Godfather (55 page)

Abe then makes a statement that in actual fact echoes the words of Carmine Coppola to young Francis when Carmine told his son that their Tucker was never going to arrive. Abe says forlornly to Tucker, “You made the car too good.” The cocky Tucker responds, “That's the whole idea, isn't it? To build a better mousetrap.” Abe answers ruefully, “Not if you're the mouse.” He adds, “My mother said, Tf you get too close to people, you catch their dreams.'” As Abe concludes, the lights in the factory are shut off for the night, and the Tucker plant dwindles into darkness, symbolizing that there are dark days ahead.

Although Tucker was not permitted to speak in his own behalf at the trial, Coppola gave him a summation speech in the film. “A trial is a kind of drama,” he explains on the DVD, and so he wanted the lead character to have his day in court and make a final plea. But Tucker's courtroom speech is fiction. Tucker addresses the jury, explaining how the establishment wants
to maintain the status quo and so squashes the little fellow with fresh ideas: “If Ben Franklin were alive today, he'd be arrested for flying a kite without a license.”

He declares in his peroration, “If big business closes the door on the little guy with a new idea, we're not only closing the door on progress, but we're sabotaging everything that we fought for during the war. Everything that this country stands for.” Coppola comments in his DVD commentary that he had Storaro dim the lights in the courtroom during Tucker's final speech to create a bleak, shadowy atmosphere, “In order to stay with the somber mood of the scene.”

Tucker is acquitted by the jury, and he accordingly ushers them outside the courthouse and gives them all a ride around the square in the fleet of Tuckers that are parked outside. He has, after all is said and done, managed to manufacture fifty Torpedoes, and he comments grandly, “Fifty cars or fifty million—it's the idea that counts—and the dream.” He implies that it is not winning that counts, but how you play the game. Storaro photographs the big parade of Tuckers in the final scene in bright sunshine, in sharp contrast to the dark courtroom scene preceding it.

Coppola was able to commandeer twenty-one of the forty-six surviving Tuckers for the movie's grand finale, but a couple of them were temporarily out of service. “They had to be chained together,” says a Tucker owner whose vehicle participated in the scene. “One that ran was hooked to one that didn't.” It was difficult to keep a car that didn't run from running into the one just ahead of it while the parade was in progress.
³³

One of the few additions Coppola made to the script occurs during the parade. In the screenplay, Tucker simply says to Vera, “The car is great.”
³⁴
In the film, as Tucker rides in a Tucker Torpedo, he muses out loud about his next invention, “a portable kerosene refrigerator that people in poor countries can afford.” This additional bit of dialogue shows more clearly that Tucker's spirit was not broken. Rather, he was already looking to the future and his next project. Coppola reflects in his DVD commentary, “He was already designing a cheap fridge so that poor kids could have cold milk and not die of rickets in South America.” He continues, “Tucker won his case. He was found not guilty of misappropriating money from investors,” but by then he was already bankrupt. “A special commission led by Senator Homer Ferguson saw to it that the Tucker Corporation was evicted from its factory. The establishment takes away from you what isn't under their control. The people at the top don't want change lest they lose their privileged position.” Spoken like a true maverick.

Withal, Coppola insisted on ending the movie on a note of affirmation.
He affixed a printed epilogue to the film, also not in the script, that reads, “Although only fifty Tucker cars were ever produced, forty-six of them are still road worthy and in use today. Tucker's innovations were slowly adopted by Detroit and are found on the cars you are driving now.”

Roger Ebert points out that automotive history would not have been substantially different if Tucker had put his dream car into mass production. The Tucker probably would have thrived in the late 1940s, “and then joined the long, slow parade of the Hudson, the Kaiser, the Nash, the Studebaker, the Packard” and all of the other cars that came and went after the war.
³⁵
Nevertheless, as Jay Scott emphasizes, the film is really not about the car—it is about the man. The movie “extols the value of vision, even if the vision is unrealized. The theme of the movie is that it is the quality of the vision itself that counts.”
³⁶

Tucker's family cooperated with the making of the film wholeheartedly and provided Jeff Bridges in particular with a wealth of information. Bridges admits that one of the few times his characterization of Tucker deviated from Tucker's true personality was in the scene in which Tucker is given disappointing news by his chief mechanic. He is told that they do not have time to incorporate all of the new safety features into the prototype before the deadline set for the public exhibition. Tucker picks up the phone from his desk and hurls it against the wall in anger. “He'd never do that,” says Bridges. “If he did have negative feelings, he'd never show them.” From watching the Tucker family's home movies and from talking to his children, Bridges learned that Tucker “didn't want to waste energy by nurturing hostile feelings within himself. He would look at obstacles as challenges.”
³⁷
Little wonder that Tucker often bursts out in a chorus of “Hold that Tiger,” which characterizes his get-up-and-go spirit during the movie. That little ditty certainly fits Bridges's overall interpretation of Tucker. Throughout the movie Bridges steadfastly wears a confident grin that mirrors the gregarious charm and pep of a man who simply declines to acknowledge defeat.

Tucker
reflects a common theme in the Coppola canon, an appreciation of the binding strength of the family unit. For important public occasions—from the unveiling of the Tucker prototype to the courtroom trial—the family conspicuously stands by Tucker. Moreover, there is the scene in which Tucker's oldest son (Christian Slater) turns down the chance to attend Notre Dame in order to help his father build the first Tucker Torpedo. Similarly, Coppola's elder son Gio asked his father to allow him to leave school when he was sixteen in order to work with his father in the movies—another parallel between Tucker's life and Coppola's.

In August 1988
Tucker
was released on 720 screens across the nation. It started strong, taking in nearly $4 million on its first weekend, thereby being numbered among the top ten moneymakers in the country. But the picture soon slipped out of the top ten. It eventually racked up a mere $19 million in domestic rentals. Foreign distribution, plus the sale of ancillary rights to TV and home video, would improve the movie's profit picture, of course.

The early, unenthusiastic notices in the daily papers acknowledged that Coppola had a vivid imagination, but decried the many disconcerting shifts in tone caused by the tension between the essentially bleak story and its sunny treatment. Thus Coppola's enthusiasm for visual flourishes and quirky characterizations undermined the atmosphere of tension he had managed to create in the dramatic scenes dealing with the forces arrayed against Tucker. Some of the subsequent reviews, appearing in weekly and monthly magazines, voiced the opinion that the picture had been vastly underappreciated by the newspaper reviewers and endorsed the movie's rousing high spirits and razzle-dazzle showmanship. A few critics even believed that the film marked the comeback of a major auteur, who was fighting his way back from disappointing pictures like
Gardens of Stone
and
The Cotton Club
to significant, workmanlike filmmaking. Coppola's faith in the film has ultimately been vindicated in that
Tucker
has become enormously popular on TV, given the number of times it is shown annually.

It is not surprising that a movie maker named Francis
Ford
Coppola, who was born in Detroit, should be fascinated by someone associated with the automotive industry. Tucker developed plans for a car that was way ahead of its time in terms of engineering, yet the auto industry at large stubbornly resisted his innovative ideas. Unfortunately, Coppola told me, creative people do not always get a chance to exercise their creativity, whether it be in Detroit or Hollywood. Putting it another way, it was appropriate that a maverick filmmaker would film the life of a maverick inventor. “I grew up as a kind of outsider, someone who didn't fit in anyplace,” he says; “and I think I'm hooked very strongly toward making movies about what it's like trying to go your own way.”
Tucker
is about the construction of a dream automobile. “Overall I seem to be tracking the through-line of the odd man out.”
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After finishing
Tucker
, Coppola went on to contribute a segment to an anthology film entitled
New York Stories
. This omnibus movie was the brainchild of Woody Allen, who proposed to fellow filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola that they each create a self-contained urban story, about a half-hour in duration, which could be filmed in a month.
The only cord linking the three short films together would be the common New York City setting. Naturally Coppola jumped at the chance to be associated with a film that involved two other important directors. Furthermore, Coppola had shot films like
You're a Big Boy Now, The Godfather
, and
The Cotton Club
in New York and was to that extent identified with the city. Given the trio of distinguished directors, Allen and producer Robert Greenhut easily found the $15 million needed to back the movie and enlisted Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Pictures, to distribute the picture.

After casting around for a subject, Coppola came up with the idea of doing his segment along the lines of writer-vocalist Kay Thompson's children's books. Thompson had penned four books in the 1950s about Eloise, a precocious child who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York, and Coppola wanted to deal with a similar little girl in his short film. Writing a script about a youngster gave him the chance to collaborate with his seventeen-year-old daughter Sofia on the screenplay. The scenario was about an eleven-year-old child named Zoe, who lives at the exclusive Sherry-Netherlands Hotel on Fifth Avenue, dines at the posh Russian Tea Room, and has her own credit cards. It would be entitled “Life without Zoe.”

“Dad took me to Las Vegas and he got a suite,” Sofia remembers. “[H]e ordered room service and we worked away, writing every day.” It was like a writing workshop for her.
³⁹
Coppola chose Vegas to work on the screenplay because he loved to labor on a script in Vegas or Reno, where he could work long hours and then go to the casinos for relaxation. In fact, he and Mario Puzo collaborated on the
Godfather
scripts at times in Reno.

The short film developed into a family project: Sofia not only cowrote the screenplay with her father, but she also designed the costumes. Her aunt, Talia Shire (from the
Godfather
films) would have a featured role, and her grandfather, Carmine, composed the score. In addition, some old hands from other Coppola films were recruited: production designer Dean Tavoularis, editor Barry Malkin, and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The director of photography, in tandem with Coppola, chose a luscious color palette to approximate the world of luxury the film depicts.

Zoe (Heather McComb) points out, “My parents named me Zoe because Zoe means life in Greek.” Zoe, of course, was associated in Coppola's mind with the name of his independent film unit, American Zoetrope, since
Zoetrope means in Greek “the movement of life,” a reference to primitive motion pictures.

Zoe's father, Claudio Montez (Giancarlo Giannini) is a renowned flautist, who frequently goes on concert tours around the world and is seldom home. Claudio is separated from Zoe's mother, Charlotte (Talia Shire), a fashion photographer who likewise travels a lot. Zoe, who is sophisticated beyond her years, lives at the Sherry-Netherlands hotel where Hector, the family butler (Don Novello), pampers her in her parents' absence. Zoe attends an exclusive private school, but complains that she has no friends her own age, since she is surrounded by adults most of the time. She yearns to see her parents reunited so that they can form a family once more (another reference to Coppola's constant theme).

In June 1988 Coppola transported the Silverfish trailer, complete with its TV monitors and other audio-visual accessories, to New York, where he would film “Life without Zoe” on location in Manhattan. The ritzy Apthorp apartment building on the Upper West Side was employed for some scenes. Coppola tended to stay unobtrusively on the sidelines in the Silverfish, out of the way of the crew, while they set up each shot according to his detailed advance instructions. He watched the preparations on a TV screen in the trailer and occasionally gave additional directions to the crew by telephoning to the set. When all was in readiness, Coppola went on the set where he occupied a high-backed canvas chair near the camera and viewed each take with one eye on a small TV monitor perched on his knee.

During shooting Coppola worried that the mass audience would not find a “poor little rich girl” an appealing heroine. He did not want Zoe to come across as a smug, spoiled brat belonging to the privileged class. He rather wished the story to suggest that material prosperity is no substitute for a loving family. Consequently, he did not intend
Zoe
merely to celebrate a world of status and wealth.

Zoe at one point meets a mysterious, beautiful Arab princess, the wife of a wealthy sheik, who had given one of her priceless earrings to Claudio as a token of her esteem for his musical virtuosity. On second thought she fears that her jealous husband might suspect that she is romantically involved with Claudio, so she wants to get the earring back. Because Claudio is away, the princess hopes Zoe can retrieve the jewel from the hotel safe where Claudio has placed it for safekeeping. Zoe thus becomes involved in a bogus robbery of the safe when some of the princess's retainers “steal” the earring, which Zoe then smuggles back to the princess.