Word: coppolas
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Only 51 Tuckers were produced. Five have been destroyed; the other 46 are still roadworthy and sell for up to $100,000. Francis Coppola has two; so has George Lucas. Owners admit the car's design flaws (the suspension system, a sticky transmission) but wouldn't trade it for a Lamborghini. Says Owner Curtis Foester: "It's my idea of what a car ought to be." That's the Tucker -- a car for yesterday, today and tomorrow...
Could anyone else play this role with the unforced authority that Bridges, 38, brings to it? Maybe, a decade ago, Jack Nicholson; he was Coppola's choice in 1977, when Tucker was on its first drawing board. But Nicholson, or virtually any other actor, would excavate demons of compulsion and desire. The Bridges version is splendidly driven, maniacally uncomplicated. The performance is also true to the prototype. The actor spent hours studying Tucker home movies; on the set, he wore the man's black pearl cuff links. "He's got it all," says Tucker's son John...
...speaking, than the Goose did. But who cares? He is not in the business of building empires; he is in the business of building dreams. And for him, as for Hughes, it is necessary to reproduce his fancy only once in reality to achieve fulfillment. Indeed, after seeing Francis Coppola's marvelous Tucker, one believes that if the inventor had been forced to replicate his car endlessly on a production line, promote it and warrant it and tweak it around to create a little novelty each new model year, Tucker might have ended up running on empty, one of those...
Failure rescued Tucker from that dismal fate. He has passed into popular history as a more interesting figure, at once heroic and cautionary: the little guy who dared to buck the big guys and got squished in the process. It is easy to see why he appealed to Coppola, who has been trying to put Tucker's story on the screen for something like a decade. It is not just simply that as a child Coppola was knocked out by a glimpse of the Tucker Torpedo at an auto show in the late '40s. It is rather that...
...plot is so beguiling that the only real surprise is that no one thought of it before (though Francis Coppola's 1986 Peggy Sue Got Married was Big in reverse). Josh Baskin (David Moscow), a twelve-year-old who has just discovered girls, realizes one day that he is not big enough to get the one he wants, a sophisticate of 15 or so who, of course, likes older boys. What could be simpler than to plunk a quarter in a carnival wishing machine and ask to be, well, big? But Josh did not specify just how big, and when...