Sex, Half-Truths and Videotape:
Auto Focus and Confessions of a Dangerous Mindby Thomas Doherty
Ever since the late 1940s, when the light of the cathode ray first dimmed the glow of the projection bulb, television has bedeviled and inspired Hollywood. Playing defense, Addison De Witt, the aloof theater critic in All About Eve (1950), sniffed that “television is nothing but auditions,” but even by then it was already becoming the featured attraction. Condescension and contempt abruptly switched to fear and loathing of the ever metastasizing competition, a cinematic sensibility that has proven surprisingly durable down through the decades, from A Face in the Crowd (1957) to Network (1976) to The Truman Show (1998). If in practice the relationship between the two media is lucrative synergy (with the movies as likely to be the audition for television as vice versa), in temperament the big screen still rankles at being dethroned by that pipsqueak in the living room.
In recent years, however, a new breed of TV-centric feature films has emerged to gaze less hysterically and more reflectively at the dreaded box, a self- (and other-) reflexive genre more in tune with the art house than the multiplex. Rather than lambasting television as part Orwell, part opium, these films accept video as the visual lingua franca of the motion-picture audience and then proceed to fiddle with the transmission signal. The prototype is Pleasantville (1998), Gary Ross's imaginative excursion through the video-hued past, a time-and-TV-travel fantasy whose main theme was less the superiority of the Nineties to the Fifties than the superiority of film to television. And just as no Saturday morning cartoon show or laugh-tracked series is too obscure for a big budget remake, no backstage story from the television archives falls beneath the radar of TV-centric cinema. Like straight to video features unaccountably blown up to 35mm format for saturation release, even the canceled and the cast-offs can grow up to be movies.
In this spirit, two C-list television personalities have lately received the full-on A-picture treatment: Bob Crane in Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus and Chuck Barris in George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Granted a media promotion (posthumous in one case, ex post facto in the other), the sitcom star and the game-show auteur get their respective hommages not on MSNBC’s Headliners and Legends or A&E’s Biography, but on the larger, celluloid screen, alongside Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison, and Gandhi.
The hit CBS sitcom and syndication evergreen Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971) is surely worthy of some sort of commemorative gesture. Maddeningly vivid, impossible to blot out, its dummkopf characters are imbedded in the reptile memory: the roly-poly see-no-evil Sergeant Schultz (“I know nothink!”), the bumbling, monocled camp commandant Colonel Klink (“Hoooh—gun!”), and the easygoing, insouciant Colonel Hogan himself, a role that an all-around all-American nice guy named Bob Crane fit into like a leather flight jacket. Away from the CBS cameras, Crane fit into another set of scenarios unmonitored by network standards and practices. In 1978, in a motel room in Tucson, AZ, his sleazy highlight reel climaxed when he was bludgeoned to death with an overdetermined murder weapon, a camera tripod.
As the film opens, Crane is mid-career in the mid-Sixties, a motor mouth disc jockey in Los Angeles, serving up drive-time chatter and rim shots from a drum kit. A churchgoing, station wagon driving family man, he has a nice home, nice kids, and nice wife Anne (Rita Wilson) of rare forbearance and cluelessness. Crane grabs the brass ring when he is cast in a television sitcom with a still jaw-dropping premise: in a fun-filled Nazi POW camp, zany antics ensue as plucky Allied flyers torment their Russian-front fearing captors. Siphoning the dark irony from Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1950) for spit-take slapstick, Hogan’s Heroes moved the goal posts of the vast wasteland into a zone beyond the pale. By the lights of Jackass and Joe Millionaire, the shock incited by a sanitized sitcom may seem quaint, but the show marked a tipping point in programming parameters. “In 1965, to its undying disgrace, CBS, the network which with Ed Murrow and Bill Shirer had so brilliantly chronicled the rise of Hitler's Germany, put on a weekly show called Hogan’s Heroes,” wrote the cultural historian David Halberstam in 1975, still seething at the “almost obscenely comic view of the Third Reich…on this uniquely mindless show.” (Poor Halberstam—he hadn’t seen nothing yet.)
Wisely, Auto Focus pauses to contemplate the moment. “Oh,” says Crane sarcastically when his agent (Ron Leibman) pitches the script. “These are the funny Nazis.” Appalled, his wife calls the show (anachronistically) “Holocaust comedy.” At a CBS publicity soiree, an entertainment reporter (Ed Begley) tricks Crane into an unflattering sound bite. “But you’re an entertainer yourself!,” pleads Crane. “I’m also a Jew,” he rasps. “Same difference,” shrugs Crane amiably.
But as if to confirm the wisdom of lowest common denominator programming, the show is a solid hit. Not an auteur known for his own zany antics, Schrader recreates the queasy milieu of the original: one of the signature markings of the TV-centric feature film is the spot-on but sardonic re-creation of the beneath-contempt original. “Self reflexive at last!,” exclaimed television critic David Marc about Saturday Night Live, the show that first mined the medium’s backlog for satiric gold. With Kurt Fuller as Werner Klemperer’s Klink, Lyle Kanouse as John Banner’s Schultz, and especially Michael Rodgers as Richard Dawson (playing him offstage as the unctuous host-to-be of Family Feud), Auto Focus executes some expert claim jumping on the video archives. When a hungover, hallucinating Crane meshes his two surreal lives into a Nazi-themed porn fantasy—with Schultz, Klink, and his girlfriend Hilda (Marla Bello) entwined in a group grope—some small measure of payoff is earned for all those wasted hours in re-rerun ennui. (Alas, little is heard from the cast member whose story is more surreal than a Bob Crane hallucination, namely Robert Clary [Christopher Neiman], who played the incongruous French POW LeBeau. An actual survivor of Buchenwald, Clary has recently penned a memoir with the bracing title From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes.)
Like all addicts, Crane starts off with the soft-core and progresses to the harder stuff: first hoarding stroke magazines and Polaroids, then frequenting strip clubs, and finally choreographing his own amateur porn videos. His enabler-cum-procurer is John “Carpy” Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), a video savant who peddles the first portable VTR units marketed by Sony. Primitive by today’s standards, the grainy black-and-white magnetic-tape images seemed miraculous in the benighted era of Three Network Hegemony, before the means of video production had been put in the hands of the people. A born pilot fish, Carpy latches tight on to Crane, using the actor’s star power to reel in partners for fourway sex romps. “We’re light years ahead of everyone!,” exults Carpy truthfully, delighted to be on the ground floor of a sexual-technological revolution. Carpenter thrives until the development of color videotape exposes his ocular deficiency: color blindness. (In an unconscionable civil-rights violation that will roil the cones and rods of the color-impaired, he is fired on the spot.)
When Hogan's Heroes ends its prime-time run, Crane is sentenced to the purgatory of dinner theater, a dreary moveable feast that at least expands the geography for swinger parties, strip joints, and motel-room trysts. As the swinging Sixties hobble into the coke snorting Seventies, the rake's lack of progress tracks the sexual zeitgeist from the airbrushed pages of Playboy to the full-frontal exposure of the mature sex trade. Strippers peel away their pasties to herald the upending of community standards, and a bored MC drones out the news: “Miss Kitty—now totally nude.”
Watching woefully from the sidelines as his client descends into celebrity palookaville, Crane’s agent counsels discretion—the suits at Disney might not want the star of Superdad (1976) collared by the vice squad—but the sex monkey on his back is insatiable. Soon the once-hot sitcom star is reduced to begging for a booking on Hollywood Squares—not the coveted Paul Lynde central square, but one of the outer squares. Yet—astonishingly—the lure of a celebrity name—even a washed-up, bottom-feeding celebrity—remains surefire sex bait; a cast of thousands lies ready to perform on cue for the Crane-Carpenter production team.
Like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), another biopic of an obsessive-compulsive, coauthored by Schrader, Bob Crane lacks a backstory that explains his psychosis. To be sure, hints are offered for the literal-minded. Perhaps a repressed Catholic upbringing motivates his penchant for marathon sexplay? The Crane family attends mass and listens raptly as a priest warns of the wages of sin. At another point, temporarily conscience-stricken, Crane seeks counsel from his hapless parish priest, but a comely fan distracts the penitent as the priest recites the party line about strip clubs being “occasions for sin.” (In the 1960s, the entire state of California qualified as an “occasion for sin.”)
Or perhaps the trauma of sordid family secrets lies at the root of the rutting? “I’m the good son!,” Crane bellows at one point. In truth, there is something forced and desperate about his aggressive congeniality, as if, like Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, he had the advice drummed into his head from an early age that the key to success in America is being not just liked but well-liked. Here the casting of a natural charmer like Greg Kinnear is pitch perfect. He plays Crane as a man beyond introspection, gliding through life happy as a clam and dumb as a rock, sporting a quick smile and a glib tongue for all, never able to turn the auto focus lens onto himself.
Or maybe those homoerotic vibes in his intense pairing with Carpy suggest a compulsive transference of unspeakable desire? “If I were a carpenter/and you were a lady,” Crane croons when he meets Carpy, as if expressing a secret wish. Maintaining one sexual hang-up, the priapic Crane angrily breaks off the partnership when Carpy gropes him during an orgy. “It was an orgy!,” protests the understandably befuddled Carpy. Later, when Crane insists that Carpy inspect a surgical enhancement, he is not talking about a nose job.
Catholic repression, family abuse, closeted homosexuality—in the end, each focus on Crane leads down a blind alley. Like Jake LaMotta’s rage, Bob Crane’s raging hormones are a tragic flaw, imbedded not explained.
If the Paul Schrader, who coauthored Raging Bull, refuses to open a window into Crane’s heart, or whatever organ, the Paul Schrader who wrote and directed Hardcore (1979) casts stern judgment on the man and his times. In that earlier excursion into the porn underworld, a Hustler billboard loomed over L.A. exhorting the community to “Think Pink.” Far from being seduced from the path of righteousness, Schrader eyed the rancid fleshpots of the Sodom on the Pacific with a disgust that oozed from every frame of Hardcore: the Midwest Dutch Reformist in the director, sometimes dormant, never totally lapses. Auto Focus scorns the vanities of the world and the things of the flesh with the stiff bluster of an Old Testament prophet. When man acquires the fruit of VTR knowledge, he is doomed to fall from grace: give these sinners Betamax equipment and soon they’ll be staging orgies, worshiping golden calves, and recording the debaucheries for playback. Unlike other directors who plunge into the netherworld of strip clubs and porn, who flaunt full-frontal nudity and acrobatic coupling, Schrader exposes the X-rated material without a glimmer of erotic titillation.
(A sidebar: to secure an R rating for the X-rated, or rather NC-17 rated, material on view, two brief snippets of video sex play have been digitally obscured in postproduction. The same ploy was used in Todd Solondz’s Storytelling for the same reason. Oddly, though, the effect in Auto Focus is not intrusive, not a censorious violation of the artist’s right to show and the audience’s right to see, but a reminder of broken commandments and looming retribution. Besides, the DVD awaits.)
The other leitmotif of Auto Focus, à la Boogie Nights, is the media transition from the high-gloss luster of 35mm (well, 16mm) film to the cheesy quality of low-def video. A clever title sequence marvelously captures the late classical Hollywood style: in rhythm to a brassy, period-sounding tune (“Snap”) sung by retro lounge singer Buster Poindexter, a collage of mid-1960s iconography imitates the hues of that brief post-beat, pre-psychedelic interlude in American cinema, before baby boomer day-glo redesigned the national wallpaper. Deteriorating in register, resolution, and focus, from studio sheen to video grime, the color palette and visual look of the film reflects Crane’s degenerating career arc and personal life.
So much eros can end only in thanatos, and when the debt comes due for the wages of sin, the judgment can play only like divine retribution. Yet Bob Crane’s real deadly sin is not a biblical but a postmodern transgression, not his unbridled lust but his unbridled lust for videotaping himself in the throes of lust, a sin of the eye not the flesh. “A day without sex is a day wasted” is the motto of Crane and Carpy, but only documentary proof of the day’s work makes the day complete. Appropriately, a celluloid shot of a video consummation is the most haunting image in the film: a creepy tableau of the two men, sitting before a blurry sex video, masturbating in tandem—a corrosive metaphor for a sex-mad, image-obsessed culture of mutual masturbation, where any idiot can be a director, the autoerotic auteur of his own destruction.
Set in relief against Auto Focus, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind may, or may not, move up the television food chain, but as a contestant for psycho-biopic-analysis, game-show producer-host Chuck Barris would surely hold his own in a therapy group with Bob Crane. Based on Barris’s delusional 1984 ‘unauthorized autobiography’ and stylishly mounted by first-time director George Clooney, the film chronicles the life of another repressed Cold War baby who seeks financial success, frequent sex, and personal validation via the airwaves. Yet where Crane is vapidly genial, Barris is actively grating. “He’s a good guy, even if he is a prick,” a woman observes of Barris, getting it right the second time.
In New York, in 1981, with his shows canceled and his brain fried, amidst the symbolic wreckage of a garbage-strewn hotel room, the catatonic, clinically depressed Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell, himself quite game in a thankless role) stands naked, mumbling, before the blue light of a television screen. While an unimpressed maid vacuums around the human clutter, a flat, nasal voice-over resolves to relate in flashback the “cautionary tale” of an unwashed, washed-up master of the game-show universe. Competing with the sedated voice-over to comment on the action à la Reds are real-life fellow travelers such as Dick Clark, Dating Game host Jim Lange, Gong Show panelist Jaye P. Morgan, and Gong Show regulars Gene-Gene the Dancing Machine and the Unknown Comic. One might say they make up a Geek Chorus.
Even as a young sprite, Barris was mixing con artistry and behind-the-curtain surprises by telling a female playmate that his private parts taste like strawberry. Clearly destined for a career in network programming, he scores a gig as an NBC page and is soon scoring big with pretty NBC pages. Barris and his lifelong, long-suffering soul-mate Penny (Drew Barrymore) meet cute when a naked Barris, hungry after banging her roommate, raids the refrigerator, making this the second time in the first act that Clooney has placed his leading man nude before a household appliance. Already a swinging Sixties kind of gal, Penny confides that among her platoons of multiethnic lovers she has yet to nail a Jew. Romance blossoms.
In between nasal whining and bar fights, Barris secures a position as a low-level executive at ABC, where his main job is to keep an eye on American Bandstand host Dick Clark, then riding out the backfire of the payola scandals. Inspired by the quick-buck music muse, Barris makes his first contribution to American culture by penning a tune called “Palisades Park,” recorded by one Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon, also a one-hit wonder. (Historians of payola suspect that this ungolden oldie was itself nudged up the charts with greased palms.)
So far, Chuck Barris is just another small-screen version of Sammy Glick: on the make, narcissistic but insecure, brimming with bottled-up rage and low-concept ideas. However, while hustling to sell a pilot to ABC, a game show with the unlikely premise that a pretty girl asking three bachelors suggestive questions will out-Nielsen Jeopardy and The Match Game, Barris is approached by a mysterious, well-dressed stranger named Jim Byrd (George Clooney) who recruits him to work as an assassin for the CIA. “I’m not killing people—my future’s in television,” he protests, but being in something of a hiatus career-wise, he shrugs and enlists. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind henceforth proceeds on two channels—Barris the ABC hit machine, Barris the CIA hit man.
To adapt this folderol for the screen, Charlie Kaufman must have seemed the perfect amanuensis: a delusional screenwriter adapting a delusional memoirist. The mind behind Being John Malkovich (1999) and, in collaboration with his imaginary twin bother Donald, Adaptation (2002), Kaufman takes a (moderately) more conventional path to adaptation here, rejecting the loopy, deconstruction work of commercial mind transference and doppelgänger screenwriters for a straight-faced account of the mock schizophrenia of an unreliable narrator. Yet however fresh the device might have been in Barris’s autobiography, after A Beautiful Mind (2001) only the dimmest spectator will fail to realize that George Clooney’s CIA handler occupies the Ed Harris role as a fantasy self, the projection of a less than beautiful and hardly dangerous mind. “I know what hand you jerk off with,” says the all-seeing, all-knowing agent, yoking Byrd’s superego to Barris’s id. Barris may well have killed thirty-three men, as he claims, but only by making appalled television viewers choke on their Cheetos.
Like Auto Focus, Confessions revels in copycat simulations of ur-bad television. Both The Dating Game (1965-73) and The Newlywed Game (1966-74) thrived by coaxing salacious remarks out of heterosexual courtship rituals (‘If I were an ice cream cone, how would you lick me?’) and conjugal relations (‘Where is the most unusual place you and your husband have ever made whoopee?’).
The outtakes—some reenacted, some apparently real—are hilarious, but the film’s funniest bit, a priceless visual gag, required Clooney to call in some serious markers—a slow pan across the triptych line-up on The Dating Game, comprised of Bachelor #1 (Brad Pitt), Bachelor #2 (Matt Damon), and Bachelor #3 (the schnook the girl picks).
In voice-over, Barris sneers that The Newlywed Game was built on the premise that couples would rat each other out for a new refrigerator, but as always the essential appliance is television: no humiliation is too demeaning, no intimacy too private, that it will not be bartered in trade for the vital oxygen of the airwaves. Unlike the video-struck protagonists of The King of Comedy (1983) and To Die For (1995), Barris’s game show contestants are not so deluded as to imagine stardom, or even fifteen minutes of fleeting fame: they just want to feel the warm glow of the cathode rays for a brief shining moment.
The Gong Show (1976-80), Barris’s magnum opus and obit lead, made The Dating Game look like Masterpiece Theatre. While enduring a series of dreadful auditions (shades of Addison De Witt), he is struck with an epiphany: why struggle to find good talent when bad talent is cheap and plentiful? Elbowing his way in front of the camera, “Chuckie Baby” becomes the top-hatted, cane-twirling, mad-as-a-hatter ringmaster to a circus of misfits, wannabes, and semicelebs. Again, the contestants embrace ridicule not for the grand prize lure of $516.32 (or $712.05 for the prime-time version), but, like Crane and Carpy’s sex partners, for the simple pleasure of being screwed on television.
Though Hogan's Heroes was attacked as a historical obscenity, Barris’s freak shows were condemned even more harshly as harbingers of a wider cultural plague. (“Possibly the most bizarre program to air on American television in recent years,” wrote television historians Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh of The Gong Show in 1988: ponder that statement.) Even a lithesome Playmate Barris encounters at the Playboy mansion finds him déclassé. Unlike Hogan's Heroes, Barris’s oeuvre, a nonnarrative series, has no syndication life to speak of, but his legacy is all around the dial: in the reality shows built less on survival than exposure, in the talk shows where guests bare their souls, and in the tabloid zoo were guests bare their bodies and invite the abuse of the MC. As much as any television auteur, Barris helped facilitate the late twentieth-century breakdown of public and private spheres in American culture, a cornerstone of bourgeois life since the eighteenth century.
Meanwhile, in his hit-man persona, Barris meets a mysterious, badly dressed femme fatale (Julia Roberts) and a psychotic hit man (Rutger Hauer). To help him juggle his two careers, winners of The Dating Game are spirited off to Cold War locales, with Barris along as chaperon, the perfect cover. When the KGB captures him in East Berlin, he is traded back to the U.S.A. for—Bachelor #3. It all connects.
As a director, actor-heartthrob Clooney exhibits the first timer’s need to brandish his chops, afraid that to let up in the razzmatazz is to make the film stall and sputter out. Cribbing from Steven Soderbergh, who directed Clooney in Out of Sight (1998) and Ocean's Eleven (2001) and who used the technique to much fanfare in Traffic (2000), Clooney and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel roll out a rich sampling of film grains for different registers of action/reality: video-tainted, black and whitish, color, and (in a nod to the south of the border action in Traffic) bleached-out yellow for a Mexican interlude. An intriguing extratextual undertone to the film is the attraction of a serene superstar like Clooney to a neurotic loon like Barris, almost as if Tom Cruise had selected Carrot Top for the subject of his first feature film. Perhaps Clooney’s long apprenticeship in the television wasteland before his breakthrough in the oasis of ER engendered a sympathy for the fate of the game-show guru. There but for the grace of Crichton go he, a Hollywood square, not a Hollywood god.
Yet for all its visual inventiveness and game-show zest, the film can’t conceal that its two-track mind has a one-joke premise. Like Barris’s signature show, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind wears thin after a couple of acts. Well before the coda, when the real Chuck Barris—gray, wizened, a gleam still in his eye—looks into the camera, one has been longing for Jaye P. Morgan or Rex Reed or Jamie Farr, or someone, to get up and bang the gong.
As usual, even in the new TV-centric cinema, when the big screen plays parasite and feeds off the small screen, it prefers to cut the host down to size.
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