Nowadays, every car on the road has seatbelts. But automobile manufacturers in 1948 were selling chrome tailfins and the post-war suburban dream, not safety. Those cars were built like tanks, designed by people who were actually designing tanks just a couple of years prior. One of them still saw fit to make seatbelts standard issue, his name was Preston Tucker. And he wanted to revolutionise the automotive industry.
Tucker prioritized passenger safety and engineering over traditional stylings to challenge Detroit’s “Big Three”. He failed spectacularly, of course. But he also won.
And you should remember that every time you buckle up.
Francis Ford Coppola’s father had originally invested in Tucker and lost his money, so that story lived in the family ledger long after the car faded into automotive history. By the time Coppola reached UCLA film school in the early 1960s he’d already decided he was going to put the Tucker story on screen, although it was originally imagined as an avant-garde and form-breaking, Brecht-influenced musical about the entire American auto industry set to a Leonard Bernstein score. Which for Coppola, sounds about right.
He eventually ended up making a little mafia film called The Godfather first, which gave him enough clout to found American Zoetrope, a production company created so filmmakers could work outside the studio system. Not unlike Tucker, who attempted to make something genuine outside the Detroit establishment.
And not to hammer the parallel, but One from the Heart, his 1982 musical shot entirely on constructed sets at Zoetrope’s own facility, became one of the most expensive failures of its era. It collapsed the company under its debt, and the Tucker film went with it.
Enter his longtime friend George Lucas, who had spent his career creating the infrastructure he needed so no studio could take his work away from him after Warner Bros. re-cut THX 1138 without his involvement.
Lucasfilm was an independent operation, and when Star Wars made more money than anyone could had anticipated, he used his profits to construct Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Ranch, the effects house and post-production facility that meant he never again had to depend on a studio for the tools he needed. By the conclusion of his trilogy about a far far away galaxy, he was the most powerful independent producer in Hollywood. In part because he’d assembled everything himself outside a system that had given him little reason to trust it.
When he offered to revive the Tucker project for Coppola, he brought his whole operation with him, covering a large portion of the budget, with Paramount coming on board to distribute – partly because the studio was already courting Coppola for The Godfather Part III. These two filmmakers who’d spent careers creating things outside the system, were finally getting around to making a film about the man who seemed to be their spirit animal.
That was the whole ethos with the big film makers to come out of the 70s. Along with Spielberg, DePalma and Scorsese – they all carved their own path and made the machine work for them, and not the other way around. Oh yeah, Martin Scorsese, we’ll get back to that.
I wasn’t kidding about the tanks. Tucker had been manufacturing gun turrets during the war. When he turned to designing cars, he included seatbelts, a padded dashboard, a windshield designed to pop out on impact rather than shatter through the cabin, and a center headlight that turned with the steering wheel. All of these would eventually become standard.
Well, except for the third headlight, but that would have been cool too.
At a time when the Big Three were still reeling from the post-war boom and the spike in car demand due to the suburban expansion, these quasi-monopolies were still measuring success in size and horsepower. None of Tucker’s innovations were welcome, likely because none of them were invented by General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler. And sure as hell none of them were going to let their latest models look inadequate by comparison. They made some calls.
Soon, Tucker’s steel allocations dried up, his factory permits stalled, and eventually the SEC brought stock fraud charges that, though thrown out in court, finished Tucker’s operation. He died in 1956, and the industry slowly absorbed every innovation he’d introduced, on its own timeline, without his name attached to any of it.
Tucker’s name was little more than a footnote for automotive historians.
But Coppola and Lucas knew those industry forces intimately. They had both seen their innovations absorbed and normalized by the same industry. The difference was they were alive to watch it happen.
The mechanism has evolved somewhat. The old catch and kill model, or the roundabout way of exacting political pressure to make things impossible for your competition, that’s all a little antiquated now. If something threatens to disrupt your market, you acquire it before it grows large enough to matter, strip it for parts, file the patents, and announce the whole thing as your innovation. Tucker would have received a very generous offer today, and would have probably been asked to sit on the board of some industry think tank.
I still remember seeing the Lucasfilm logo on the poster and getting a small jolt of excitement in 1988. In the post-Star Wars vacuum you took whatever Lucas was putting his name on, and Tucker was clearly going to be something more Oscar-worthy than Howard the Duck or Labyrinth, both of which had come out a couple of years earlier and done nothing to reassure anyone about his Midas touch.
Tucker opened August 12, 1988, the same weekend as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Yeah, that.
It opened to picket lines and death threats, and for most of the following week nobody could talk about anything except whether Scorsese had blasphemed and what the Bible thumpers outside the theaters were going to do about it. Tucker couldn’t cut through that noise, and only made 3.7 million across 604 screens. The number one film that weekend was still Cocktail after 2 weeks in theaters. Back when that could still happen.
And I confess, I was so caught up in the ‘Scorsese hates jesus’ narrative that I forgot about Tucker too, until it showed up on home video several months later.
I have no strong feelings about cars or the car industry. ‘Mom’ is the one who can actually tell you what a carburetor does. I like fins and fancy hubcaps, plus I’m fairly convinced red ones go faster, and unless something reminds me of the 1989 Batmobile, I’ll probably tune out anything about anti-lock brakes.
But I have a real weakness for the catastrophically optimistic visionaries who make something the system tells them can’t exist, and a particular soft spot for the ones who don’t live to see it matter.
Tucker died still fighting.
At least Coppola and Lucas were alive when their visionary work was praised, and they got to make this gorgeous film about a man whose story they understood from the inside.
Coppola still keeps a restored Tucker 48 at his Napa winery, right next to his Oscars. -Pop
Tucker: The Man and His Dream arrived on home video today in 1989, after an August 12, 1988 theatrical release.