Godfather

by Gene D. Phillips

  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.

  For example, on the one hand, all the evidence shows that Senator Ferguson was out to get Tucker. It is also known that competitive car manufacturers employed FBI agents to monitor the private tests of the Tucker Torpedo conducted on a speedway, in the hope of spying out flaws in the car’s performance. On the other hand, Coppola admits in his commentary on the DVD, there is no documentation to support the suggestion that Ferguson was personally responsible for “the spy watching from the stands, as shown in the film,” during the test runs. Coppola wanted to have a clear-cut villain to play the role of Tucker’s nemesis, and Ferguson was elected. According to Nazarian, in the script Ferguson was made more of a villain than he was in real life in order to bring into relief the conspiracy between powerful industry executives and influential politicians aimed at ruining Tucker. She adds that “people who were there found a lot of what they call errors” in the movie and peppered the Zoetrope office with complaints. She responded that “we knew the facts, but to fit the spirit of the story into a film that is exciting and has characters you love and characters you hate—that made us change a lot of things.”22

  One thing that did not change was the screenplay, since, as mentioned, Lucas was adamant that Coppola follow the script as written once principal photography began. The shoot started on April 13, 1987. Schulman, who had been on hand for rehearsals, visited the set during filming and was gratified to learn that Coppola was faithfully following the shooting script as written: “An actor would ask, ‘Can I try the line this way?”‘ Coppola would think for a moment and then reply, “Why don’t you do it the way it’s written?” When Schulman thanked Coppola for respecting his writing, Coppola answered, “A hundred hacks can rewrite another hack, and nobody will know the difference; but one good writer cannot rewrite another good writer,” because their individual styles are different.23

  Coppola favored long takes while shooting Tucker, as he had on some other films, notably One from the Heart. Thus, in a single, uninterrupted tracking shot, the camera would take in the action by dollying from one actor to another as each contributed dialogue to the scene. The complicated choreography of these scenes meant that the actors had to mo
ve with the same precision as the camera and be careful not to wander out of camera range. “I’ve never done a film this complicated as far as camera moves,” Jeff Bridges said.24 He got around the problem by marching like a robot through the first take, just concentrating on staying in the frame. He added emotion to his performance from the second take onward.

  Jeff Bridges did enjoy doing scenes with his father, Lloyd Bridges, who played Homer Ferguson, the industry-backed senator. “It was fun to act with Dad,” says Bridges. “He’d give me tips and I’d give him suggestions; he even took some of my advice.”25

  Working swiftly and efficiently, Coppola completed principal photography on July 17, after just thirteen weeks of shooting. During postproduction, George Lucas sat in, while Coppola and editor Priscilla Nedd shaped the footage Coppola had shot into a final cut. Coppola and Lucas had no serious disagreements en route. The postproduction stage went along smoothly, commented Coppola, since he had begun with a strong script. That made the editing phase relatively easy, as the edited material was forged into a compelling narrative.

  Afterward Coppola opined in a published interview that he bought George Lucas’s idea that giving the film a light touch would make it more palatable to the public, so he abandoned the notion of going with the darker vision of the material he had originally envisioned. “I think it’s a good movie; it’s eccentric like the Tucker car—but it’s not the movie I would have made at the height of my power,” when he owned his own studio.26 Lucas wanted to dispel the notion that he had imposed his concept of the film on Coppola, so he issued a statement in response, saying, “The truth of it is, Francis and I worked on the movie together, and he made the movie he wanted to make. Who knows what it would have been if he’d have made it ‘at the height of his power’?”27

  Nevertheless, the trade press reported industry gossip of a rift between the “reckless” Coppola and the “less-assertive” Lucas, implying that Coppola bossed Lucas, not the other way round. Coppola emphasized in reply that he had not sought to overshadow the younger man. Indeed, Coppola scoffed at the notion that “George was in my shadow.” Added Lucas, “The truth is, we’ve always worked together; it’s always been a collaborative sort of thing” as they kibitzed on each other’s scripts and shared ideas over the years.28 “I don’t think my relationship with Francis has changed much,” Lucas comments in the documentary. “We’re like family, and there’s an energy and an emotional exuberance that comes out of that—sometimes it’s conflict, sometimes devotion.”

  Eleanor Coppola endorsed Lucas’s remarks: “I think it’s a remarkable collaboration. Francis has suffered from not having a producer he can believe in,” she states. He has often been at odds with studio executives while making a movie because “they haven’t understood him or made funds available in the areas where he needed them. He therefore felt relieved to have George Lucas as his producer,” since Lucas is a fellow filmmaker. “Both men have become established in their own realm, and now they are reunited as equals. Francis listened to George’s opinions and ideas with respect.”29

  The film’s opening credits are superimposed on Coppola’s facsimile of a promotional short made by the Public Relations Department of the Tucker Corporation. It has a cheerful voice-over narration, snappy 1940s Big Band music, and snapshots from the Tucker family album. “It’s like a promo film of the 1940s,” says Coppola. “The sort of thing that Detroit manufacturers used to show their dealers.”30 (The Tucker DVD includes an authentic 1948 promo film made by the Tucker Corporation, entitled, “Tucker: The Man and the Car.”)

  Coppola’s version of a Tucker promo film recounts Tucker’s life through World War II, telling how Tucker invented a high-speed, bulletproof assault vehicle with a machine gun turret. The narrator states that the army found the combat car impractical, “but the gun turret was immediately pressed into service” on bombers. “The turrets were built in the barn next to Tucker’s home in Michigan,” says the narrator, as the promo (and the credit sequence) comes to an end.

  The credit sequence sets the tone for the film to follow, Coppola explains on the DVD: “I had the desire to make the movie in the style of a 1940s promo film that had been produced by Tucker’s Public Affairs office—with a great deal of showmanship. After all, this was a kind of Horatio Alger story.” Coppola, in concert with Tavoularis, Storaro, and his other collaborators, gave the entire movie the brash, peppy flavor of a promotional documentary, with sunny exteriors and glowing interiors, plus warm, earthy colors in the costumes.

  The film proper begins in 1945 at Tucker’s Ypsilanti homestead. The story gets rolling as Tucker convinces Abe Karatz, the seedy promoter who becomes Tucker’s financial adviser, that his concept of the “car of tomorrow, today” is a workable one. Abe, who happens to be named after “Honest Abe” Lincoln, pledges Tucker that he will do his best to get the project jump-started. He tells Tucker frankly, “I don’t have connections in the auto industry, but I have connections who have connections.”

  Abe, in due course, negotiates with the United States government to grant Tucker a lease on a former Dodge factory in Chicago that recently, during the war, has been utilized as a defense plant. But Tucker has to commit himself to producing fifty Tucker Torpedoes within the next three months, and so Abe hires a former Detroit auto executive, Robert Bennington, as chairman of the board, in order to give the company some credibility with Washington.

  Tucker addresses a government committee at a luncheon in Washington in order to clinch the deal for the Chicago factory. He shows slides of traffic accidents, declaring melodramatically, “The tycoons in Detroit don’t give a damn about people—all they care about is profits. The Big Three should be convicted of criminal negligence” because their cars lack the safety features of the Tucker Torpedo. The slides of the gory traffic accidents are intercut with shots of the committee members being served rare, bloody roast beef—something they find hard to swallow under the circumstances.

  It is clear in viewing Coppola’s “auto” biography, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, that, as he himself says, his cinematic imagination was inspired by creating a film centering on an automaker’s technical ingenuity. In essence, since Tucker’s car was a mechanical miracle, he wanted his film to some extent also to be a mechanical marvel—a movie that emphasizes a variety of technical effects, from crane shots to split screens (where the frame is divided between two parallel scenes, shown on the screen side by side.) “I always like my movie’s style to reflect the subject matter,” he states on the DVD.

  There is, for example, a tricky split-screen shot when Tucker phones his wife back home from his hotel after the Washington luncheon. The camera glides from Tucker in his Washington hotel on the left to include the Tucker living room on the right, so that the two settings virtually melt into each other. We see separate shots of Tucker and Vera juxtaposed on the screen simultaneously as they converse. Their juxtaposition implies their closeness—the bond between them—as if they were together in the same room. Coppola comments on the DVD, “Here is a basic use of a theatrical scene transition, which we experimented with in One from the Heart. We pan from one set to the one built right next to it. So in this case, you go from the husband to the wife.” Coppola “never ceased to experiment with eye-catching compositions and off-beat storytelling techniques, such as the use of the fake publicity film in Tucker” and the split-screen effect that “connects Tucker with his wife as they talk on the phone.”31 (As Tucker walks away from the phone, incidentally, a sign on the wall comes into view that reads appropriately, “Where there’s a will there’s a way.”)

  Another cinematic effect, inspired by a sequence in Citizen Kane, occurs in a later scene. In Welles’s film Charles Kane, the publisher of the Enquirer, lures the top reporters from a rival newspaper to work for him. A still photograph of the new additions to the Enquirer staff seems to come to life, as the photo dissolves into a shot of the men posing for the picture at Kane’s party, welcoming them to the Enquirer. In a s
imilar manner Coppola has a photo of the newly constituted board of directors of the Tucker Corporation dissolve to a shot of the board members having a conference. “This transition was stolen from Citizen Kane,” says Coppola in his DVD commentary. “My father always said, ‘Steal from the best.’”

  Coppola proves himself a master of visual metaphors once again when Tucker’s dedicated crew, led by Eddie Dane, are renovating the old Chicago plant to produce the Tucker Torpedo. Tucker mutters to himself, “I may have a ringside seat at my own crucifixion,” if the local premiere of the prototype does not come off on schedule. Tucker then watches as the “T” in Tucker is hoisted into place on the sign over the factory. Coppola observes in his DVD commentary that the “T” looks like a cross and subtly foreshadows that Tucker will subsequently be crucified by the power structure in Detroit.

  The film includes a short sequence in which Tucker has a private meeting with rebel inventor-industrialist Howard Hughes. Coppola describes Hughes in his DVD commentary as “Tucker a thousand times over. He liked to set his sights on things that were out of reach.” The scene is based on the recollection of one of Tucker’s sons who accompanied his father to meet Hughes in a hanger in Long Beach. This is where Hughes housed history’s largest aircraft, nicknamed the Spruce Goose, which was so enormous that it proved impractical for manufacture. “We used the real plane in the scene,” says Coppola in his commentary. The Spruce Goose looms behind Hughes and Tucker as they converse—two iconoclastic legends on the fringe of American capitalism. Hughes gestures toward the plane, laconically, commenting, “They say it can’t fly; but that’s not the point.” He implies that the goal of an invention is not marketability but the satisfaction of creating something unique. Tucker nods in agreement. After all, Tucker is not in the business of building empires. He is in the business of building dreams, as the film’s subtitle implies.32 Hughes ends their conversation by urging Tucker to continue battering at the big auto manufacturers.