Watts: ‘Tucker: A Man and His Dream’
by Tyler Watts, Ph.D.
The history of American capitalism is littered with the dashed hopes and shattered dreams of failed entrepreneurs. Seldom does a business failure story make for compelling Hollywood drama, but the 1989 film Tucker: the Man and His Dream does just that. The movie tells a heroic, riveting story of a revolutionary business that ultimately collapsed in failure and scandal. Tucker tells, in a highly dramatized fashion, the true and fascinating story of automobile pioneer Preston T. Tucker and his late-1940s start-up auto company.
Tucker’s dream was to produce the most high-tech, high-performance car in the world, and launch a car company that would upend the entire industry by beating the “Big Three” U.S. car companies (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) to the market with the first all-new car in the post-WWII era. While Tucker did design and produce a version of his dream car in limited numbers, his company crashed in spectacular fashion, racked with scandal and facing federal fraud charges. Yet the film indicates that, despite the temporal failure of the Tucker car company, the innovations and forward-thinking attitude that Tucker’s product spawned lived on in later generations of automobiles. Thus, Tucker truly earned a spot as a legendary American entrepreneur who made his mark not so much with a ubiquitous product, but with relentlessly innovative ideas that, despite his own failure, the rest of the industry could not help but ultimately adopt.
Tucker, portrayed by Jeff Bridges (later famous as “The Dude” Lebowski) was a man far ahead of his times. Although the film does not go into depth on Tucker’s background, it does indicate that Tucker had been fascinated with cars from his youth, a time when the automobile was a rare marvel. Tucker got involved in the industry at a young age and ultimately worked his way into the Indianapolis racing scene in the 1930s where he partnered with engineers and drivers to develop competitive high-performance racing machines. Tucker was an engineer in his own right, and in the years leading up to WWII he designed a nimble combat vehicle for the Army, featuring a unique 360-degree gun turret. Tucker’s combat vehicle design was rejected as being too fast, but US forces did press his gun turret into service in PT boats and Army bombers.
Toward the end of the war Tucker had laid plans to enter the then-dormant consumer auto industry. All new car production had been idled to let the Big Three manufacture tanks, planes and armaments as part of the war-winning U.S. “arsenal of democracy.” Tucker knew that with the return of peace and demobilization of millions of GIs, there would be huge demand for safe, reliable, high-performing cars. While the slow-moving Big Three were content to release warmed-over pre-war models, Tucker aimed to bring out something new and revolutionary. The film depicts the shock and doubts raised by his engineers when Tucker announced the features he intended to include on the sleek “Tucker Torpedo” — rear engine (for improved traction), disc brakes, fuel injection, seat belts, pop-out windshields to prevent lacerations in a collision, and most iconic of all Tucker features, a center headlight that turned with the front wheels to aid night visibility around blind curves.
It is a challenge for any film to depict years’ worth of events in the space of a few hours. Tucker does an admirable job with the use of montages and vignettes. Indeed, the film itself is an homage to cheesy contemporary corporate promo films, which gives the entire project an authentic 1940s flair. The film quickly takes us from Tucker’s struggles to create the prototype to raising $15 million from stock sales to acquiring the world’s largest factory in Chicago. Production of the car has not even gotten fully underway when disaster strikes in the form of a federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation of the Tucker Corporation on claims of stock fraud. Tucker soon learns that the Detroit car companies have friends in high places, friends like Michigan Senator Homer Ferguson (in a cameo portrayal by Jeff’s father Lloyd Bridges) who, as the film suggests, uses us his governmental clout to make life miserable for Tucker, thus helping his Big Three friends forestall a major competitive threat.
In the culmination of the film, Tucker is on trial in federal court on charges of defrauding the public. Prosecutors claim that Tucker established his car company to merely bilk ignorant investors out of their money. Tucker admits to having made some foolish maneuvers along the way, but is adamant about his commitment to actually producing his car and bringing new levels of safety and performance to the American driving public. Although the movie takes much dramatic license in this final courtroom scene, it is used to good effect, with Tucker delivering an impassioned defense of America’s unique free-market system. As the movie version of Tucker explains, “We invented the free enterprise system, where anybody, no matter who he was, where he came from, what class he belonged to — if he came up with a better idea about anything, there’s no limit to how far he could go.” While Tucker did not in reality testify at the trial, the film does capture a true historic detail when it shows jurors being offered rides in some of the 51 completed Tuckers that were brought to the courthouse to help demonstrate the superiority of Tucker’s product and the viability of his business.
As expected with high production value Hollywood pictures, Tucker: The Man and His Dream takes artistic license with both the facts of the story and the personae involved. The filmmakers are nonetheless true to the basic arc of Tucker’s saga and to the essential character of this visionary entrepreneur. Tucker believed in hugely innovative ideas and took equally huge risks in trying to bring them to market. Some risk-takers are bound to fail, whether through sheer bad luck or bad judgment, being out-competed, or through underhanded political machinations of corrupt opponents. Tucker arguably had a clear competitive edge with his revolutionary product but suffered from his own reckless ambition and a cronyism by which his market rivals could effectively wield government pressure against him. Despite the premature failure of the Tucker Corporation, the film closes on a positive note, indicating that most of Tucker’s then-radical innovations had eventually become standard features on all modern cars. Tucker had indeed succeeded in producing “the car of tomorrow, today.”
Tyler Watts, Ph.D., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation formerly with Ball State University, is professor of economics at Ferris State University.
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