Godfather (53 page)

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-beat, 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

Lucas insisted that Coppola have a finished script before shooting began so that the ceaseless delays occasioned by the rewrites on films like
The Cotton Club
would not plague the filming of
Tucker
. Lucas suggested screenwriter Arnold Schulman (
Goodbye
,
Columbus
), and Coppola invited Schulman to stay with him in Napa for a couple of weeks for script conferences. Since the Tucker family had script approval, Schulman had to appease them as well as Coppola. When the Tuckers insisted that the script make no reference to Tucker's mistress, Coppola had no problem in deferring to them on this point. He wanted to emphasize Tucker the family man in the movie, in harmony with his ongoing theme about the importance of family relationships.

Since David Seidler is listed in the screen credits of the film as coauthor of the screenplay, Goodwin and Wise wrongly assume in their book on Coppola that Seidler and Schulman collaborated on the script. But Schulman affirms that he never even met Seidler. Schulman was initially to receive sole screen credit for the screenplay. As a matter of fact, the title page of the shooting script, dated March 9,1987, which is in the Paramount Script Repository, lists only Arnold Schulman as the author of the script. Seidler, who had worked on an early draft of the script, got wind of this, however, and he claimed that he deserved to have his contribution to the film acknowledged with a coauthor screen credit.

When Seidler enlisted the Screen Writers Guild to arbitrate the matter, Schulman insisted that he made no use whatever of Seidler's draft, since it was a perfunctory recital of the facts of Tucker's life, totally lacking in dramatic substance. “His script started with Tucker at six years old and included every detail of the man's life until the day he died,” Schulman contends. “Since it was a real-life story, obviously there were going to be incidents in it similar to those in my script…. If ten writers write ten different scripts about Abraham Lincoln, in all of them there's going to be a Civil War and Abe's going to get shot in the end.”
¹⁸
Schulman had no better luck in fighting for a sole screen credit for
Tucker
than Coppola did in negotiating for a sole screen credit on
The Outsiders
. The Screen Writers Guild upheld Seidler's contention that he be named coauthor of
Tucker
.

Coppola did his best to round up a production crew of artists he had worked with before. Besides the ever-faithful production designer Dean
Tavoularis, he managed to corral costume designer Milena Canonero (
The Cotton Club
) and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (
Apocalypse Now, One from the Heart)
. Coppola and Storaro decided to photograph
Tucker
in ultrasaturated colors to give the film the lustrous, lacquered look of an auto industry promotional film.

Jeff Bridges, with his good looks and winning smile, won the title role, while Lloyd Bridges, his father, nabbed the part of Senator Homer Ferguson, Tucker's principal antagonist. Martin Landau was assigned to play Abe Karatz, Tucker's top financial officer and best friend. Coppola also reengaged some actors from his other films: Frederic Forrest (
Apocalypse Now, One from the Heart)
was picked for Eddie Dane, Tucker's chief mechanic; Joan Allen, who was one of Peggy Sue's close friends in
Peggy Sue Got Married
, was given the nod for Vera, Tucker's wife; and Dean Stockwell (
Gardens of Stone
) would impersonate millionaire inventor-industrialist Howard Hughes.

In early April 1987 Coppola assembled the cast on one of Lucasfilm's sound stages in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, for two weeks of rehearsals. The rehearsal period, Coppola contends, “lets the actors spend time together without being pressured or having to perform,” and they could improvise to polish their characterizations.
¹⁹
Landau in particular found these rehearsals helpful. He envisaged Abe at the beginning of the movie as “a lonely New York Jewish guy with no family or friends, who sits in cafeterias and reads newspapers and lives for deals.”
²⁰
Landau adds in the documentary, “Tucker brings Abe to life. He gives him a sense of belonging, and Abe finds he can dream again. In the course of the film, because of his commitment to Tucker and his dream, Abe “grows into a warm, feeling, and caring human being.”

The rehearsal period culminated, as usual, with a complete walkthrough of the script, that was videotaped as a sort of home movie, thereby giving the director and the actors a preview of the film. Landau adds that the videotaped run-through especially helped him to grasp the evolution of his character during the story.

Tavoularis remembers
Tucker
as one of the most carefully designed movies that he ever worked on with Coppola. Long before the cameras turned, he joined Storaro at a bungalow on Coppola's estate, where the trio pored over the script for a week, discussing how each scene should be shot and sharing ideas about locations, set designs, and decor. During the shooting phase, says Tavoularis, “I think we shot about ninety percent of what we talked about at that cottage.”
²¹
Coppola, after all, was committed to appease Lucas by bringing the film in on schedule and on budget.

Tavoularis and Coppola selected location sites in the Bay Area, in easy commuting distance from Coppola's Napa home. In Sonoma, in northern California, they found an enormous manor house that was subsequently turned into Tucker's home in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Tavoularis converted the ballroom of the senior citizens' hotel in Oakland into the courtroom where Tucker's trial for fraud took place. He built several of the sets in a huge abandoned factory, which had once been owned by the Ford Motor Company, on Harbor Way in Richmond, California. The ground floor became the Tucker plant, while the second floor housed the factory's offices.

Tucker's plant did not have an assembly line, because he was never able to arrange to mass-produce the Tucker Torpedo. But the old Ford plant used in the film to stand in for Tucker's factory did have an assembly line, and so in the movie the Tucker plant has an assembly line. In dramatizing Tucker's life on the screen, Anahid Nazarian, Coppola's chief research assistant, notes that certain liberties of this sort inevitably were taken with Tucker's life.