More than one journalist writing about the new movie ”Tucker,” the story of a dreamer/carmaker who tried to buck the big boys and failed, has made a comparison between inventor Preston Tucker and the film`s maker, Francis Coppola, himself.
That`s a stretch.
Until this week`s release of ”Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” very few people knew of Preston Tucker, the man, or his 1946 dream of building a revolutionary car with all sorts of safety features.
Coppola`s place in movie history, however, is assured for generations with ”The Godfather” movies and ”Apocalypse Now.”
The only similarity seems to be that, after making ”Apocalypse Now,”
Coppola dared to try to create his own version of an old-time movie studio. That dream died under a mountain of debt, unpopular films and overreaching ambition.
But, while ”Tucker” alludes to possible collusion among the Big Three automakers to destroy Preston Tucker, no such conspiracy has ever been suggested in the case of Coppola`s failed Zoetrope Studios.
”Actually,” says the 49-year-old filmmaker, speaking from California,
”the similarity that I see with `Tucker` is that I made a film about a generally happy man with a happy family. That`s the state I`m in now, and I`ve often found that the movies I make reflect a great deal of what`s happening in my life and, in turn, that influences the movies as I make them. We feed off each other.
”It can be eerie at times. With `Gardens of Stone,` (his last film) I started to make a film about a man who loved his son, and three days after I started shooting, I lost my son (who died in a boating accident).
”With `Godfather I,` I was a guy seeking a position of influence; with
`Godfather II,` I had become very respected and was holding together a family of friends, family and coworkers. I had people coming to me seeking work and protection.
”With `Apocalypse Now,` I was making a film about the search for a man who consults no one after he`s been tested to his moral limit and been driven crazy. I didn`t have a nervous breakdown while making the movie, but I certainly got a little full of myself while controlling a lot of people who were following me blindly.
”But the connection between `Tucker` and `Zoetrope` isn`t accurate,”
Coppola said, ”because I thought of making the film before I bought the studio and lost my shirt.”
Coppola said he had been thinking about the Tucker automobile from the time he had done college research on the vehicle. Fifty cars were actually made; 46 survive, including two owned by Coppola and one by George Lucas, the film`s executive producer.
”I had heard about the car from my father when I was a kid,” Coppola said. ”I did college research about it, and then when I was a film student at UCLA, I met a girl who took me to a museum of mechanical oddities and she showed me this thing. I said, `That`s a Tucker.`
”After `The Godfather` (1972), I had a couple of bucks and I bought one- the maroon one you see all the time in the movie-and I had it restored. The car cost me $15,000, and $15,000 more to restore it.
”After `Apocalypse,` the guy who restored it for me gave me another one, and I took a trip with it.
”I drove it from L.A. to San Francisco. It was very fast for a big car. It was easy to go more than 100 miles an hour.
”My drive up to San Francisco was fine until about Big Sur,” Coppola said. ”Then some trouble with the transmission developed. When I arrived, I didn`t have any gears. Tucker never got around to solving the car`s transmission problems until the last few cars of production. He initially used a transmission from a Cord (automobile) and it was too lightweight.”
No one has ever accused Coppola of making anything lightweight, although the version of ”Tucker” that will open Friday is much less ambitious than his original idea for the film-a musical.
”I always like to stretch things, and originally I envisioned a more operatic film that tried to tell the conflicts through music. I even commissioned Elmer Bernstein and the team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green to write some songs, which they graciously did. I was thinking of creating something like `Wonderful Town.` But that was years ago.”
Instead, Coppola chose more traditional storytelling methods and the result is a less than satisfying movie, telling us more about Tucker`s dream car than the man himself (played by Jeff Bridges).
But whereas Tucker is destroyed by his brave new car, Francis Coppola now finds himself at a new stage in his life.
”I`m finally debt free,” said the man who once owed $50 million and had to hock some of his film rights and his Northern California vineyard home to survive as a filmmaker.
”In fact, I have enough money right now so that I don`t have to work again. Believe it or not, I made more money from `The Outsiders` than from the original `Godfather.`
”Right now,” he continues, ”I don`t have a next project. I`m almost 50 years old, and I`m at the stage in my life and career where I have the chance to take a couple of years off and really write something great or small. Too often in the past, I was directing someone else`s unfinished script.”
As for the changes Coppola has seen in the film industry during the last two decades, he sees much more of a ”hit mentality” operating in Hollywood today.
”The importance of having an immediate hit has never been greater,”
Coppola said. ”They publish the box-office numbers as if the movies belonged on the sports pages. And the rewards of having a hit have never been greater. Your friends and neighbors get all excited. At the same, it`s such a disgrace not to have a hit. You feel like your family is ashamed of you. The stakes are really at that level now.
”But I`ve had enough success and failure for a lifetime. I might write a radio play and just perform it for my relatives. Whatever, I don`t have to think in terms of making a viable, commercial project. I have a tendency to want to make things big. It`s time for me to dream like Preston Tucker and write something for myself.”
