Last night, the local PBS affiliate, KQED, showed a Joe Mankiewicz flick I'd never seen or heard of: People Will Talk. Had Cary Grant and Finlay Currie in it and it was rather funny in a strange kind of way. 1951: a woman who's pregnant and unmarried, and -- contra Hayes Office -- she's unpunished at the end of the film, too. A hilarious send-up of HUAC style witch hunts with Hume Cronyn as a creepy medical professor. After that was How the West Was Won in letterboxed widescreen. The two Cinerama seams plainly visible throughout, though they were usually hidden by conveniently placed vertical objects like fence posts or trees. Just an artifact of a silly technological anti-TV innovation like all the stuff thrown at the camera in 3D movies from the fifties. Weird, end of the western as a genre blockbluster flick.

This morning, though, there was an article on Bob Crane. Col. Hogan and his weird amateur porn collection. Paul Schrader's made a biopic on Crane, and now the two half-brother sons of Bob Crane are duelling with one another about paternal penis size and whether Crane was a lonely guy or one heck of a swinger. They're both named Robert Scott Crane, too. The younger one, Scotty, was a shock jock in Seattle. "Cranes in Seattle? Moo." The story of the making of Auto Focus is probably going to be more interesting than the flick itself. Hogan's Heros itself was one strange trip. Robert Clary, who played Corporal LeBeau, was actually in a concentration camp during the war. Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink) and John Banner (Sgt. Schultz) were both Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria respectively.