If every cloud has a silver lining, the opposite is also true. And many of the best filmmakers have scratched that lining, finding sleaze beneath the shine.
Paul Schrader may be the first to use the pre-fab sterility of Hollywood sitcoms as the pristine backdrop for degradation and ugliness. If so, it strikes such a primal chord, you wonder why no one has thought of it before.
Sitcoms are the unreal perfect world with which we've all grown up, a world of exemplary false families and fake lives that shame our own. What a revelation, then, is Bob Crane, the sexaholic ex-deejay whose entire worth was tied up in being Col. Hogan, the glib star of Hogan's Heroes, the improbable hit '60s sitcom about life in a Nazi PoW camp.
While presenting the facade of presentability and wholesomeness, the married-with-children Crane carried on a double life, trolling for women and photographing them having sex. Later he hooked up with an enabler, a Sony salesman named John Carpenter who would lend his hi-tech video expertise to Crane's compulsions. The duo became de facto pioneers in the industry that would be home video porn.
Carpenter would remain Crane's crony until Crane's murder in 1978. Carpenter was tried for the murder and acquitted.
A sea of sunshine, formica, chrome and pastel set against a creepy Angelo Badalamenti score, Schrader's L.A. is a fantasy, like an amped American Graffiti. He gets marks for verisimilitude for his re-creation of Hogan's Heroes -- particularly Kurt Fuller as Werner Klemperer as Col. Klink the camp commandant. Each time he utters that drawn-out, rising "Ho-ga-a-an?" it elicits a Pavlovian laugh from pop-cult savvy audiences.
Greg Kinnear shares a quality from Crane's mantra, "I'm a likable guy." And he flexes his dimples freely as the kind of gladhander who excels in a world of surfaces, though his performance may be lower key than the real guy.
The centrepiece of the film, however, is the dance between Crane and Carpenter -- whose relationship shifts with the inevitable decline in Crane's fortunes from sitcom star to dinner theatre. (There's a resonant scene for Canadians, re-creating Crane's "slumming" appearance on Celebrity Cooks with Bruno Gerussi). At first, Kinnear's Crane is a tentative participant in the hunt with Carpenter, then taking control and demanding privilege. Willem Dafoe's performance, in turn, is reminiscent of Eric Roberts' Paul Snider in Star 80, turned down two or three notches. One scene in particular -- Crane and Carpenter sitting side-by-side on a couch, masturbating as they watch themselves on video -- underlines their downward spiral.
It is, in the end, a fable. It seems unlikely that Crane was the innocent falling into temptation that the film paints him to be. But he's far more interesting as a symbol than as a documentary subject. Even a sitcom actor would understand that.
(This film is rated R)
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