Jul 13 2022

Hemmings & AACA Video: Did the Tucker movie get Preston Tucker’s story right?


Bill Murray has forwarded this July 10, 2022 post on Francis Ford Coppola's 1988 film "Tucker: The Man and his Dream."

Enjoy,

Howard Kroplick


Did the Tucker movie get Preston Tucker's story right?

By Daniel Strohl on Jul 10th, 2022 at 8:00 am

Hemmings.com

Almost as a rule, Hollywood borks cars in its films, even in car flicks. Whether it's dubbing the sound of tires squealing when a car spins out on a dirt road, showing too many hubcaps coming loose during a car chase, or make-believing that intake manifold explosions somehow cause floorboards to come loose, reality comes in a distant second to fantasy in the process of making a movie. But what happens when a filmmaker wants to do more than just use cars as backdrops and crash fodder? How loose with the details can that filmmaker get when telling a story about the automotive industry in general, and specifically about a bunch of unique and fairly well known cars?

Francis Ford Coppola famously went to great lengths to get a lot of the details right in his 1988 movie, "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," and props from that movie remain highly prized by Tucker collectors today. However, the movie was no documentary; it took some liberties here and there in the name of drama (or as necessities to get the film out the door.) 

Exactly what Coppola got right and what he didn't was the subject of a recent AACA Museum discussion by Tucker expert Larry Clark, with commentary by John Tucker Jr. and Cynthia Tucker-Fordon, that delved into details and when the movie veered from fact into fiction.



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