Godfather (52 page)

One evening Rip goes off hunting in the upper reaches of the Catskills to escape his nagging wife. As he wanders deeper into the woods, a ghost suddenly materializes from the murky green fog. “I am Commander Heinrich Hudson,” the spectral figure declares to Rip. Hudson is dressed in a traditional Dutch naval captain's uniform, which is tattered with age. He then introduces to Rip his band of merry men as the crew of the good ship
Half Moon
, which foundered off the coast some one hundred and fifty years before. “We discovered this land at the time, and it is sacred to me,” Hudson
explains. “I return every twenty years to see if future generations are taking care of it.”

Rip is appointed cupbearer to the crew. He is given a keg of a mysterious brew and told to keep their flagons filled as they engage in a spirited game of ninepins (bowling). Rip samples the tasty draught himself and eventually imbibes copiously from the keg. The revelers finally disappear, leaving Rip behind, sound asleep. As a matter of fact, the magic beverage causes Rip to sleep for twenty years. When he awakes, he is sporting a straggly white beard, and he finds the village much changed.

For one thing, the sign over the village inn, which once bore the likeness of King George III, has been replaced by one with the image of George Washington, thereby indicating to the viewer, if not yet to Rip, that the American Revolution has transpired while Rip slept. When he inquires at the tavern if anyone knows Rip Van Winkle, the customers point to Rip Van Winkle, Jr. (also played by Stanton). The young man is dozing on the porch (like father, like son). Young Rip informs his father that Wilma “broke a blood vessel screaming at a travelling salesman a couple of years ago and died.”

Rip regales the group with the tale of his fantastic experience with Henry Hudson and the crew of the
Half Moon
. The narrator adds, voiceover on the sound track, “In time he became a legend in the village, and he never grew tired of telling the children his story.” A shot of Rip and the village children freezes into a picture in the same book which the narrator was holding at the beginning of the film. He then closes the volume and replaces it on the shelf, and we see his face for the first time: it is Henry Hudson, grinning at us at the fade-out.

Since Coppola's episode of
Faerie Tale Theater
was slotted as the last segment of the series to be televised, it was first aired after
Peggy Sue Got Married
had opened. Some critics noted a link between the telefilm and the feature: In
Peggy Sue
the heroine is transplanted into the past—in “Rip Van Winkle” the hero is transported into the future. Moreover, “Rip Van Winkle,” like
Peggy Sue
, got uniformly good notices, and deservedly so (although more than one critic stated that the telefilm's literary source was a novel, rather than a short story). Coppola's telemovie was described as a slightly fractured but never totally Grimm fairy tale.

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.

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.”

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.