which, according to Scotty, disproved the allegation that his father had a penile implant. The site, renamed the "Bob Crane The Official Web Site", is now more sedate and does not include controversial material.