This June 29 we will mark 40 years since the murder of Hogan’s Heroes television star, Bob Crane. Crane was a successful leading man on the small screen, and the conservative head of his small town, American family. The only thing that seemed odd about the Crane clan was that dad was famous for making people laugh on television. No harm there.

But Bob Crane lived a double life: TV star/family man in the public eye, and sex addict/amateur pornographer away from the set and his family. I might post more about Crane at the official anniversary of his death this summer, but I’m posting about Crane’s dark life today because his son has just released a new book illuminating his father’s long shadows and attempting to cast some light on Crane’s still-unsolved murder. Here’s the word from the Daily Mail…

‘The red light was always on in my dad’s makeshift film processing lab,’ writes Robert Crane in his riveting account of his father’s very secret and sordid lifestyle in Crane: Sex, Celebrity and My Father’s Unsolved Murder, published by University Press of Kentucky…

He spent his ‘off-duty’ time developing hundreds of photographs of the actresses and Playboy Playmates who were always stopping by the set. Word was out that the Hogan’s set was the place to market your wares if you were young, shapely, and of the female persuasion.

All the kink ended on June 29, 1978, when Victoria Berry, Crane’s co-star on Beginner’s Luck, ran screaming from the TV star’s apartment, unit 132A of the Winfield Apartments in Scottsdale. Crane’s body was found lying on its right side atop a queen-sized bed, clad only in boxer shorts and wearing a wrist watch.

An electrical cord was fastened tightly around his neck and a pillow stood vertically at the top of his head.

Two parallel gashes were above and behind the left side of his head that left a fan of blood across the ceiling, the wall behind the top of the bed and the nightstand lamp. Human tissue was on the wall; the bed sheet and pillowcase were soaked with blood.

Watch the documentary Murder in Scottsdale for a deep dive into Crane’s dark side, and the investigation of his still unsolved murder…

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Jounalist William T. Vollmann has a reputation for edgy writing: He’s smoked crack with hookers in San Francisco, marched with the mujahideen in Afghanistan during their war with Russia in the ’80′s and covered the Bosnian War in the ’90′s. Vollmann is no shrinking violet, but is he a domestic terrorist?

In a recent NPR story, Vollman reveals that a Freedom of Information Act informed him that the FBI had been watching him for years — he was even listed as a suspect in the Unabomber case. It’s an odd story that all began when Vollmann became associated with the controversial photographer Jock Sturges, and it’s a cautionary tale about how America’s confusion about art versus pornography can have far-reaching implications in the hands of an inept bureaucracy.

Sturges and Vollmann had been in contact in 1990 when the photographer had inquired whether Vollmann might be available to write an introduction to his latest coffee table book. Sturges’ photographs feature nude children and adolescents in non-sexual settings. Controversy about Sturges’ work led to an FBI raid and info on Sturges’ computer led the agency to Vollmann.

The NPR story tells the rest of the decades-long cat-and-befuddled-mouse game that followed, and it speaks volumes about the energized sexual paranoia that Americans often feel around the subject of children and sexuality.

Clearly the sexual abuse of children and child pornography are abhorrent. That said, Sturges work has consistently been defended in court: The 1990 raid failed to get an indictment from a San Francisco grand jury and, in 1998, when both Tennessee and Alabama tried to get Sturges’ books classified as pornography, both cases were unsuccessful. The fact that the photographer’s images regularly feature groups of siblings and their parents in family portraits seemed to make no difference to the FBI who classified the mere association with the photographer to be a damning mark against Vollmann.

As a journalist who regularly writes about visual art, this is always a frustrating issue. The nude is art’s fundamental subject, yet American puritanism often insists on infringing on creative expression. We all have birthday suit portraits adorning the pages of our parent’s photo albums and in the age of the internet, Facebook and Instagram are awash with images of bare-bottomed kids just being kids. A nude photograph of a child or an adolescent isn’t sexual in and of itself, and cases like this only prove that pornography is often found in the eyes of the beholder regardless of the images they behold.

Listen to the full NPR interview here.

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“As soon as moving cameras were invented people began using them to make pornographic films…”

So starts Taboo: The Beginning of Erotic Cinema – a one hour documentary that examines the earliest days of the dirty movie biz, tracing the industry up to the age of the VHS tape. As the quote suggests, Taboo argues that nude/erotic/pornographic films were some of the first expressions created with moving picture technology. But, that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with porn’s early adoption of video, cable, digital and the Internet to produce and distribute their goods to wider and wider audiences at lower and lower costs.

While not a porno movie, Taboo is still full of enough moaning nudity to be NSFW.

Read about another sexy/weird film pioneer at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia.

Stay Awake!

Joe Nolan