In bringing Irving’s storybook classic to life, Coppola tackles the material with antic glee and serves up engaging, warmhearted whimsy. His direction is spry and imaginative, and, though he is a stylist, it is evident that he cares about actors and performance—Harry Dean Stanton, Talia Shire, and John C. Ryan could not be better. “Rip Van Winkle,” in short, is an unqualified artistic success. Happily, the Faerie Tale Theater TV series has not sunk without a trace, as so many television series do. The telefilms in the series were released on video and DVD in 2002. The most prominent filmmaker to direct a segment of the series is clearly Francis Ford Coppola.
With the box-office triumph of Peggy Sue Got Married, plus the well-received “Rip Van Winkle,” Coppola was in a position to bargain with the studio moguls to do a film he had wished to make for several years. As early as 1975 he had mentioned in interviews that he wanted to film the life of the innovative automobile designer Preston Tucker, but he could not find the necessary financing. Finally, in 1986, an independent producer came forward and offered to back Tucker: The Man and His Dream. It was none other than Coppola’s erstwhile protégé, George Lucas, whose professional relationship with Coppola dated back to the earliest days of American Zoetrope.
11
The Disenchanted
Tucker: The Man and His Dream and New York Stories
A good salesman could sell bubblegum in the lockjaw ward at Bellevue.
—Seth Davis, a stockbroker in the film Boiler Room
Preston Tucker, the maverick automobile inventor who was the subject of Coppola’s biographical film, first came to Coppola’s attention when, as a child of eight, he saw the first Tucker automobile on display in 1948. He never forgot the experience and decided to make a movie about the flamboyant inventor many years later.
Preston Tucker was born in suburban Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1903. He got his start in the auto industry by selling used cars. By 1935 he was entering racing cars in the Indianapolis 500, sponsored by none other than auto tycoon Henry Ford. During the Second World War, Tucker operated the Ypsilanti Machine and Tool Company, which had several profitable defense contracts. He designed an assault vehicle that had a cruising speed of 150 mph, but military officials nixed it as going too fast. The gun turret he designed for the combat car was utilized on bombers.
At the end of World War II, Tucker decided the time was right to produce the revolutionary auto he had had in mind for some years. In 1946 he organized the Tucker Corporation, with former executives from Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors on the governing board. Tucker mounted an advertising campaign to herald the Tucker automobile as “the car of tomorrow, today.”
“Thanks to World War II,” says Roger White, a specialist in the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Transportation, “no new cars had been made since 1941. So the Tucker car, with its rocket-ship styling, captured the imagination of the American public.” Moreover, the safety features Tucker had developed “were an unusual and timely idea.”1 The Tucker car boasted an air-cooled, rear-mounted engine with a 160-horsepower motor and an automatic transmission. In addition, the safety features included a pop-out safety windshield made of shatter-proof glass, a padded dashboard, and a third “Cyclops” headlight that swiveled with the steering wheel, providing motorists with additional illumination on turns. Because of the car’s sleek exterior, which resembled a rocket ship, it was christened the Tucker Torpedo.
In July 1946 Tucker leased a huge 457-acre factory at 7601 South Cicero, on Chicago’s Southwest Side, a former Dodge plant that had turned out B-19 bomber engines during the war. He supervised his engineering team in designing a hand-built prototype. The prototype was unveiled at the Chicago plant in June 1947. When Tucker attempted to drive the prototype onstage, the car, which had been assembled from spare parts scavenged from junkyards, simply refused to start. His rag-tag mechanics hastily made some last-minute adjustments in the vehicle backstage. When the audience finally got a look at the first Tucker Torpedo, they were simply delighted.
Tucker took the prototype on a triumphant nationwide tour, and young Francis Coppola, age eight, was dazzled by it when his father took him to see it at an auto exhibition on Long Island. Coppola recalls in his commentary on the DVD of Tucker, “When I was a boy, my father conducted the orchestra for auto shows, and I traveled with him sometimes.” Carmine Coppola had been enthusiastic about the Tucker car for some time and had shown Francis magazine stories about it. When Francis finally saw the Tucker prototype, “I thought it was a beautiful, gleaming car; it looked to me like a rocket ship.” Carmine Coppola actually ordered a Tucker Torpedo,” and I kept asking my father when our Tucker was going to come.”2 To finance the manufacturing of his car, Tucker sold stock in the corporation to small-time investors, from pharmacists to grocery store managers. Carmine Coppola invested five thousand dollars of his savings in Tucker stock.
While Tucker was on his nationwide tour with the prototype, some executives back at the plant in Chicago were resigning because the Tucker Corporation was desperately underfinanced and was running short of steel and other raw materials. “It was not an ideal time to be entering the field; the steel shortage was acute after the war. Tucker was taking on a major, maybe a staggering load,” White explains. “To produce a reasonably priced mass-market car takes an enormous amount of capital and time—even under the most advantageous of circumstances.”3
Furthermore, industry experts wondered if Tucker could mass-produce enough cars—even with the best of intentions—to make a decent profit. To make matters worse, rumors were flying that the Big Three in Detroit (Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors), were in cahoots with Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan to sabotage Tucker’s whole operation. Ferguson denounced Tucker to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), allegedly to repay the campaign contributions of the Big Three. William Kirby, Tucker’s lawyer, always maintained that the Big Three were afraid to compete with the Tucker Torpedo, and so engineered Tucker’s downfall. “The SEC had more time to investigate Tucker than he did to build his car,” Kirby contends.4
In January 1949, Otto Kerner, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, presided over a grand jury investigation of the Tucker Corporation. In March, Tucker was indicted for violating SEC regulations and for mail fraud. More specifically, he was accused of employing the mails for fraudulent purposes, by conning investors into purchasing stock in an automobile he had no hope of ever manufacturing. Tucker was vilified in the press as a combination of circus showman P. T. Barnum and crooked New York Mayor Jimmy Walker. He was ridiculed as a charlatan with a taste for high living and a fashionable wardrobe.
Nevertheless, the jury acquitted Tucker of all charges. Tucker, they decided, was in good faith in endeavoring to manufacture a revolutionary automobile. By this time, however, Tucker was forced to file for bankruptcy because of the expensive trial, and his investors—including Carmine Coppola—lost every cent of their investments. Carmine broke the news to his son: “He told me that our Tucker was never going to come, because all the other auto companies thought it was too good; and they put him out of business. I thought that was an injustice.”5
Withal, Tucker ultimately managed to produce fifty Tucker Torpedoes, which featured innovations that eventually became standard equipment on the American automobile. In 1956 he died of lung cancer at the age of fifty-three. Although he died in relative obscurity, he was at the time of his death working on various inventions, including a mini-refrigerator that people in the third world could afford.
Although Tucker was a controversial figure, even his enemies admitted that he was an inspiring leader and an almost messianic salesman. But even his friends had to concede that he was a disastrous business manager. He could be described, in the last analysis, as an honest man with a great idea but a bad business sense. Coppola gave this thumbnail sketch of Tucker in 1975:
Tucker designed a car that could be built for a fraction of the kind of money the major companies were spending on their new models. It
was a safe car, a revolutionary car in terms of engineering, and it was a beautiful car. In every way, it was a much better machine than the stuff the major companies were offering, the companies created by Ford and others. But Tucker was called a fraud and he was destroyed. If he were alive today, he’d be hired by one of the major car companies and his inventions would be … filtered out to the public as the company deemed economically prudent. Not to benefit the public but the company, and only the company.6
Still, Coppola had no illusions about Tucker. Elsewhere he describes Tucker as “a loveable American con man” (!). He continues, “I like him because he feels human.” He is “the used car salesman with his heart in the right place…. He wore those brown-and-white pointy shoes; and he was handsome and good with the ladies. He talked fast.” Coppola concludes, “I’m going to make a film of Tucker’s story some day.”7 When he learned as a boy that Tucker was never allowed to manufacture his car, Coppola says in the documentary “Under the Hood” (2000), which accompanies the film on DVD, that it “instilled in me the wish to find out what happened.”
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
Coppola toyed with the notion of making a movie about Preston Tucker as early as 1962, when he was a film student at UCLA. He dated a girl who took him to a museum where a Tucker Torpedo was on display, and that rekindled his interest in Tucker.
“Right from childhood I have always been stimulated by stories about great enterprises,” Coppola told me. He states in his commentary on the DVD that he saw Tucker at the time he first considered making a film about him as a larger-than-life figure like Charles Foster Kane, the newspaper magnate in Orson Welles’s 1941 movie Citizen Kane. “I wanted my film about Tucker to be an exposé, stark and heavy, about the man and his company being destroyed by larger corporate interests.”
In 1975 Coppola acquired the rights to film Tucker’s life from the Tucker estate and purchased one of the surviving Tucker cars for good measure. He told the Tucker family about seeing a Tucker Torpedo as a boy, he says in the documentary, “and they were flattered that I had a personal connection to Tucker.” The following year Coppola mentioned in a memo reporting on the status of American Zoetrope to his staff that “the sums spent on Tucker” to secure the rights to the story “will finally reach the cash box in two years from now.”8 So Coppola at that juncture was hoping to put Tucker into production after Apocalypse Now, an eventuality that never came to pass.
It seems that Coppola was drawn to tell Tucker’s story on film because of the affinities between the film director and the automobile maker. Coppola shared Tucker’s charisma as a talented, fast-talking entrepreneur, which enabled him to persuade industry officials to back projects he wanted to film. Moreover, like Tucker, Coppola became a celebrity by manipulating the media to promote his accomplishments, as when he showcased Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival and Peggy Sue Got Married at the New York Film Festival.
Furthermore, both men were gamblers whose most ambitious business ventures left them broke (as, in Coppola’s case, when Zoetrope Studios in L.A. went belly up). The effusive Coppola candidly notes that he identified with Tucker, the rebel inventor, because Tucker was a tireless selfpromoter. “When you tell people your dreams out of enthusiasm, somehow it makes them disgusted,” he comments. “I think a lot of my problems would not have been as aggravated had I not in my enthusiasm irritated people.” When a filmmaker goes around saying that he uses state-of-the-art technology that the studios do not possess, “it’s taken as criticism, although that’s not how it was intended.”
In sum, Coppola obviously identified with Tucker’s independent spirit. Both Tucker and Coppola could be called likeable mavericks. As one of Coppola’s friends has put it, “Maybe Francis is the Tucker of our day.”9 “I see parallels between Tucker and Francis,” George Lucas states in the documentary. “Both are flamboyant characters and are very creative; both like innovation—thus Francis likes interesting camera techniques.”
By the late 1970s, Coppola’s concept of the film had evolved. He now conceived it as a dark musical drama. He therefore enlisted Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story) to compose the music and Betty Comden and Adolph Greene (Singin’ in the Rain) to write the lyrics. Coppola invited them to spend a week at his Napa estate, driving around the countryside in Coppola’s Tucker while they planned the film. “Leonard Bernstein was impatient that I didn’t have the project more worked out,” Coppola says in his DVD commentary. “Well, Francis,” chided Bernstein, “you can’t rush into this like Apocalypse Now. We have to know what the approach is.” Coppola then outlined the plot in detail for Bernstein and pointed out where the songs could fit into the story, “and Bernstein actually wrote one song,” says Coppola. But the project was stopped dead with the disaster of One from the Heart, “and my studio was coming down around me.”
After Coppola lost his shirt on Zoetrope Studios, the Tucker project, which he had originally planned to make there, fell through. He could not interest any major studio in backing his Tucker film. In the wake of the debacle of One from the Heart, he says, “people thought my projects were too grandiose.”10
Gio, Coppola’s elder son, was an auto buff, and he very much wanted his father to make the film. He was familiar with the Independence Day parade held each year in Calistoga, California, just north of Coppola’s Napa estate. On July 4, 1985, Coppola states in his DVD commentary, Gio coaxed Francis into allowing him to drive his Tucker car in the parade, with Francis riding in the back seat. “Let’s dust it off and drive it around,” Gio urged. The spectators along the parade route cheered as Coppola and his Tucker passed by.
“George Lucas was there,” Coppola continues, and he inquired, “What happened to your Tucker idea?” When Coppola told him that he had long since written it off, Lucas replied, “Why not make it anyway, but not as a musical?” Because it was Gio who really rejuvenated the project, Coppola concludes, “I dedicated the film to Gio—he loved cars so much.”
Coppola confesses, “I have tended to make projects so big that I really couldn’t pull them off.” Consequently, he was anxious to collaborate with Lucas, who could see to it that Coppola made a film on a smaller scale than usual, one that could be potentially marketable. When he approached Lucas, who had helped Coppola inaugurate American Zoetrope in San Francisco in the late 1960s, Lucas agreed to produce the picture. Coppola, Lucas remembers, had wanted to make Tucker as long as he had known him. Over the years he had shown Lucas the Tucker Corporation’s promo films for the car. “I thought it was the best project Francis had ever been involved with,” says Lucas (who also owns a Tucker Torpedo), because it was the story of a little guy pursuing his dream and attempting to beat the system, something that audiences could identify with.11
Recalling how Coppola had helped him finance American Graffiti, Lucas wanted to return the favor by not only producing Tucker but also helping Coppola to finance the film through his independent production unit, Lucasfilm, which he had established with the profits from Star Wars. By late 1986 Paramount Pictures had agreed to help finance the film and to distribute it. The budget was set at $25 million. Richard Macksey compliments Coppola for his ability to obtain backers for a project he wants to make: “His perilous if uncanny power to enlist backers probably depends upon his temperamental inability to fold in a poker game; movie-making and risk-taking are synonymous to him.”12
“It was a flip-flop,” having George Lucas produce Tucker, says Coppola in the documentary short on the DVD entitled “Under the Hood.” “Now he was the producer, while I had produced a couple of his films.” He continues, “George and I have different talents and therefore they mesh. George’s talent is in designing and editing a film,” while Lucas maintains in the documentary that he got his storytelling ability from Coppola.
When Lucas opts to produce a picture, he is no mere figurehead. He offers input to the director all along the way. Thus he vetoed Coppola’s concept of a down-beat musical, in favor of an up-be
at, non-musical version of Tucker’s life. After all, Coppola had never made a commercially successful musical, from Finian’s Rainbow to One from the Heart to The Cotton Club. “Francis can get so esoteric, it can be hard for an audience to relate to him,” Lucas declares. “He needs someone to hold him back. With The Godfather it was Mario Puzo; with Tucker it was me.”13
Coppola and Lucas endeavored to think of a way to sugarcoat the story of a creative individual who does not accomplish his dream. It was finally Lucas who came up with the solution. As Lucas puts it, in the end Tucker may not have manufactured his car, “but he was not defeated as a creative person. They couldn’t crush his spirit.”14 In “Under the Hood” Lucas states that the picture is about “the conflict between the bureaucratic-status quo mentality and the creative impulse that says, ‘Let’s do it differently!’” When the individual collides with the establishment, the establishment usually survives while the individual loses out in most cases. He thought a film about Tucker could examine the lasting impact of the individual, even when he loses. In short, “I wanted to make it an uplifting experience,” Lucas concludes, “and Francis didn’t resist.”15
Asked what drives Coppola, Lucas responds, “What drives a tiger? He wants to be in control of a situation, which is obvious from his life. I can say no to him,… but it’s hard to say no to Francis.”16 Yet Coppola willingly went along with Lucas’s concept of the movie: “I knew George has a marketing sense of what people might want. He wanted to candy-apple it up a bit,” says Coppola. Audiences loved the optimistic Peggy Sue Got Married. Hence, he decided, “If that’s what they want from me, I’ll give it to them.”17
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