LA Weekly pieces on Auto Focus
John Powers talks to director Paul Schrader about Auto Focus, the Bob Crane movie which opens today in some cities.
You know, there were no dark nights of the soul for Bob Crane. It was very hard to go that deeply into him. It couldn't be The Lost Weekend. It couldn't even be Leaving Las Vegas. You had a glib, kind of clueless guy, so you had to get a glib actor. If I had hired someone like John Cusack, it would've been a much different movie. It would've been, Let's go to this dark place together and have a dark night of the soul together. With Greg [Kinnear] it's, Let's pretend we're normal.
LA Weekly also has a review of Auto Focus by Ella Taylor, which includes this questionable line about Hogan's Heroes: "The show, a smash hit set in a World War II POW camp, was symptomatic of the chipper superficiality of both the new medium and the period it reflected." First, calling TV a "new medium" in the late 1960s would be like calling the Internet a "new medium" in 2010. Second, was 1965-1971 really a period of "chipper superficiality" in American culture? Wasn't there a war going on then or something? (This entry edited by Daze because the original wording was unnecessarily mean.)
