WASHINGTON - Bob Crane - handsome with a knowing smirk and an easy manner - seemed like a wholesome, low-key, instantly likeable actor, perfect for family viewing on the living-room TV.

In truth, he was nothing of the sort. He was a womanizing philanderer with an insatiable libido, whose sexual practices could charitably be described as deviant, and who compounded the perversity by amassing a huge collection of homemade pornography, starring himself, his friends and any woman he could persuade to disrobe. When he was found bludgeoned to death in a Scottsdale, Ariz., hotel room in 1978, many who knew him were not entirely surprised.

Is it any wonder Paul Schrader decided to make his most recent movie, Auto Focus, about him?

"Underneath what was really a conventional bio picture, I saw a very interesting character study," says the 56-year-old director, whose career has more often than not focused on people who are not what they seem. "I saw his story as kind of an American, midlife, TV-star, heterosexual version of a movie I liked called Prick Up Your Ears."

Makes sense. That 1987 film, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina, told the story of playwright Joe Orton, whose long-term relationship with a homosexual lover far less charismatic and famous than he ends tragically. The parallels to the Bob Crane depicted in Auto Focus are hard to miss: Like Orton, Crane picked up an ordinary-Joe sycophant (video technician John Carpenter, played by Willem Dafoe) who eventually tires of living in the great one's shadow and ends the relationship with a grisly exclamation point.

But Auto Focus is more than a nod to an admired film. It fits with the rest of the Schrader canon: Few writers or directors have gotten so much mileage out of characters living their lives in denial.

Think of the roles played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, Dafoe in Light Sleeper, Nastassja Kinski in Cat People, Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast, Nick Nolte in Affliction or Skeet Ulrich in Touch - all films written or directed by Schrader. In each, the story hinges on the conflict between who the characters would like to be, and who they are - or, at least, how they're perceived.

A fatal flaw

"I am drawn to these studies of contradictory behavior, people who do the wrong things for the right reasons, or vice-versa," Schrader says over drinks in a Georgetown restaurant. "People who say one thing and then do another; people whose motivations are clouded, even in their own minds, who somehow just don't get it."

Yet, Schrader emphasizes, there's a difference between most of those characters and his version of Bob Crane, whose delusions continue to the bitter end. "Usually in my films, those characters finally get it at some point. But I don't think Bob ever gets it."

That's a fatal flaw to the director, whose strict Calvinist upbringing - he didn't see his first movie until he was in college - is reflected in his choice of preferred subject material. In the universe according to Paul Schrader, the greatest sin is to ignore who you are, to not have a firm sense of what you should be doing.

"Once you were raised with a real sense of moral purpose," he says, hesitating for a moment to ensure that the words come out right, "that you were put on this Earth for a reason and that there will be an accounting at the end of your life of how you have spent your life ... if that's underneath everything, it tends to keep you from doing things that you think are a waste of time."

That mindset also has shaped his career. Although always provocative, his films have never made big money (excepting, perhaps, his work with Martin Scorsese, although not even those - Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ - have proven box-office gold). He hasn't worked with a major studio in over two decades (although that will change with his next project, a prequel to The Exorcist).

Schrader's a niche filmmaker, and proud of it. "For the most part, I have made the choice to try and stay in that realm and make those kinds of films," he says. "I did a film for HBO once [Witch Hunt], it was kind of interesting and fun. But at the end of it, I said, 'Well, that was a year wasted.' I didn't feel that I was using my talents to the best of my ability."

Conversely, that philosophy suggests Schrader believes his other films do utilize his talents to their fullest, and that belief gives him a sense of confidence that can border on the cocky. Determined to get the word out on Auto Focus, he wrote his own review of the film and posted it on the Internet - not realizing his e-mail address would be attached, thus blowing his cover.

Arguing with son

He's also in the midst of verbal warfare with Crane's younger son, Scotty, a Seattle-based record producer, who insists that Auto Focus is garbage. In an Internet posting, Scotty Crane - whose Web site sells access to his father's pornography - refers to the movie as "a theatrical disaster."

One of his chief complaints: that the film has Crane (played by Greg Kinnear) boast about having had a penile implant. His father didn't have and didn't need one, Scotty Crane says. He's even posted a picture on his site to prove the point.

Schrader, however, dismisses the younger Crane's criticism, insisting he's a frustrated film writer himself who was hawking his own version of his father's story. (Scotty Crane did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview.)

As for the dispute over the implant, Schrader says it misses the point. "I don't know whether it's really true that he had it done or not. What was interesting to me was that he told Carpenter he had - that nobody disputes, because he told other people.

"I mean, what's more interesting, having a penile implant or telling your pal that you had one?"